Because of this post, I’ve been thinking a little today about people who I consider wholesome, who often seem wiser than those who don’t (I guess due to tracking things that others have pressures to not think about). I think the main thing I find upsetting about these people is that they tend to less often be holy madmen who commit their life to a cause or do something great, and instead they often do more typical human things like tradeoff against their career and impact on the world in order to get married and have kids.
I think the world will probably end soon and most value will be lost to us and I am kind of upset when people choose not to fight against that but instead to live a simpler and smaller life. Especially so when I thought we were fighting it together and then they just… stop. Then I feel kind of betrayed.
I think something that can go poorly when trying to be more wholesome is that, on finding yourself aware of a cost that you’ve been paying, you can also find that you do not have the strength now to choose to continue paying that cost. Now that you see how you’ve been hurting yourself, even though you’ve been getting great results, you cannot continue to inflict that upon yourself, and so you will instead give up on this course of action and do something less personally difficult.
I think this is a fair complaint! I think it’s quite unwholesome, if you think we’re in a crisis, to turn away and not look at that, or not work towards helping. It seems important to think about safety rails against that. It’s less obviously unwholesome to keep devoting some effort towards typical human things while also devoting some effort towards fighting. (And I think there are a lot of stories I could tell where such paths end up doing better for the world than monomania about the things which seem most important.)
BTW one agenda here is thinking about what kinds of properties we might want societies of AI systems to have. I think there’s some slice of worlds where things go better if we teach our AI systems to be something-in-the-vicinity-of-wholesome than if we don’t.
I’d agree with that.
Because of this post, I’ve been thinking a little today about people who I consider wholesome, who often seem wiser than those who don’t (I guess due to tracking things that others have pressures to not think about). I think the main thing I find upsetting about these people is that they tend to less often be holy madmen who commit their life to a cause or do something great, and instead they often do more typical human things like tradeoff against their career and impact on the world in order to get married and have kids.
I think the world will probably end soon and most value will be lost to us and I am kind of upset when people choose not to fight against that but instead to live a simpler and smaller life. Especially so when I thought we were fighting it together and then they just… stop. Then I feel kind of betrayed.
I think something that can go poorly when trying to be more wholesome is that, on finding yourself aware of a cost that you’ve been paying, you can also find that you do not have the strength now to choose to continue paying that cost. Now that you see how you’ve been hurting yourself, even though you’ve been getting great results, you cannot continue to inflict that upon yourself, and so you will instead give up on this course of action and do something less personally difficult.
I think this is a fair complaint! I think it’s quite unwholesome, if you think we’re in a crisis, to turn away and not look at that, or not work towards helping. It seems important to think about safety rails against that. It’s less obviously unwholesome to keep devoting some effort towards typical human things while also devoting some effort towards fighting. (And I think there are a lot of stories I could tell where such paths end up doing better for the world than monomania about the things which seem most important.)
BTW one agenda here is thinking about what kinds of properties we might want societies of AI systems to have. I think there’s some slice of worlds where things go better if we teach our AI systems to be something-in-the-vicinity-of-wholesome than if we don’t.