I am a bit unsure of the standard here for “understands how Eliezer would tackle the problem”. Is the standard “the underlying philosophy was successfully communicated to lots of people”? If so I’ll note as background that it is pretty standard that such underlying philosophies of solving problems are hard to communicate — someone who reads Shannon or Pearl’s writing does not become equal to them, someone who read Faraday’s notes couldn’t pick up his powerful insights, until Maxwell formalized them neatly[1], and (for picking up philosophies broadly) someone who reads Aurelius or Hume or Mill cannot produce the sorts of works those people would have produced had they been alive for longer or in the present day.
Is the standard “people who read Eliezer’s writing go on to do research that Eliezer judges to be remotely on the right track”? Then I think a couple of folks have done stuff here that Eliezer would view as at all on the right track, including lots of MIRI researchers, Wei Dai, John Wentworth, the mesa-optimizers paper, etc. It would be a bit of effort to give me an overview of all the folks who took parts of Eliezer’s writing and did useful things as a direct result of the specific ideas, and then assess how successful that counts as.
My current guess is that Eliezer’s research dreams have not been that successfully picked up by others relative to what I would have predicted 10 years ago. I am not confident why this is — perhaps other institutional support has been lacking for people to work on it, perhaps there have been active forces in the direction of “not particularly trying to understand AI” due to the massive success of engineering approaches over scientific approaches, perhaps Eliezer’s particular approach has flaws that make it not very productive.
I think my primary guess for why there has been less progress on Eliezer’s research dreams is that the subject domain is itself very annoying to get in contact with, due to us not having a variety of superintelligences to play with, and my anticipation that when we do get to that stage our lives will soon be over, so it’s much harder to make any progress on these problems than it is in the vast majority of other domains humans have been successful in.
Nate Soares has a blogpost that discusses this point that I found insightful, here’s a quote.
Faraday discovered a wide array of electromagnetic phenomena, guided by an intuition that he wasn’t able to formalize or transmit except through hundreds of pages of detailed laboratory notes and diagrams; Maxwell later invented the language to describe electromagnetism formally by reading Faraday’s work, and expressed those hundreds of pages of intuitions in three lines.
I am a bit unsure of the standard here for “understands how Eliezer would tackle the problem”.
Huh? Isn’t this a question for you, not for me? You wrote this:
If folks want to understand how Eliezer would tackle the problem they can read the over-one-million thoughtfully written words he has published across LessWrong and Arbital and in MIRI papers about how to solve hard problems in general and how to think about AI in particular.
So, the standard is… whatever you had in mind there?
Oh. Here’s a compressed gloss of this conversation as I understand it.
Eliezer: People should give up on producing alignment theory directly and instead should build augmented humans to produce aligned agents.
Vanessa: And how do you think the augmented humans will go about doing so?
Eliezer: I mean, the point here is that’s a problem for them to solve. Insofar as they need my help they have not augmented enough. (Ben reads into Eliezer’s comment: And insofar as you wish to elicit my approach, I have already written over a million words on this, a few marginal guesses ain’t gonna do much.)
Peter: It seems wrong to not share your guesses here, people should not have to build the foundations themselves without help from Eliezer.
Ben: Eliezer has spent many years writing up and helping build the foundations, this comment seems very confusing given that context.
Said: But have Eliezer’s writings worked?
Ben: (I’m not quite sure what the implied relationship is of this question to the question of whether Eliezer has tried very hard to help build a foundation for alignment research, but I will answer the question directly.) To the incredibly high standard that ~nobody ever succeeds at, it has not succeeded. To the lower standard that scientists sometimes succeed at, it has worked a little but has not been sufficient.
My first guess was that you’re implicitly asking because, if it has not been successful, then you think Eliezer still ought to answer questions like Vanessa’s. I am not confident in this guess.
If you’re simply asking for clarification on whether Eliezer’s writing works to convey his philosophy and approach to the alignment problem, I have now told you two standards to which I would evaluate this question and how I think it does on those standards. Do you understand why I wrote what I wrote in my reply to Peter?
Uh… I think you’re somewhat overcomplicating things. Again, you wrote (emphasis mine):
If folks want to understand how Eliezer would tackle the problem they can read the over-one-million thoughtfully written words he has published across LessWrong and Arbital and in MIRI papers about how to solve hard problems in general and how to think about AI in particular.
In other words, you wrote that if people want X, they can do Y. (Implying that doing Y will, with non-trivial probability, cause people to gain X.[1]) My question was simply whether there exists anyone who has done Y and now, as a consequence, has X.
There are basically two possible answers to this:
“Yes, persons A, B, C have all done Y, and now, as a consequence, have X.”
Or
“No, there exists no such person who has done Y and now, as a consequence, has X.”
(Which may be because nobody has done Y, or it may be because some people have done Y, but have not gained X.)
There’s not any need to bring in questions of standards or trying hard or… anything like that.
So, to substitute the values back in for the variables, I could ask:
Would you say that you “understand how Eliezer would tackle the problem”?
and:
Have you “read the over-one-million thoughtfully written words he has published across LessWrong and Arbital and in MIRI papers about how to solve hard problems in general and how to think about AI in particular”?
Likewise, the same question about Vanessa: does she “understand … etc.”, and has she “read the … etc.”?
Again, what I mean by all of these words is just whatever you meant when you wrote them.
“Implying” in the Gricean sense, of course, not in the logical sense. Strictly speaking, if we drop all Gricean assumptions, we could read your original claim as being analogous to, e.g., “if folks want to grow ten feet fall, they can paint their toenails blue”—which is entirely true, and yet does not, strictly speaking, entail any causal claims. I assumed that this kind of thing is not what you meant, because… that would make your comment basically pointless.
Ah, but I think you have assumed slightly too much in what I meant. I simply meant to say that if someone wants Eliezer’s help in their goal to “work out the foundations” to “a field of (MIRI-style) Agent Foundations” the better way to understand Eliezer’s perspective on these difficult questions is to read the high-effort and thoughtful blog posts and papers he produced that’s intended to communicate his perspective on these questions, rather than ask him for some quick guesses on how one could in-principle solve the problems. I did not mean to imply that (either) way would necessarily work, as the goal itself is hard to achieve, I simply meant that one approach is clearly much more likely than the other to achieve that goal.
(That said, again to answer your question, my current guess is that Nate Soares is an example of a person who read those works and then came to share a lot of Eliezer’s approach to solving the problems. Though I’m honestly not sure how much he would put down to the factors of (a) reading the writing (b) working directly with Eliezer (c) trying to solve the problem himself and coming up with similar approaches. I also think that Wei Dai at least understood enough to make substantial progress on an open research question in decision theory, and similar things can be said of Scott Garrabrant re: logical uncertainty and others at MIRI.)
I am a bit unsure of the standard here for “understands how Eliezer would tackle the problem”. Is the standard “the underlying philosophy was successfully communicated to lots of people”? If so I’ll note as background that it is pretty standard that such underlying philosophies of solving problems are hard to communicate — someone who reads Shannon or Pearl’s writing does not become equal to them, someone who read Faraday’s notes couldn’t pick up his powerful insights, until Maxwell formalized them neatly[1], and (for picking up philosophies broadly) someone who reads Aurelius or Hume or Mill cannot produce the sorts of works those people would have produced had they been alive for longer or in the present day.
Is the standard “people who read Eliezer’s writing go on to do research that Eliezer judges to be remotely on the right track”? Then I think a couple of folks have done stuff here that Eliezer would view as at all on the right track, including lots of MIRI researchers, Wei Dai, John Wentworth, the mesa-optimizers paper, etc. It would be a bit of effort to give me an overview of all the folks who took parts of Eliezer’s writing and did useful things as a direct result of the specific ideas, and then assess how successful that counts as.
My current guess is that Eliezer’s research dreams have not been that successfully picked up by others relative to what I would have predicted 10 years ago. I am not confident why this is — perhaps other institutional support has been lacking for people to work on it, perhaps there have been active forces in the direction of “not particularly trying to understand AI” due to the massive success of engineering approaches over scientific approaches, perhaps Eliezer’s particular approach has flaws that make it not very productive.
I think my primary guess for why there has been less progress on Eliezer’s research dreams is that the subject domain is itself very annoying to get in contact with, due to us not having a variety of superintelligences to play with, and my anticipation that when we do get to that stage our lives will soon be over, so it’s much harder to make any progress on these problems than it is in the vast majority of other domains humans have been successful in.
Nate Soares has a blogpost that discusses this point that I found insightful, here’s a quote.
Huh? Isn’t this a question for you, not for me? You wrote this:
So, the standard is… whatever you had in mind there?
Oh. Here’s a compressed gloss of this conversation as I understand it.
Eliezer: People should give up on producing alignment theory directly and instead should build augmented humans to produce aligned agents.
Vanessa: And how do you think the augmented humans will go about doing so?
Eliezer: I mean, the point here is that’s a problem for them to solve. Insofar as they need my help they have not augmented enough. (Ben reads into Eliezer’s comment: And insofar as you wish to elicit my approach, I have already written over a million words on this, a few marginal guesses ain’t gonna do much.)
Peter: It seems wrong to not share your guesses here, people should not have to build the foundations themselves without help from Eliezer.
Ben: Eliezer has spent many years writing up and helping build the foundations, this comment seems very confusing given that context.
Said: But have Eliezer’s writings worked?
Ben: (I’m not quite sure what the implied relationship is of this question to the question of whether Eliezer has tried very hard to help build a foundation for alignment research, but I will answer the question directly.) To the incredibly high standard that ~nobody ever succeeds at, it has not succeeded. To the lower standard that scientists sometimes succeed at, it has worked a little but has not been sufficient.
My first guess was that you’re implicitly asking because, if it has not been successful, then you think Eliezer still ought to answer questions like Vanessa’s. I am not confident in this guess.
If you’re simply asking for clarification on whether Eliezer’s writing works to convey his philosophy and approach to the alignment problem, I have now told you two standards to which I would evaluate this question and how I think it does on those standards. Do you understand why I wrote what I wrote in my reply to Peter?
Uh… I think you’re somewhat overcomplicating things. Again, you wrote (emphasis mine):
In other words, you wrote that if people want X, they can do Y. (Implying that doing Y will, with non-trivial probability, cause people to gain X.[1]) My question was simply whether there exists anyone who has done Y and now, as a consequence, has X.
There are basically two possible answers to this:
“Yes, persons A, B, C have all done Y, and now, as a consequence, have X.”
Or
“No, there exists no such person who has done Y and now, as a consequence, has X.”
(Which may be because nobody has done Y, or it may be because some people have done Y, but have not gained X.)
There’s not any need to bring in questions of standards or trying hard or… anything like that.
So, to substitute the values back in for the variables, I could ask:
Would you say that you “understand how Eliezer would tackle the problem”?
and:
Have you “read the over-one-million thoughtfully written words he has published across LessWrong and Arbital and in MIRI papers about how to solve hard problems in general and how to think about AI in particular”?
Likewise, the same question about Vanessa: does she “understand … etc.”, and has she “read the … etc.”?
Again, what I mean by all of these words is just whatever you meant when you wrote them.
“Implying” in the Gricean sense, of course, not in the logical sense. Strictly speaking, if we drop all Gricean assumptions, we could read your original claim as being analogous to, e.g., “if folks want to grow ten feet fall, they can paint their toenails blue”—which is entirely true, and yet does not, strictly speaking, entail any causal claims. I assumed that this kind of thing is not what you meant, because… that would make your comment basically pointless.
Ah, but I think you have assumed slightly too much in what I meant. I simply meant to say that if someone wants Eliezer’s help in their goal to “work out the foundations” to “a field of (MIRI-style) Agent Foundations” the better way to understand Eliezer’s perspective on these difficult questions is to read the high-effort and thoughtful blog posts and papers he produced that’s intended to communicate his perspective on these questions, rather than ask him for some quick guesses on how one could in-principle solve the problems. I did not mean to imply that (either) way would necessarily work, as the goal itself is hard to achieve, I simply meant that one approach is clearly much more likely than the other to achieve that goal.
(That said, again to answer your question, my current guess is that Nate Soares is an example of a person who read those works and then came to share a lot of Eliezer’s approach to solving the problems. Though I’m honestly not sure how much he would put down to the factors of (a) reading the writing (b) working directly with Eliezer (c) trying to solve the problem himself and coming up with similar approaches. I also think that Wei Dai at least understood enough to make substantial progress on an open research question in decision theory, and similar things can be said of Scott Garrabrant re: logical uncertainty and others at MIRI.)