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I would expect that some amount of good safety research is of the form, "We tried several ways of persuading several leading AI models how to give accurate instructions for breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Here are the ways that succeeded, here are some first-level workarounds, here's how we beat those workarounds...": in other words, stuff that would be dangerous to publish. In the most extreme cases, a mere title ("Telling the AI it's writing a play defeats all existing safety RLHF" or "Claude + Coverity finds zero-day RCE exploits in many codebases") could be dangerous.
That said, some large amount should be publishable, and 5 papers does seem low.
Though maybe they're not making an effort to distinguish what's safe to publish from what's not, and erring towards assuming the latter? (Maybe someone set a policy of "Before publishing any safety research, you have to get Important Person X to look through it and/or go through some big process to ensure publishing it is safe", and the individual researchers are consistently choosing "Meh, I have other work to do, I won't bother with that" and therefore not publishing?)
Any specific knowledge about colostrum? (Mildly surprised it hasn't been mentioned in the thread.) Do breastmilk banks usually supply that, and is it worthwhile?
The idea that ethical statements are anything more than "just expressions of emotion" is, to paraphrase Lucretius, "regarded by the common people as true, by the wise[1] as false, and by rulers as useful."
I figure you think the wise are correct. Well, then. Consider randomly selected paragraphs from Supreme Court justices' opinions. Or consider someone saying "I'd like to throw this guy in jail, but unfortunately, the evidence we have is not admissible in court, and the judicial precedent on rules of evidence is there for a reason—it limits the potential abusiveness of the police, and that's more important than occasionally letting a criminal off—so we have to let him go." Is that an ethical statement? And is it "just an expression of emotion"?
For the record, in an ethical context, when I say a behavior is bad, I mean that (a) an ethical person shouldn't do it (or at least should have an aversion to doing it—extreme circumstances might make it the best option) and (b) ethical people have license to punish it in some way, which, depending on the specifics, might range from "social disapproval" to "the force of the law".
Alarming and dangerous as this view may be, I'd be really surprised if literally everyone who had power ("in charge of anything important") also lacked the self-awareness to see it.
I think there are lots of people in power who are amoral, and this is indeed dangerous, and does indeed frequently lead to them harming people they rule over.
However, I don't think most of them become amoral by reading emotivist philosophy or by independently coming to the conclusion that ethical statements are "just expressions of emotion". What makes rulers frequently immoral? Some have hypothesized that there's an evolved response to higher social status, to become more psychopathic. Some have said that being psychopathic makes people more likely to succeed at the fight to become a ruler. It's also possible that they notice that, in their powerful position, they're unlikely to face consequences for bad things they do, and... they either motivatedly find reasons to drop their ethical principles, or never held them in the first place.
There's a philosophy called "emotivism" that seems to be along these lines. "Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes."
I can see a couple of ways to read it (not having looked too closely). The first is "Everyone's ethical statements are actually just expressions of emotion. And, as we all know, emotions are frequently illogical and inappropriate to the situation. Therefore, everything anyone has ever said or will say about ethics is untrustworthy, and can reasonably be dismissed." This strikes me as alarming, and dangerous if any adherents were in charge of anything important.
The second reading is something like, "When humans implement ethical judgments—e.g. deciding that the thief deserves punishment—we make our emotions into whatever is appropriate to carry out the actions we've decided upon (e.g. anger towards the thief). Emotions are an output of the final judgment, and are always a necessary component of applying the judgment. However, the entire process leading up to the final judgment isn't necessarily emotional; we can try, and expect the best of us to usually succeed, at making that process conform to principles like logical consistency." That I would be on board with. But... that seems like a "well, duh" which I expect most people would agree with, and if that was what the emotivists meant, I don't see why they would express themselves the way they seem to.
I think a proper human morality somehow accounts for disgust having actually been an important part of how it was birthed.
I'm not sure if people maintain consistent distinctions between legal philosophy, ethics, and morality. But for whatever it is that governs our response to crimes, I think anger / desire-for-revenge is a more important part of it. Also the impulse to respond to threats ("Criminal on the streets! Who's he coming for next?"), which I guess is fear and/or anger.
Come to think of it, if I try to think of things that people declare "immoral" that seem to come from disgust rather than fear or anger, I think of restrictions on sexual behavior (e.g. homosexuality, promiscuity) and drugs, which I think the law shouldn't touch (except in forms where someone was injured nonconsensually, in which case revenge-anger comes into play). As emotions go, I think I'd distrust disgust more than the others.
The paradox arises for people who lack a concept of "known unknowns" as distinct from "unknown unknowns". If our knowledge of x can only be in the state of "we know what x is and everything about it" or "we don't know anything about x and aren't even aware that anything like x exists", then the reasoning is all correct. However, for many things, that's a false binary: there are a lot of intermediate states between "zero knowledge of the concept of x" and "100% knowledge of x".
1Yeah, learning by reading at home definitely has a huge effect in many cases. In Terence Tao's education, he was allowed to progress through multiple years of a subject per year (and to do so at different rates in different subjects), and since the classes he attended were normal ones, I think his academic progression must have been essentially determined by his ability to teach himself at home via textbooks. Unless perhaps they let him e.g. attend 7th grade science 2 days a week and 6th grade science the rest? I should learn more about his life.
The educational setup can also feed into the reading aspect. During my childhood, on a few occasions, I did explicitly think, "Well, I would like to read more of this math stuff (at home), but on the other hand, each thing I learn by reading at home is another thing I'll have to sit through the teacher telling me, being bored because I already know it", and actually decided to not read certain advanced math stuff because of that. (Years later, I changed my mind and chose to learn calculus from my sister's textbook around 8th grade—which did, in fact, cause me to be bored sitting through BC Calculus eventually.) This could, of course, be solved by letting kids easily skip past stuff by taking a test to prove they've already learned it.
Maybe with the objection that the time coefficient can be different for different school subjects, because some of them are more focused on understanding things, and others are more focused on memorizing things
Possibly. It's also the case that IQ is an aggregated measure of a set of cognitive subtests, and the underlying capabilities they measure can probably be factored out into things like working memory, spatial reasoning, etc., which are probably all correlated but imperfectly so; then if some of those are more useful for some subjects than others, you'll expect some variance in progression between subjects. And you certainly observe that the ultra-gifted kids, while generally above average at everything, are often significantly more ahead in math than in language, or vice versa (some of this is probably due to where they choose to spend their time, but I think a nonzero amount is innate advantage).
Among the various ways to take up the extra time of the rapid learners, probably the best one is "don't go faster, go wider".
The term of art, for doing this within a single subject, is "enrichment". And yeah, if you can do it, it fits nicely into schedules. "Taking more classes" is a more general approach. There are administrative obstacles to the latter: K-12 schools seem unlikely to permit a kid to skip half the sessions of one class so he can attend half the sessions of another class (and make up any gaps by reading the textbooks). Colleges are more likely to permit this by default, due to often not having attendance requirements, though one must beware of double-booking exams.
(Note: I am not saying that this is optimal for the rapid learner. The optimal thing for the rapid learner would be to... learn faster, obviously.
I think the best setup—can't find the citation—is believed to be "taking a class with equally gifted children of the same age, paced for them". If you don't have that, then skipping grades (ideally per-subject) would address knowledge gaps; taking a class paced for at least somewhat gifted kids (possibly called an "advanced" class, or a class at a high-tier college) would partly address the learning speed gap, and enrichment would also address the learning speed gap, to a variable extent depending on the details.
A more realistic example would be a math textbook, where each chapter is followed by exercises, some of them marked as "optional, too difficult"
A specific way of doing this, which I think would be good for education to move towards, is to have a programming component: have some of those optional exercises be "Write programs to implement the concepts from this chapter".
But if I had to guess, I would guess that the gifted kids who stay within the confines of school will probably lose most of their advantage, and the ones who focus on something else (competitions, books, online courses, personal projects) will probably keep it.
Subjects Not Permitted Acceleration. [...] With few exceptions, they have very jaded views of their education. Two dropped out of high school and a number have dropped out of university. Several more have had ongoing difficulties at university, not because of lack of ability but because they have found it difficult to commit to undergraduate study that is less than stimulating. These young people had consoled themselves through the wilderness years of undemanding and repetitive school curriculum with the promise that university would be different—exciting, intellectually rigorous, vibrant—and when it was not, as the first year of university often is not, it seemed to be the last straw.
Some have begun to seriously doubt that they are, indeed, highly gifted. The impostor syndrome is readily validated with gifted students if they are given only work that does not require them to strive for success. It is difficult to maintain the belief that one can meet and overcome challenges if one never has the opportunity to test oneself.
Versus:
Young People Who Have [skipped 3 or more grades by the end of high school]. [...] In every case, these young people have experienced positive short-term and long-term academic and socioaffective outcomes. The pressure to underachieve for peer acceptance lessened significantly or disappeared after the first acceleration. Despite being some years younger than their classmates, the majority topped their state in specific academic subjects, won prestigious academic prizes, or represented their country or state in Math, Physics, or Chemistry Olympiads. The majority entered college between ages 11 and 15. Several won scholarships to attend prestigious universities in Australia or overseas. All have graduated with extremely high grades and, in most cases, university prizes for exemplary achievement. All 17 are characterized by a passionate love of learning and almost all have gone on to obtain their Ph.D.s.
Though one could say this is more of an attitude and habit and "ever bothered to figure out study skills" thing, than a "you've permanently lost your advantage" thing. If you took one of those jaded dropouts (of 160+ IQ) and, at age 30, threw them into a job where they had to do some serious and challenging scientific work... There's a chance that their attitude and habits would make them fail and get fired within the first few months, that chance depending on how severe and how ingrained they are. But if they did ok enough to not get fired, then I expect that, within a year, they would be pulling ahead of a hypothetical 120 IQ counterpart for whom everything had gone great and who started with slightly more knowledge.
I'll give a citation on learning speed to show the extent of the problem, at least in early years (bold added):
Observation and investigation prove that in the matter of their intellectual work these children are customarily wasting much time in the elementary schools. We know from measurements made over a three-year period that a child of 140 IQ can master all the mental work provided in the elementary school, as established, in half the time allowed him. Therefore, one-half the time which he spends at school could be utilized in doing something more than the curriculum calls for. A child of 170 IQ can do all the studies that are at present required of him, with top "marks," in about one-fourth the time he is compelled to spend at school. What, then, are these pupils doing in the ordinary school setup while the teacher teaches the other children who need the lessons?
No exhaustive discussion of time-wasting can be undertaken here, except to say briefly that these exceptional pupils are running errands, idling, engaging in "busy work," or devising childish tasks of their own, such as learning to read backward—since they can already read forward very fluently. Many are the devices invented by busy teachers to "take up" the extra time of these rapid learners, but few of these devices have the appropriate character that can be built only on psychological insight into the nature and the needs of gifted children.
Note that this is above what the mere "intelligence quotient" seems to predict—i.e. at a given chronological age, IQ 140 children have 1.4x the mental age of those at IQ 100, and IQ 170 have 1.7x that mental age. So why would you get 2x and 4x learning speeds respectively?
One guess is that, at least within this elementary-school age range, higher mental age also means they've figured out better strategies for paying attention, noticing when you've understood something vs when you need to go back and re-read, etc.—which other kids may eventually figure out too. Another guess is that, for at least some kids, it seems that one of the things that manifests as higher intelligence is an increased need for intellectual stimulation; so in general, it may be that the higher-IQ kids are more naturally inclined to pay attention when the teacher is saying new things, and more inclined to read the textbook and think back to it, so there's less need for self-control, and so they're less handicapped by the lack of it in early years.
I don't know how far up in age the above extends. I do expect the lower-IQ learning rate to catch up somewhat in later years, perhaps bringing the difference down to the IQ ratio. (The learning-rate difference certainly doesn't disappear, though; I believe it's common that if an exceptionally gifted kid gets accelerated into college classes with adults of equal knowledge—several of whom are probably moderately gifted—she'll still finish at the top of her class.)
There's an interesting mechanic here, a hyperstitious cascade. In certain educational environments, people are taught to use approved language with protected-class members. In that environment, anyone who uses forbidden language is, therefore, some kind of troublemaker. That then makes it somewhat less illegitimate for the most sensitive of those protected-class members to say they feel threatened when someone uses forbidden language. Which then makes it all the more important to teach people to use approved language, and have harsher enforcement on it. If this goes far enough, then we get to where one can make the case that unpunished usage of forbidden language constitutes a hostile environment, which would therefore drive out the protected classes and hence violate civil rights law.