Tobias H

Karma: 246

Tobias H 21 Aug 2023 20:28 UTC
1 point
on: clearthis’s Shortform
I recently found a 2-hour interview with Mo Gawdat titled “EMERGENCY EPISODE: Ex-Google Officer Finally Speaks Out On The Dangers Of AI!” from 2 months ago. It has 6.5 million views which is 1 million more views than Sam Altman’s interview on Lex Fridman.

I’ve only skimmed through it, but it seems that Gawdat frames AI developments as an emergency and is mainly concerned about potential misuse.

I likely won’t have time to actually listen to it for a while – but it seems pretty relevant for the AI Safety community to understand what kind of other extremely popular media narratives about dangers from AI exist.

Tobias H 3 Aug 2023 13:54 UTC
6 points
2
on: Work culture creep
I think the overall point you’re making is intriguing, and I could see how it might alter my home behaviour if I considered it more deeply. But I also strongly disagree with the following:
Just about every work behavior is an example of bad home behavior
There is a bunch of “work behavior” that has been very useful – in the right measure – for my personal life:
- Task Management – This cut down on the time I spend on “life admin”.
- Scheduling – Reaching out with “let’s find an evening to play tennis” helps me increase the number of fulfilling activities I do with friends.
- Prioritization – Day-to-day life can obscure what’s really important. Thinking about what I really value and want to achieve can make my life more meaningful.
- Creating Spreadsheets & Documents – Apart from the obvious use case in personal finance, Spreadsheets are also very valuable to me for evaluating crucial life decisions (“Where should we move?”). I use documents for private events I’m organising (e.g. a weekend trip to the mountains with friends).
Maybe some of them are too obvious and common. But they are things that my grandmother wouldn’t have done – and I suspect that they are mostly derived from work culture.

Tobias H 27 Jul 2023 18:23 UTC
3 points
0
on: What are examples of someone doing a lot of work to find the best of something?
DC Rainmaker does incredibly detailed reviews of sports watches.

Tobias H 30 Jan 2023 16:14 UTC
1 point
0
on: All AGI Safety questions welcome (especially basic ones) [~monthly thread]
How useful do people think it would be to have human-in-the-loop (HITL) AI systems?

What’s the likeliest failure mode of HITL AI Systems? And what kind of policies are mostly likely to help against those failure modes?

If we assume that HITL AI Systems are not going to be safer once we reach unaligned AGI. Could it maybe give use tools/information/time-steps to increase the chance that AGI will be aligned?

Tobias H 29 Sep 2022 2:27 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: jacobjacob’s comment on: How I buy things when Lightcone wants them fast
I was thinking of money. :)

Tobias H 26 Sep 2022 22:39 UTC
12 points
0
on: How I buy things when Lightcone wants them fast
Interesting. Can you give us a sense of how much those asks (offer to pay for the extra labour) end up costing you?

Tobias H 4 Jul 2022 13:57 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: Toni Kurz and the Insanity of Climbing Mountains
Also: The last name is “Von Almen” not “Almen”

Tobias H 18 Jun 2022 8:19 UTC
35 points
in reply to: AlphaAndOmega’s comment on: Scott Aaronson is joining OpenAI to work on AI safety
I always assumed that “Why don’t we give Terence Tao a million dollars to work on AGI alignment?” was using Tao to refer to a class of people. Your comment implies that it would be especially valuable for Tao specifically to work on it.

Why should we believe that Tao would be especially likely to be able to make progress on AGI alignment (e.g. compared to other recent fields medal winners like Peter Scholze)?

Tobias H 15 Jun 2022 9:08 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Tobias H’s comment on: AGI Safety FAQ / all-dumb-questions-allowed thread
Just saw the inverse question was already asked and answered.

Tobias H 15 Jun 2022 9:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: AGI Safety FAQ / all-dumb-questions-allowed thread
[I think this is more anthropomorphizing ramble than concise arguments. Feel free to ignore :) ]

I get the impression that in this example the AGI would not actually be satisficing. It is no longer maximizing a goal but still optimizing for this rule.

For a satisficing AGI, I’d imagine something vague like “Get many paperclips” resulting in the AGI trying to get paperclips but at some point (an inflection point of diminishing marginal returns? some point where it becomes very uncertain about what the next action should be?) doing something else.

Or for rules like “get 100 paperclips, not more” the AGI might only directionally or opportunistically adhere. Within the rule, this might look like “I wanted to get 100 paperclips, but 98 paperclips are still better than 90, let’s move on” or “Oops, I accidentally got 101 paperclips. Too bad, let’s move on”.
In your example of the AGI taking lots of precautions, the satisficing AGI would not do this because it could be spending its time doing something else.
I suspect there are major flaws with it, but an intuition I have goes something like this:
- Humans have in some sense similar decision-making capabilities to early AGI.
- The world is incredibly complex and humans are nowhere near understanding and predicting most of it. Early AGI will likely have similar limitations.
- Humans are mostly not optimizing their actions, mainly because of limited resources, multiple goals, and because of a ton of uncertainty about the future.
- So early AGI might also end up not-optimizing its actions most of the time.
- Suppose we assume that the complexity of the world will continue to be sufficiently big such that the AGI will continue to fail to completely understand and predict the world. In that case, the advanced AGI will continue to not-optimize to some extent.
  - But it might look like near-complete optimization to us.

Tobias H 12 Jun 2022 15:27 UTC
6 points
0
on: AGI Safety FAQ / all-dumb-questions-allowed thread
- Would an AGI that only tries to satisfice a solution/goal be safer?
- Do we have reason to believe that we can/can’t get an AGI to be a satisficer?

Tobias H 20 Jan 2022 7:44 UTC
4 points
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: “A Harmful Idea”
There has been quite a lot of discussion over on the EA Forum:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/search?terms=phil%20torres

Avital Balwit linked to this lesswrong post in the comments of her own response to his longtermism critique (because Phil Torres is currently banned from the forum, afaik):
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kageSSDLSMpuwkPKK/response-to-recent-criticisms-of-longtermism-1#6ZzPqhcBAELDiAJhw

Tobias H 17 Jan 2022 19:59 UTC
19 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Trying to Keep the Garden Well
The whole thing was much more banal than what you’re imagining. It was an interim-use building with mainly student residents. There was no coordination between residents that I knew of.

The garden wasn’t trashed before the letter. It was just a table and a couple of chairs, that didn’t fit the house rules. If the city had just said “please, take the table out of the garden”, I’d have given a 70% chance of it working. If the city had not said a thing, there would not have been (a lot of) additional furniture in the garden.

By issuing the threat, the city introduced an incentive they didn’t intend.
Some residents who picked up on the incentive destroyed the garden because they were overconfident in the authority following through with the threat – no matter what.

Tobias H 15 Jan 2022 15:39 UTC
1 point
on: How Bad Is QWERTY, Really? A Review of the Literature, such as It Is
The link to the QWYRFM layout contains an error.

Tobias H 6 Jan 2022 10:56 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: Animal welfare EA and personal dietary options
I would guess that humans’ nightmarish experience in concentration camps was usually better than nonexistence; and even if you suspect this is false, it seems easy to imagine how it could be true, because there’s a lot more to human experience than ‘pain, and beyond that pain, darkness’.
I can’t really imagine this – at least for people in extermination camps, who weren’t killed. I’d assume that, all else equal, the vast majority of prisoners would choose to skip that part of their life. But maybe I’m missing something or have unusual intuitions.

Tobias H 17 Dec 2021 13:11 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Connor_Flexman’s comment on: COVID and the holidays
Thank you! The general reasoning makes sense to me.
This Cochrane review finds a false negative for asymptomatic individuals of 42% with antigen tests – which were not self-tests. Is your rate significantly higher because you’re thinking of self-administered antigen tests?
In many European countries, you can get antigen self-tests for about $2-4 a piece, this might make a testing scheme more cost-effective.

Tobias H 16 Dec 2021 14:09 UTC
1 point
on: COVID and the holidays
Thanks for this post, it helped clarify some of my concerns about the upcoming holidays.

I’m surprised you don’t mention testing (PCR or antigen).
What are your views on testing before an event?
What would be a good protocol for testing before a specific event – test on the day of, a day before?

Tobias H 25 Jun 2021 15:32 UTC
4 points
on: How should we act on the possibility of UFOs being already here?
The triangular video almost certainly isn’t a UFO anymore.

Some guy investigated it on the ground and there’s a simple explanation: skyscrapers that are illuminated.
The videos capture a somewhat unique moment when clouds pass infront of the triangular shadow.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpjyWgjQvmc
(The most important part is at the end of the video.)

Tobias H 19 Jun 2021 16:08 UTC
1 point
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Are bread crusts healthier?
Interesting. I’m now wondering if dislike of crust is more widespread than I assumed.
This strikes me as plausible because there is a lot of moral sentiment attached to not wasting food.
This consumer survey from Switzerland found that consumers see the crust as more indicative of bread freshness than the crumb [low quality online survey]. So maybe people are also mixing up the crust as an indicator for quality with the actual taste of the crust?

Tobias H 18 Jun 2021 18:43 UTC
7 points
on: Are bread crusts healthier?
Curious: Are you from a country without very good (crusted) bread?

In Switzerland, Germany and France (that I know of) the crust is often considered the tastiest part of the bread, at least when fresh. I only know of children and elderly people not eating the crust because it’s harder to chew.