All of Charlie Sanders's Comments + Replies

I'd like to propose a test to objectively quantify the average observer's reaction with regards to skepticism of doomsday prophesizing present in a given text. My suggestion is this: take a text, swap the subject of doom (in this case AGI) with another similar text spelling out humanity's impending doom - for example, a lecture on Scientology and Thetans or the Jonestown massacre - and present these two texts to independent observers, in the same vein as a Turing test. 
 

If an outside independent observer cannot reliably identify which subject of ... (read more)

I think this post would be stronger if it covered at least basic metrology and statistics. 

It's incorrect to say that billions of variables aren't affecting a sled sliding down a hill - of course they're affecting the speed, even if most are only by a few planck-lengths per hour. But, crucially, they're mostly not affecting it to a detectable amount. The detectability threshold is the key to the argument. 

For detectability, whether you notice the effects of outside variables is going to come down to the precision of the instrument that you're usi... (read more)

1. The size of the community working on the alignment problem can be assumed to be at least somewhat proportional to the likelihood of successfully solving the alignment problem.
2. Eliezer, being the most public face of the alignment problem community, wields outsized influence in shaping public perception of the community.
3. Eliezer's writing is distinctly condescending and polemical, and has at least a hypothetical possibility of causing reputational harm to the community (as evidenced by your comment).

Based on this, there absolutely exists a hypothetical point w... (read more)

Imagine you have two points, A and B. You're at A, and you can see B in the distance. How long will it take you to get to B?

Well, you're a pretty smart fellow. You measure the distance, you calculate your rate of progress, maybe you're extra clever and throw in a factor of safety to account for any irregularities during the trip. And you figure that you'll get to point B in a year or so.

Then you start walking.

And you run into a wall. 

Turns out, there's a maze in between you and point B. Huh, you think. Well that's ok, I put a factor of safety into my ... (read more)

One implication of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is that is it difficult to make money on the stock market. Generously, maybe only the top 1% of traders will be profitable. 

Nitpick: it's incredibly easy to make money on the stock market: just put your money in it, ideally in an index fund. It goes up by an average of 8% a year. Almost all traders will be profitable, although many won't beat that 8% average. 

The entire FIRE movement is predicated on it being incredibly simple to make money on the stock market. It takes absolutely zero skil... (read more)

Right, but I'm not sure how you'd "test" for success in that scenario. Usefulness to humanity, as demonstrated by effective product use, seems to me like the only way to get a rigorous result. If you can't measure the success or failure of an idea objectively, then the idea probably isn't going to matter much. 

On fuzzy tasks: I think the appropriate frame of comparison is neither an average subset (Mechanical Turk) or the ideal human (Go), but instead the median resource that someone would be reasonably likely to seek out. To use healthcare as an example, you'd want your AI to beat the average family doctor that most people would reach out to, as opposed to either a layman's opinion or the preeminent doctor in the field. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRBsaJPkt2Q

If you’re interested in this topic more and have an hour and a half to burn, there’s worse ways to spend it.

The world would undoubtedly be better if more Data Scientists became monks.