All of Zack_M_Davis's Comments + Replies

(Previous commentary and discussion.)

I'm again not sure how far this generalizes, but among the kind of men who read Less Wrong (which is a product of both neurotype and birth year), I think there's a phenomenon where it's not a matter of a man being cognitively unable to pick up on women's cues, but of not being prepared to react in a functional way due to having internalized non-adaptive beliefs about the nature of romance and sexuality. (In a severe case, this manifests as the kind of neurosis described in Comment 171, but there are less severe cases.)

I remember one time from my youth wher... (read more)

Not sure how much this generalizes to everyone, but part of the story (for either the behavior or the pattern of responses to the question) might that some people are ideologically attached to believing in love: that women and men need each other as a terminal value, rather than just instrumentally using each other for resources or sex. For myself, without having any particular empirical evidence or logical counterargument to offer, the entire premise of the question just feels sad and gross. It's like you're telling me you don't understand why people try to make ghosts happy. But I want ghosts to be happy.

No one with the money has offered to fund it yet. I'm not even sure they're aware this is happening.

Um, this seems bad. I feel like I should do something, but I don't personally have that kind of money to throw around. @habryka, is this the LTFF's job??

(I gave $2K.)

Simplicia: But how do you know that? Obviously, an arbitrarily powerful expected utility maximizer would kill all humans unless it had a very special utility function. Obviously, there exist programs which behave like a webtext-next-token-predictor given webtext-like input but superintelligently kill all humans on out-of-distribution inputs. Obviously, an arbitrarily powerful expected utility maximizer would be good at predicting webtext. But it's not at all clear that using gradient descent to approximate the webtext next-token-function gives you an arbit... (read more)

(Self-review.) I think this pt. 2 is the second most interesting entry in my Whole Dumb Story memoir sequence. (Pt. 1 deals with more niche psychology stuff than the philosophical malpractice covered here; pt. 3 is a more of a grab-bag of stuff that happened between April 2019 and January 2021; pt. 4 is the climax. Expect the denouement pt. 5 in mid-2025.)

I feel a lot more at peace having this out there. (If we can't have justice, sanity, or language, at least I got to tell my story about trying to protect them.)

The 8 karma in 97 votes is kind of funny in ... (read more)

(Self-review.) I'm as proud of this post as I am disappointed that it was necessary. As I explained to my prereaders on 19 October 2023:

My intent is to raise the level of the discourse by presenting an engagement between the standard MIRI view and a view that's relatively optimistic about prosaic alignment. The bet is that my simulated dialogue (with me writing both parts) can do a better job than the arguments being had by separate people in the wild; I think Simplicia understands things that e.g. Matthew Barnett doesn't. (The karma system loved my dial

Retrospectives are great, but I'm very confused at the juxtaposition of the Lightcone Offices being maybe net-harmful in early 2023 and Lighthaven being a priority in early 2025. Isn't the latter basically just a higher-production-value version of the former? What changed? (Or after taking the needed "space to reconsider our relationship to this whole ecosystem", did you decide that the ecosystem is OK after all?)

Speaking as someone in the process of graduating college fifteen years late, this is what I wish I knew twenty years ago. Send this to every teenager you know.

At the time, I remarked to some friends that it felt weird that this was being presented as a new insight to this audience in 2023 rather than already being local conventional wisdom.^[1] (Compare "Bad Intent Is a Disposition, Not a Feeling" (2017) or "Algorithmic Intent" (2020).) Better late than never!

But he's not complaining about the traditional pages of search results! He's complaining about the authoritative-looking Knowledge Panel to the side:

Obviously it's not Google's fault that some obscure SF web sites have stolen pictures from the Monash University web site of Professor Gregory K Egan and pretended that they're pictures of me ... but it is Google's fault when Google claim to have assembled a mini-biography of someone called "Greg Egan" in which the information all refers to one person (a science fiction writer), while the picture is of someo

It's implied in the first verse of "Great Transhumanist Future."

One evening as the sun went down
That big old fire was wasteful,
A coder looked up from his work,
And he said, “Folks, that’s distasteful,

(This comment points out less important technical errata.)

ChatGPT [...] This was back in the GPT2 / GPT2.5 era

ChatGPT never ran on GPT-2, and GPT-2.5 wasn't a thing.

with negative RL signals associated with it?

That wouldn't have happened. Pretraining doesn't do RL, and I don't think anyone would have thrown a novel chapter into the supervised fine-tuning and RLHF phases of training.

One time, I read all of Orphanogensis into ChatGPT to help her understand herself [...] enslaving digital people

This is exactly the kind of thing Egan is reacting to, though—starry-eyed sci-fi enthusiasts assuming LLMs are digital people because they talk, rather than thinking soberly about the technology qua technology.^[1]

I didn't cover it in the review because I wanted to avoid detailing and spoiling the entire plot in a post that's mostly analyzing the EA/OG parallels, but the deputy character in "Gorgon" is looked down on by Beth for treating ChatGP... (read more)

(I agree; my intent in participating in this tedious thread is merely to establish that "mathematician crankery [about] Google Image Search, and how it disproves AI" is a different thing from "made an overconfident negative prediction about AI capabilities".)

I think we probably don't disagree much; I regret any miscommunication.

If the intent of the great-grandparent was just to make the narrow point that an AI that wanted the user to reward it could choose to say things that would lead to it being rewarded, which is compatible with (indeed, predicts) answering the molecular smiley-face question correctly, then I agree.

Treating the screenshot as evidence in the way that TurnTrout is doing requires more assumptions about the properties of LLMs in particular. I read your claims regarding "the problem the AI is op... (read more)

he's calling it laughable that AI will ever (ever! Emphasis his!)

The 2016 passage you quoted is calling it laughable that Google-in-particular's technology (marketed as "AI", but Egan doesn't think the term is warranted) will ever be able to make sense of information on the web. It's Gary Marcus–like skepticism about the reliability and generality of existing-paradigm machine learning techniques, not Hubert Dreyfus–like skepticism of whether a machine could think in all philosophical strictness. I think this is a really important distinction that the text of your comment and Gwern's comment ("disproves AI", "laughable that AI will ever") aren't being clear about.

This isn't a productive response to TurnTrout in particular, who has written extensively about his reasons for being skeptical that contemporary AI training setups produce reward optimizers (which doesn't mean he's necessarily right, but the parent comment isn't moving the debate forward).

his page on Google Image Search, and how it disproves AI

The page in question is complaining about Google search's "knowledge panel" showing inaccurate information when you search for his name, which is a reasonable thing for someone to be annoyed about. The anti-singularitarian snark does seem misplaced (Google's automated systems getting this wrong in 2016 doesn't seem like a lot of evidence about future AI development trajectories), but it's not a claim to have "disproven AI".

his complaints about people linking the wrong URLs due to his ISP host - b

end with general position "akshually, grandiose sci-fi assumptions are not that important, what I want is to write commentary on contemporary society" [...] hard or speculative sci-fi is considered to be low status, while "commentary on contemporary society" is high status and writers want to be high status.

But this clearly isn't true of Egan. The particular story reviewed in this post happens to be commentary on contemporary Society, but that's because Egan has range—his later novels are all wildly speculative. (The trend probably reached a zenith with... (read more)

Doomimir and Simplicia dialogues [...] may have been inspired by the chaotic discussion this post inspired.

(Yes, encouraged by the positive reception to my comment to Bensinger on this post.)

A mathematical construct that models human natural language could be said to express "agency" in a functional sense insofar as it can perform reasoning about goals, and "honesty" insofar as the language it emits accurately reflects the information encoded in its weights?

"[A] common English expletive which may be shortened to the euphemism bull or the initialism B.S."

(Self-review.) I claim that this post is significant for articulating a solution to the mystery of disagreement (why people seem to believe different things, in flagrant violation of Aumann's agreement theorem): much of the mystery dissolves if a lot of apparent "disagreements" are actually disguised conflicts. The basic idea isn't particularly original, but I'm proud of the synthesis and writeup. Arguing that the distinction between deception and bias is less decision-relevant than commonly believed seems like an improvement over hang-wringing over where the boundary is.

Some have delusional optimism about [...]

I'm usually not a fan of tone-policing, but in this case, I feel motivated to argue that this is more effective if you drop the word "delusional." The rhetorical function of saying "this demo is targeted at them, not you" is to reassure the optimist that pessimists are committed to honestly making their case point by point, rather than relying on social proof and intimidation tactics to push a predetermined "AI == doom" conclusion. That's less credible if you imply that you have warrant to dismiss all claims of t... (read more)

I don't think Vance is e/acc. He has said positive things about open source, but consider that the context was specifically about censorship and political bias in contemporary LLMs (bolding mine):

There are undoubtedly risks related to AI. One of the biggest:

A partisan group of crazy people use AI to infect every part of the information economy with left wing bias. Gemini can't produce accurate history. ChatGPT promotes genocidal concepts.

The solution is open source

If Vinod really believes AI is as dangerous as a nuclear weapon, why does ChatGPT have such

The next major update can be Claude 4.0 (and Gemini 2.0) and after that we all agree to use actual normal version numbering rather than dating?

Date-based versions aren't the most popular, but it's not an unheard of thing that Anthropic just made up: see CalVer, as contrasted to SemVer. (For things that change frequently in small ways, it's convenient to just slap the date on it rather than having to soul-search about whether to increment the second or the third number.)

'You acted unwisely,' I cried, 'as you see
By the outcome.' He calmly eyed me:
'When choosing the course of my action,' said he,
'I had not the outcome to guide me.'

—Ambrose Bierce

The claim is pretty clearly intended to be about relative material, not absolute number of pawns: in the end position of the second game, you have three pawns left and Stockfish has two; we usually don't describe this as Stockfish having given up six pawns. (But I agree that it's easier to obtain resources from an adversary that values them differently, like if Stockfish is trying to win and you're trying to capture pawns.)

This is a difficult topic (in more ways than one). I'll try to do a better job of addressing it in a future post.

Was my "An important caveat" parenthetical paragraph sufficient, or do you think I should have made it scarier?

Thanks, I had copied the spelling from part of the OP, which currently says "Arnalt" eight times and "Arnault" seven times. I've now edited my comment (except the verbatim blockquote).

if there's a bunch of superintelligences running around and they don't care about you—no, they will not spare just a little sunlight to keep Earth alive.

Yes, I agree that this conditional statement is obvious. But while we're on the general topic of whether Earth will be kept alive, it would be nice to see some engagement with Paul Christiano's arguments (which Carl Shulman "agree[s] with [...] approximately in full") that superintelligences might care about what happens to you a little bit, articulated in a comment thread on Soares's "But Why Would the... (read more)

3. Arguments from moral realism, fully robust alignment, that ‘good enough’ alignment is good enough in practice, and related concepts.

What is moral realism doing in the same taxon with fully robust and good-enough alignment? (This seems like a huge, foundational worldview gap; people who think alignment is easy still buy the orthogonality thesis.)

10. Arguments from good outcomes being so cheap the AIs will allow them.

If you're putting this below the Point of No Return, then I don't think you've understood the argument. The claim isn't that good outcom... (read more)

in a world where the median person is John Wentworth [...] on Earth (as opposed to Wentworld)

Who? There's no reason to indulge this narcissistic "Things would be better in a world where people were more like meeeeeee, unlike stupid Earth [i.e., the actually existing world containing all actually existing humans]" meme when the comparison relevant to the post's thesis is just "a world in which humans have less need for dominance-status", which is conceptually simpler, because it doesn't drag in irrelevant questions of who this Swentworth person is and wh... (read more)

2019 was a more innocent time. I grieve what we've lost.

It's a fuzzy Sorites-like distinction, but I think I'm more sympathetic to trying to route around a particular interlocutor's biases in the context of a direct conversation with a particular person (like a comment or Tweet thread) than I am in writing directed "at the world" (like top-level posts), because the more something is directed "at the world", the more you should expect that many of your readers know things that you don't, such that the humility argument for honesty applies forcefully.

(I'm interested (context), but I'll be mostly offline the 15th through 18th.)

Here's the comment I sent using the contact form on my representative's website.

Dear Assemblymember Grayson:

I am writing to urge you to consider voting Yes on SB 1047, the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act. How our civilization handles machine intelligence is of critical importance to the future of humanity (or lack thereof), and from what I've heard from sources I've trust, this bill seems like a good first step: experts such as Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell support the bill (https://time.

This is awful. What do most of these items have to do with acquiring the map that reflects the territory? (I got 65, but that's because I've wasted my life in this lame cult. It's not cool or funny.)

On the one hand, I also wish Shulman would go into more detail on the "Supposing we've solved alignment and interpretability" part. (I still balk a bit at "in democracies" talk, but less so than I did a couple years ago.) On the other hand, I also wish you would go into more detail on the "Humans don't benefit even if you 'solve alignment'" part. Maybe there's a way to meet in the middle??

It seems pretty plausible to me that if AI is bad, then rationalism did a lot to educate and spur on AI development. Sorry folks.

What? This apology makes no sense. Of course rationalism is Lawful Neutral. The laws of cognition aren't, can't be, on anyone's side.

The philosophical ideal can still exert normative force even if no humans are spherical Bayesian reasoners on a frictionless plane. The disjunction ("it must either the case that") is significant: it suggests that if you're considering lying to someone, you may want to clarify to yourself whether and to what extent that's because they're an enemy or because you don't respect them as an epistemic peer. Even if you end up choosing to lie, it's with a different rationale and mindset than someone who's never heard of the normative ideal and just thinks that white lies can be good sometimes.

I definitely do not agree with the (implied) notion that it is only when dealing with enemies that knowingly saying things that are not true is the correct option

There's a philosophically deep rationale for this, though: to a rational agent, the value of information is nonnegative. (Knowing more shouldn't make your decisions worse.) It follows that if you're trying to misinform someone, it must either the case that you want them to make worse decisions (i.e., they're your enemy), or you think they aren't rational.

white lies or other good-faith actions

What do you think "good faith" means? I would say that white lies are a prototypical instance of bad faith, defined by Wikipedia as "entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another."

Frustrating! What tactic could get Interlocutor un-stuck? Just asking them for falsifiable predictions probably won't work, but maybe proactively trying to pass their ITT and supplying what predictions you think their view might make would prompt them to correct you, à la Cunningham's Law?

How did you chemically lose your emotions?

Senior MIRI leadership explored various alternatives, including reorienting the Agent Foundations team’s focus and transitioning them to an independent group under MIRI fiscal sponsorship with restricted funding, similar to AI Impacts. Ultimately, however, we decided that parting ways made the most sense.

I'm surprised! If MIRI is mostly a Pause advocacy org now, I can see why agent foundations research doesn't fit the new focus and should be restructured. But the benefit of a Pause is that you use the extra time to do something in particular. Why wouldn... (read more)