Alongside that though, I think the next biggest leverage point would be something like nationalising social media and retargeting development/design toward connection and flourishing (as opposed to engagement and profit).
This is one area where, if we didn’t have multiple catastrophic time pressures, I’d be pretty optimistic about the future. These are incredibly high impact and tractable levers for changing the world for the better; part of the whole bucket of ‘just stop doing the most stupid thing’ stuff.
Raising children better doesn’t scale well. Neither in how much ooomph you get out of it per person, nor in how many people you can reach with this special treatment.
Most promising way is just raising children better.
I highly doubt this would be very helpful in resolving the particular concerns Habryka has in mind. Namely, a world in which:
very short AI timelines (3-15 years) happen by default unless aggressive regulation is put in place, but even if it is, the likelihood of full compliance is not 100% and the development of AGI can be realistically delayed by at most ~ 1⁄2 generations before the risk of at least one large-scale defection having appeared becomes too high, so you don’t have time for slow cultural change that takes many decades to take effect
the AI alignment problem turns out to be very hard and basically unsolvable by unenhanced humans, no matter how smart they may be, so you need improvements that quickly generate a bunch of ultra-geniuses that are far smarter than their “parents” could ever be
I believe that we could raise children much better, however, even in the article you linked:
An important factor to acknowledge is that these children did not only receive an exceptional education; they were also exceptionally gifted.
Unfortunately, in current political climate, discussing intelligence is a taboo. I believe that optimal education for gifted children would be different from optimal education for average children (however, both could—and should—be greatly improved over what we have now), which unfortunately means that debates about improving education in general are somewhat irrelevant for improving the education of the brightest (who presumably could solve AI alignment one day).
just stop doing the most stupid thing
Sometimes this is a chicken-and-egg problem: the stupid things happen because people are stupid (the ones who do the things, or make decisions about how the things should be done), but as long as the stupid things keep happening, people will remain stupid.
For example, we have a lot of superstition, homeopathy, conspiracy theories, and similar, which if it could somehow magically disappear overnight, people probably wouldn’t reinvent them, or at least not quickly. These memes persist, because they spread from one generation to another. Here, the reason we do the stupid thing, is that there are many people who sincerely and passionately believe that the stupid thing is actually the smart and right thing.
Another source of problem is that with average people, you can’t expect extraordinary results. For example, most math teachers suck at math and at teaching. As a result, we get another generation that sucks at math. The problem is, we need so many math teachers (at elementary and high schools), that you can’t simply decide to only hire the competent ones—there would be not enough teachers to keep the schools running.
Then we have all kinds of political mindkilling and corruption, when stupid things happen because they provide some political advantage for someone, or because the person who is supposed to keep things running is actually more interested in extracting as much rent as possible.
Yeah, I wish we could stop doing the stupid things… but that turns out to be quite difficult. Merely explaining why some thing is stupid would not work—you would get a lot of people yelling at you, some of them because they believe the stupid thing, others because they derive some benefit from the stupid thing, and some are simply incompetent to do it better.
Re: 2
Most promising way is just raising children better.
See (which I’m sure you’ve already read): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CYN7swrefEss4e3Qe/childhoods-of-exceptional-people
Alongside that though, I think the next biggest leverage point would be something like nationalising social media and retargeting development/design toward connection and flourishing (as opposed to engagement and profit).
This is one area where, if we didn’t have multiple catastrophic time pressures, I’d be pretty optimistic about the future. These are incredibly high impact and tractable levers for changing the world for the better; part of the whole bucket of ‘just stop doing the most stupid thing’ stuff.
Raising children better doesn’t scale well. Neither in how much ooomph you get out of it per person, nor in how many people you can reach with this special treatment.
I highly doubt this would be very helpful in resolving the particular concerns Habryka has in mind. Namely, a world in which:
very short AI timelines (3-15 years) happen by default unless aggressive regulation is put in place, but even if it is, the likelihood of full compliance is not 100% and the development of AGI can be realistically delayed by at most ~ 1⁄2 generations before the risk of at least one large-scale defection having appeared becomes too high, so you don’t have time for slow cultural change that takes many decades to take effect
the AI alignment problem turns out to be very hard and basically unsolvable by unenhanced humans, no matter how smart they may be, so you need improvements that quickly generate a bunch of ultra-geniuses that are far smarter than their “parents” could ever be
I believe that we could raise children much better, however, even in the article you linked:
Unfortunately, in current political climate, discussing intelligence is a taboo. I believe that optimal education for gifted children would be different from optimal education for average children (however, both could—and should—be greatly improved over what we have now), which unfortunately means that debates about improving education in general are somewhat irrelevant for improving the education of the brightest (who presumably could solve AI alignment one day).
Sometimes this is a chicken-and-egg problem: the stupid things happen because people are stupid (the ones who do the things, or make decisions about how the things should be done), but as long as the stupid things keep happening, people will remain stupid.
For example, we have a lot of superstition, homeopathy, conspiracy theories, and similar, which if it could somehow magically disappear overnight, people probably wouldn’t reinvent them, or at least not quickly. These memes persist, because they spread from one generation to another. Here, the reason we do the stupid thing, is that there are many people who sincerely and passionately believe that the stupid thing is actually the smart and right thing.
Another source of problem is that with average people, you can’t expect extraordinary results. For example, most math teachers suck at math and at teaching. As a result, we get another generation that sucks at math. The problem is, we need so many math teachers (at elementary and high schools), that you can’t simply decide to only hire the competent ones—there would be not enough teachers to keep the schools running.
Then we have all kinds of political mindkilling and corruption, when stupid things happen because they provide some political advantage for someone, or because the person who is supposed to keep things running is actually more interested in extracting as much rent as possible.
Yeah, I wish we could stop doing the stupid things… but that turns out to be quite difficult. Merely explaining why some thing is stupid would not work—you would get a lot of people yelling at you, some of them because they believe the stupid thing, others because they derive some benefit from the stupid thing, and some are simply incompetent to do it better.