I'm bumping into walls but hey now I know what the maze looks like.
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Fun fact: it's thanks to Lucie that I ended up stumbling onto PauseAI in the first place. Small world + thanks Lucie.
1Update everyone: the hard right did not end up gaining a parliamentary majority, which, as Lucie mentioned, could have been the worse outcome wrt AI safety.
Looking ahead, it seems that France will end up being fairly confused and gridlocked as it becomes forced to deal with an evenly-split parliament by playing German-style coalition negociation games. Not sure what that means for AI, except that unilateral action is harder.
For reference, I'm an ex-high school student who just got to vote for the first 3 times in his life because of French political turmoil (✨exciting) and am working these days at PauseAI France, a (soon to be official) governance non-profit aiming to, well—
Anyway, as an org we're writing a counter to the AI commitee mentioned in this post, so that's what's up these days in the French AI safety governance circles.
I'm working on a non-trivial.org project meant to assess the risk of genome sequences by comparing them to a public list of the most dangerous pathogens we know of. This would be used to assess the risk from both experimental results in e.g. BSL-4 labs and the output of e.g. protein folding models. The benchmarking would be carried out by an in-house ML model of ours. Two questions to LessWrong:
1. Is there any other project of this kind out there? Do BSL-4 labs/AlphaFold already have models for this?
2. "Training a model on the most dangerous pathogens in existence" sounds like an idea that could backfire horribly. Can it backfire horribly?
Poetry and practicality
I was staring up at the moon a few days ago and thought about how deeply I loved my family, and wished to one day start my own (I'm just over 18 now). It was a nice moment.
Then, I whipped out my laptop and felt constrained to get back to work; i.e. read papers for my AI governance course, write up LW posts, and trade emails with EA France. (These I believe to be my best shots at increasing everyone's odds of survival).
It felt almost like sacrilege to wrench myself away from the moon and my wonder. Like I was ruining a moment of poetry and stillwatered peace by slamming against reality and its mundane things again.
But... The reason I wrenched myself away is directly downstream from the spirit that animated me in the first place. Whether I feel the poetry now that I felt then is irrelevant: it's still there, and its value and truth persist. Pulling away from the moon was evidence I cared about my musings enough to act on them.
The poetic is not a separate magisterium from the practical; rather the practical is a particular facet of the poetic. Feeling "something to protect" in my bones naturally extends to acting it out. In other words, poetry doesn't just stop. Feel no guilt in pulling away. Because, you're not.
Too obvious imo, though I didn't downnvote. This also might not be an actual rationalist failure mode; in my experience at least, rationalists have about the same intuition all the other humans have about when something should be taken literally or not.
As for why the comment section has gone berserk, no idea, but it's hilarious and we can all use some fun.
3FHI at Oxford
by Nick Bostrom (recently turned into song):
the big creaky wheel
a thousand years to turn
thousand meetings, thousand emails, thousand rules
to keep things from changing
and heaven forbid
the setting of a precedent
yet in this magisterial inefficiency
there are spaces and hiding places
for fragile weeds to bloom
and maybe bear some singular fruit
like the FHI, a misfit prodigy
daytime a tweedy don
at dark a superhero
flying off into the night
cape a-fluttering
to intercept villains and stop catastrophes
and why not base it here?
our spandex costumes
blend in with the scholarly gowns
our unusual proclivities
are shielded from ridicule
where mortar boards are still in vogue
A functionality I'd like to see on LessWrong: the ability to give quick feedback for a post in the same way you can react to comments (click for image). When you strong-upvote or strong-downvote a post, a little popup menu appears offering you some basic feedback options. The feedback is private and can only be seen by the author.
I've often found myself drowning in downvotes or upvotes without knowing why. Karma is a one-dimensional measure, and writing public comments is a trivial inconvience: this is an attempt at middle ground, and I expect it to make post reception clearer.
See below my crude diagrams.