A few thoughts from my political science classes and experience -
when people value authority more than arguments
It's probably less about "authority", but more about the desperate hope to reach stability, and the belief of unstable governments leading to instability, after many years of being colonized on the coasts, and war (ww 2 + civil war).
"Societies can be different"
is a way too compressed term to summarize the points you made. Some of them are political ideology issues, and others are resource issues, but not related to "culture" as could ...
For "prison sentencing" here, do you mean some time in prison, but not life sentencing? Also instead of prison sentencing, after increasing "reliability of being caught", would you propose alternative form of sentencing?
Some parts of 1) and most of 2) made me feel educating people on the clear consequences of the crime is important.
For people who frequently go in and out of prison - I would guess most legal systems already make it more severe than previous offenses typically, but for small crimes they may not be.
I do think other types of punishments that you have listed there (physical pain, training programs, etc) would be interesting depending on the crime.
focusing less on intent and more on patterns of harm
In a general context, understanding intent though will help to solve the issue fundamentally. There might be two general reasons behind harmful behaviors: 1.do not know this will cause harm, or how not to cause harm, aka uneducated on this behavior/being ignorant, 2.do know this will cause harm, and still decided to do so. There might be more nuances but these two are probably the two high level categories. Knowing what the intent is helps to create strategies to address the issue - 1.more education? 2.more punishments/legal actions?
I personally agree with your reflection on suffering risks (including factory farming, systemic injustices, and wars) and the approach to donating to different cause areas. My (maybe unpopular under "prioritizing only 1" type of mindset) thought is: maybe we should avoid prioritizing only one single area (especially collectively), but recognize that in reality there are always multiple issues we need to fight about/solve. Personally we could focus professionally on one issue, and volunteer for/donate to another cause area, depending on our knowledge, inter...
Haven't looked too closely at this, but my initial two thoughts:
It is good to think critically, but I think it would be beneficial to present more evidence before making the claim or conclusion
This is very interesting, and thanks for sharing.
I find it useful sometimes to think about "how to differentiate this term" when defining a term. In this case, in my mind it would be thinking about "reasoning", vs "general reasoning" vs "generalization".
In my observation (trying to avoid I think!), "I think" is intended to (or actually should have been used to) point out perspective differences (which helps to lead to more accurate conclusions, including collaborative and effective communication), rather than confidence. In the latter case of misuse, it would be good if people clarify "this term is about confidence, not perspective in my sentence".
I highly agree with almost all of these points, and those are very consistent with my observation. As I am still relatively new to lesswrong, one big observation (based on my experience) I still see today, is disconnected concepts, definitions, and or terminologies with the academic language. Sometimes I see terminology that already exists in academia and introducing new concepts with the same name may be confusing without using channels academics are used to. There are some terms that I try to search on google for example, but the only relevant ones are f...
Yes, what I meant is exactly "there is no must, but only want". But it feels like a "must" in some context that I am seeing, but I do not recall exactly where. And yeah true, there may be some survival bias.
I agree it is tragedy from human race's perspective, but I think what I meant is from a non-human perspective to view this problem. For example, to an alien who is observing earth, human is just another species that rise up as a dominant species, as a thought experiment.
(On humans prefer to be childless - actually this already slowed down in many countries due to cost of raising a child etc, but yeah this is a digress on my part.)
My two cents:
- The system has a fixed goal that it capably works towards across all contexts.
- The system is able to capably work towards goals, but which it does, if any, may depend on the context.
From these two above, seems it would be good for you to define/clarify what exactly you mean by "goals". I can see two definitions: 1. goals as in a loss function or objective that the algorithm is optimizing towards, 2. task specific goals like summarize an article, planning. There may be some other goals that I am unaware of, or this is obvious elsewhere in some c...
I think that is probably not a good reason to be libertarian in my opinion? Could you also share maybe how much older were your than you siblings? If you are not that far apart, you and your siblings came from the same starting line, distributing is not going to happen in real life economically nor socially even if not libertarian (in real life, where we need equity is when the starting line is not the same and is not able to be changed by choice. A more similar analogy might be some kids are born with large ears, and large ears are favored by the society, and the large eared kids always get more candy). If you are ages apart with you being a lot older, it may make some limited sense to for your parents to re-distribute.
I am not quite sure about the writing/examples in computational kindness and responsibility offloading, but I think I feel the general idea.
For computational kindness, I think it is just really the difference in how people prefer to communicate, or making plans it seems, with the example on trip planning. I, for example, personally prefer being offered with their true thoughts - if they are okay with just really anything, or not. Anything is fine as long as that is what they really think or prefer (side talk: I generally think communicating real pref...
On what evidence do I conclude what I think is know is correct/factual/true and how strong is that evidence? To what extent have I verified that view and just how extensively should I verify the evidence?
For this, aside from traditional paper reading from credible sources, one good approach in my opinion is to actively seek evidence/arguments from, or initiate conversations with people who have a different perspective with me (on both side of the spectrum if the conclusion space is continuous).
I personally agree with you on the importance of these problems. But I myself might also be a more general responsible/trustworthy AI person, and I care about other issues outside of AI too, so not sure about a more specific community, or what the definition is for "AI Safety" people.
For funding, I am not very familiar and want to ask for some clarification: by "(especially cyber-and bio-)security", do you mean generally, or "(especially cyber-and bio-)security" caused by AI specifically?
Does "highest status" here mean highest expertise in a domain generally agreed by people in that domain, and/or education level, and/or privileged schools, and/or from more economically powerful countries etc? It is also good to note that sometimes the "status" is dynamic, and may or may not imply anything causal with their decision making or choice on priorities.
One scenario is "higher status" might correlates with better resources to achieve those statuses, and a possibility is as a result they haven't experienced or they are not subject to many near-ter...
Thanks! I think the term duration is interesting and creative.
Do you think for the short-term ones there might be pre-studies they need to do for the exact topics they need to learn on? Or maybe could design the short-term ones for topics that can be learnt quickly and solved quickly? I am a little worried about the consistency in policy as well (for example even with work, when a person on a project take vacation, and someone need to cover for them, there are a lot of onboarding docs, and prior knowledge to transfer), but could not find a good way just yet. I will think more about these.
Amazingly detailed article covering malevolence, interaction with power, and the other nuances! Have been thinking of exploring similar topics, and found this very helpful. Besides the identified research questions, some of which I highly agree with, one additional question I was wondering is: do self-awareness of one's own malevolence factors help one to limit the malevolence factors? if so how effective would that be? how would this change when they have power?
Interesting idea, and I think there is a possibility that the responsibility will make the "normal people" make better choices or learn more even though they do not know policy, etc in the first place.
A few questions:
Agree with this, and wanted to add that I am also not completely sure if mechanistic interpretability is a good "commercial bet" yet based on my experience and understanding, with my definition of commercial bet being materialization of revenue or simply revenue generating.
One revenue generating path I can see for LLMs is the company uses them to identify data that are most effective for particular benchmarks, but my current understanding (correct me if I am wrong) is that it is relatively costly to first research a reliable method, and then run inte...
Would agree with most of the posts; To me, humans have some general shared experiences that may activate empathy related to those experiences, but the the numerous small differences in experience make it very hard to know exactly what the others would think/feel, even if in exactly the same situations. We could never really model the entire learning/experience history from another person.
My belief/additional point I want to add/urge is that this should not be interpreted as say empathy is not needed because we don't get it right anyways (I saw ...
I think I observe this generally a lot: "as soon as those implications do not personally benefit them", and even more so when this comes with a cost/conflict of interest.
On rationality on decision making (not the seeking truth part on belief forming I guess) - I thought it is more like being consistent with their own preference and values (if we are constraining to the definition on lesswrong/sequence ish)? I have a hot take that:
I think the title could be a bit more specific like - "involving political party in science discussions might not be productive", or something similar. If using the word "politics", it would be crucial to define what "politics" here mean or refer to. The reason I say this is "politics" might not be just about actual political party's power dynamics, but also includes general policy making, strategies, and history that aim to help individuals in the society, and many other aspects. These other types of things included in the word "politics" is crucial...
I think by winning, he meant: "art of choosing actions that lead to outcomes ranked higher in your preferences", though I don't completely agree with this word choice of "winning" which could be ambiguous/causing confusion.
A bit unrelated, but more of a general comment on this - in my belief, I think people generally have unconscious preferences, and knowing/acknowledging these before weighing out preferences are very important, even if some preferences are short term.
I also had similar feelings on the simplicity part, and also how theory/idealized situation and execution could be very different. Also agree on the conflict part (and to me many different type of conflicts). And, I super super strongly support the section on The humans behind the numbers.
(These thoughts still persist after taking intro to EA courses).
I think EA's big overall intentions are good to me and I am happy/energized by see how passionate people are comparing to no altruism at all at least; but the details/execution are not quite there to me.
I have been having some similar thoughts on the main points here for a while and thanks for this.
I guess to me what needs attention is when people do things along the lines of "benefit themselves and harm other people". That harm has a pretty strict definition, though I know we may always be able to give borderline examples. This definitely includes the abuse of power in our current society and culture, and any current risks etc. (For example, if we are constraining to just AI with warning on content, https://www.iwf.org.uk/media/q4zll2ya/iwf-ai-csam...
Oxford languages (or really just after googling) says "rational" is "based on or in accordance with reason or logic."
I think there are a lot of other types of definitions (I think lesswrong mentioned it is related to the process of finding truth). For me, first of all it is useful to break this down into two parts: 1) observation and information analysis, and 2) decision making.
For 1): Truth, but also particularly causality finding. (Very close to the first one you bolded, and I somehow feel many other ones are just derived from this one. I added causality...
From my perspective - would say it's 7 and 9.
For 7: One AI risk controversy is we do not know/see existing model that pose that risk yet. But there might be models that the frontier companies such as Google may be developing privately, and Hinton maybe saw more there.
For 9: Expert opinions are important and adds credibility generally as the question of how/why AI risks can emerge is by root highly technical. It is important to understand the fundamentals of the learning algorithms. Additionally they might have seen more algorithms. This is important to me ...
Agree with a lot of the things in this post, including "But implicit in that is the assumption that all DALYs are equal, or that disability or health effects are the only factors that we need to adjust for while assessing the value of a life year. However, If DALYs vary significantly in quality (as I’ll argue and GiveWell acknowledges we have substantial evidence for), then simply minimizing the cost of buying a DALY risks adverse selection. "
Had the same question/thoughts when I did the Introduction to Effective Altruism course as well.
Out of curiosity - what was the time span for this raise that achieved this goal/when did first start again? Was it 2 months ago?