I think these points are common sense to an outsider. I don’t mean to be condescending, I consider myself an outsider.
I’ve been told that ideas on this website are sometimes footnoted by people like Sam Altman in the real world, but they don’t seem to ever be applied correctly.
It’s been obvious from the start that not enough effort was put into getting buy-in from the government. Now, their strides have become oppressive and naive (the AI Act is terribly written and unbelievably complicated, it’ll be three-five years before it’s ever implemented).
Many of my peers who I’ve introduced to some arguments on this website who do not know what alignment research is identified many of these ‘mistakes’ at face value. LessWrong got into a terrible habit of fortifying an echo chamber of ideas that only worked on LessWrong. No matter how good an idea, if it cannot be simply explained to the average layperson, it will be discarded as obfuscatory.
Hero worship & bandwagons seems to be a problem with the LessWrong community inherently, rather than something unique to the Alignment movement (again, I haven’t been here long, I’m simply referring to posts by long-time members critiquing the cult-like mentalities that tend to appear).
Advocating for pause—well duh. The genie is out of the bottle, there’s no putting it back. We literally cannot go back because the gravy train of money in the throats of those with the power to change things aren’t going to give that up.
I don’t see these things as mistakes but rather common-sense byproducts of the whole: “We were so concerned with whether we could, we didn’t ask whether we should,” idea. The LessWrong community literally couldn’t help itself, it just had to talk about these things as rationalists of the 21st century.
I think… well, I think there may be a 10-15% chance these mistakes are rectified in time. But the public already has a warped perception of AI, divided on political lines. LessWrong could change if there was a concerted effort—would the counterparts who read LessWrong also follow? I don’t know.
I want to emphasise here, since I’ve just noticed how many times I mentioned LW, I’m not demonising the community. I’m simply saying that, from an outsider’s perspective, this community held promise as the vanguards of a better future. Whatever ideas it planted in the heads of those at the top a few years ago, in the beginning stages of alignment, could’ve been seeded better. LW is only a small cog of blame in the massive machine that is currently outputting a thousand mistakes a day.
I think these points are common sense to an outsider. I don’t mean to be condescending, I consider myself an outsider.
I’ve been told that ideas on this website are sometimes footnoted by people like Sam Altman in the real world, but they don’t seem to ever be applied correctly.
It’s been obvious from the start that not enough effort was put into getting buy-in from the government. Now, their strides have become oppressive and naive (the AI Act is terribly written and unbelievably complicated, it’ll be three-five years before it’s ever implemented).
Many of my peers who I’ve introduced to some arguments on this website who do not know what alignment research is identified many of these ‘mistakes’ at face value. LessWrong got into a terrible habit of fortifying an echo chamber of ideas that only worked on LessWrong. No matter how good an idea, if it cannot be simply explained to the average layperson, it will be discarded as obfuscatory.
Hero worship & bandwagons seems to be a problem with the LessWrong community inherently, rather than something unique to the Alignment movement (again, I haven’t been here long, I’m simply referring to posts by long-time members critiquing the cult-like mentalities that tend to appear).
Advocating for pause—well duh. The genie is out of the bottle, there’s no putting it back. We literally cannot go back because the gravy train of money in the throats of those with the power to change things aren’t going to give that up.
I don’t see these things as mistakes but rather common-sense byproducts of the whole: “We were so concerned with whether we could, we didn’t ask whether we should,” idea. The LessWrong community literally couldn’t help itself, it just had to talk about these things as rationalists of the 21st century.
I think… well, I think there may be a 10-15% chance these mistakes are rectified in time. But the public already has a warped perception of AI, divided on political lines. LessWrong could change if there was a concerted effort—would the counterparts who read LessWrong also follow? I don’t know.
I want to emphasise here, since I’ve just noticed how many times I mentioned LW, I’m not demonising the community. I’m simply saying that, from an outsider’s perspective, this community held promise as the vanguards of a better future. Whatever ideas it planted in the heads of those at the top a few years ago, in the beginning stages of alignment, could’ve been seeded better. LW is only a small cog of blame in the massive machine that is currently outputting a thousand mistakes a day.