I was trying to rely on Tao’s trust in Demis’s judgement, since he is an AI researcher. Mentioning Eliezer is mainly so he has someone to contact if he wants to get hired.
I wanted his thinking to be “this competent entity has spent some of his computational resources verifying that it is important to solve this problem, and now that I’m reminded of that I should also throw mine at it”.
Is he truly mostly interested in what he considers to be mentally stimulating? Not in improving the world, or in social nonsense, or guaranteeing that his family is completely safe from all threats?
Then was including this link a bad idea? It gives examples of areas a mathematician might find interesting. And if not that, then what should I say? I’ve got nothing better. Do you know any technical introduction to alignment that he might like?
And about getting him to talk to other people, if anyone volunteers just DM me your contact information so that I can include it in the email (or reply directly if you don’t care about it being public). I mean, what else could I do?
If you plan to rewrite that letter with a less pushy tone (I agree 100% with the comment from TechneMakre) I think it might be useful if you try to change the framework of the problem a bit. Imagine that a random guy is writing to you instead, and he is telling you to work on deviating possible meteorites reaching Earth. What sort of email would make you compelled to reply?
I’ll rewrite it but I can’t just model other people after me. If I were writing it for someone like myself it would be a concise explanation of the main argument to make me want to spend time thinking about it followed by a more detailed explanation or links to further reading. As long as it isn’t mean I don’t think I would care if it’s giving me orders, begging for help or giving me information without asking for anything at all. But he at least already knows that unaligned AIs are a problem, I can only remind him of that, link to reading material or say that other people also think he should work on it.
But now the priority of that is lower, see the edit to the post. Do you think that the email to Demis Hassabis has similar problems or that it should stay like it is now?
Does the stuff about pushiness make sense to you? What do you think of it? I think as is, the letter, if Tao reads it, would be mildly harmful, for the reasons described by other commenters.
I think I get it, but even if I didn’t now I know that’s how it sounds, and I think I know how to improve it. That will be for other mathematicians though (at least Maxim Kontsevich), see the edit to the post. Does the tone in the email to Demis seem like the right one to you?
In terms of tone it seems considerably less bad. I definitely like it more than the other one because it seems to make arguments rather than give social cues. It might be improved by adding links giving technical descriptions about the terms you use (e.g. inner alignment (Hubinger’s paper), IRL (maybe a Russell paper on CIRL)). I still don’t think it would work, simply because I would guess Hassabis gets a lot of email from randos who are confused and the email doesn’t seem to distinguish you from that (this may be totally unfair to you, and I’m not saying it’s correct or not, it’s just what I expect to happen). I also feel nervous about talking about arms races like that, enforcing a narrative where they’re not only real but the default (this is an awkward thing to think because it sounds like I’m trying to manage Hassabis’s social environment deceptively, and usually I would think that worrying about “reinforcing narratives” isn’t a main thing to worry about and instead one should just say what one thinks, but, still my instincts say to worry about that here, which might be incorrect).
I was trying to rely on Tao’s trust in Demis’s judgement, since he is an AI researcher. Mentioning Eliezer is mainly so he has someone to contact if he wants to get hired.
I wanted his thinking to be “this competent entity has spent some of his computational resources verifying that it is important to solve this problem, and now that I’m reminded of that I should also throw mine at it”.
Is he truly mostly interested in what he considers to be mentally stimulating? Not in improving the world, or in social nonsense, or guaranteeing that his family is completely safe from all threats?
Then was including this link a bad idea? It gives examples of areas a mathematician might find interesting. And if not that, then what should I say? I’ve got nothing better. Do you know any technical introduction to alignment that he might like?
And about getting him to talk to other people, if anyone volunteers just DM me your contact information so that I can include it in the email (or reply directly if you don’t care about it being public). I mean, what else could I do?
If you plan to rewrite that letter with a less pushy tone (I agree 100% with the comment from TechneMakre) I think it might be useful if you try to change the framework of the problem a bit. Imagine that a random guy is writing to you instead, and he is telling you to work on deviating possible meteorites reaching Earth. What sort of email would make you compelled to reply?
I’ll rewrite it but I can’t just model other people after me. If I were writing it for someone like myself it would be a concise explanation of the main argument to make me want to spend time thinking about it followed by a more detailed explanation or links to further reading. As long as it isn’t mean I don’t think I would care if it’s giving me orders, begging for help or giving me information without asking for anything at all. But he at least already knows that unaligned AIs are a problem, I can only remind him of that, link to reading material or say that other people also think he should work on it.
But now the priority of that is lower, see the edit to the post. Do you think that the email to Demis Hassabis has similar problems or that it should stay like it is now?
Does the stuff about pushiness make sense to you? What do you think of it? I think as is, the letter, if Tao reads it, would be mildly harmful, for the reasons described by other commenters.
I think I get it, but even if I didn’t now I know that’s how it sounds, and I think I know how to improve it. That will be for other mathematicians though (at least Maxim Kontsevich), see the edit to the post. Does the tone in the email to Demis seem like the right one to you?
In terms of tone it seems considerably less bad. I definitely like it more than the other one because it seems to make arguments rather than give social cues. It might be improved by adding links giving technical descriptions about the terms you use (e.g. inner alignment (Hubinger’s paper), IRL (maybe a Russell paper on CIRL)). I still don’t think it would work, simply because I would guess Hassabis gets a lot of email from randos who are confused and the email doesn’t seem to distinguish you from that (this may be totally unfair to you, and I’m not saying it’s correct or not, it’s just what I expect to happen). I also feel nervous about talking about arms races like that, enforcing a narrative where they’re not only real but the default (this is an awkward thing to think because it sounds like I’m trying to manage Hassabis’s social environment deceptively, and usually I would think that worrying about “reinforcing narratives” isn’t a main thing to worry about and instead one should just say what one thinks, but, still my instincts say to worry about that here, which might be incorrect).