I agree that humans sometimes fall prey to adversarial inputs, and am updating up on dangerous-thought density based on your religion argument. Any links to where I can read more?
I would add that EA funders have to consider even more (and potentially more explicitly adversarial) proposals/plans than a typical EA, and AFAIK nobody has suggested that that’s doomed from the start because it amounts to argmaxing against an evaluator. Instead, everyone implicitly or explicitly recognizes the danger of adversarial plans, and tries to harden the evaluation process against them.
This seems disanalogous to the situation discussed in the OP. If we were designing, from scratch, a system which we wanted to pursue effective altruism, we would be extremely well-advised to not include grader-optimizers which are optimizing EA funder evaluations. Especially if the grader-optimizers will eventually get smart enough to write out the funders’ pseudocode. At best, that wastes computation. At (probable) worst, the system blows up.
By contrast, we live in a world full of other people, some of whom are optimizing for status and power. Given that world, we should indeed harden our evaluation procedures, insofar as that helps us more faithfully evaluate grants and thereby achieve our goals.
I agree that humans sometimes fall prey to adversarial inputs, and am updating up on dangerous-thought density based on your religion argument. Any links to where I can read more?
However, this does not seem important for my (intended) original point. Namely, if you’re trying to align e.g. a brute-force-search plan maximizer or a grader-optimizer, you will fail due to high-strength optimizer’s curse forcing you to evaluate extremely scary adversarial inputs. But also this is sideways of real-world alignment, where realistic motivations may not be best specified in the form of “utility function over observation/universe histories.”
My counterpoint here is, we have an example of human-aligned shard-based agents (namely humans), who are nevertheless unsafe in part because they fall prey to dangerous thoughts, which they themselves generate because they inevitably have to do some amount of search/optimization (of their thoughts/plans) as they try to reach their goals, and dangerous-thought density is high enough that even that limited amount of search/optimization is enough to frequently (on a societal level) hit upon dangerous thoughts.
Wouldn’t a shard-based aligned AI have to do as much search/optimization as a human society collectively does, in order to be as competent/intelligent, in which case wouldn’t it be as likely to be unsafe in this regard? And what if it has an even higher density of dangerous thoughts, especially “out of distribution”, and/or does more search/optimization to try to find better-than-human thoughts/plans?
(My own proposal here is to try to solve metaphilosophy or understand “correct reasoning” so that we / our AIs are able to safely think any thought or evaluation any plan, or at least have some kind of systematic understanding of what thoughts/plans are dangerous to think about. Or work on some more indirect way of eventually achieving something like this.)
I agree that humans sometimes fall prey to adversarial inputs, and am updating up on dangerous-thought density based on your religion argument. Any links to where I can read more?
However, this does not seem important for my (intended) original point. Namely, if you’re trying to align e.g. a brute-force-search plan maximizer or a grader-optimizer, you will fail due to high-strength optimizer’s curse forcing you to evaluate extremely scary adversarial inputs. But also this is sideways of real-world alignment, where realistic motivations may not be best specified in the form of “utility function over observation/universe histories.”
(Also, major religions are presumably memetically optimized. No deliberate choice required, on my model.)
Answered now.
This seems disanalogous to the situation discussed in the OP. If we were designing, from scratch, a system which we wanted to pursue effective altruism, we would be extremely well-advised to not include grader-optimizers which are optimizing EA funder evaluations. Especially if the grader-optimizers will eventually get smart enough to write out the funders’ pseudocode. At best, that wastes computation. At (probable) worst, the system blows up.
By contrast, we live in a world full of other people, some of whom are optimizing for status and power. Given that world, we should indeed harden our evaluation procedures, insofar as that helps us more faithfully evaluate grants and thereby achieve our goals.
Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds (I don’t mean read this book, which I haven’t either, but you could use the wiki article to familiarize yourself with the historical episodes that the book talks about.) See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven’s_Gate_(religious_group)
My counterpoint here is, we have an example of human-aligned shard-based agents (namely humans), who are nevertheless unsafe in part because they fall prey to dangerous thoughts, which they themselves generate because they inevitably have to do some amount of search/optimization (of their thoughts/plans) as they try to reach their goals, and dangerous-thought density is high enough that even that limited amount of search/optimization is enough to frequently (on a societal level) hit upon dangerous thoughts.
Wouldn’t a shard-based aligned AI have to do as much search/optimization as a human society collectively does, in order to be as competent/intelligent, in which case wouldn’t it be as likely to be unsafe in this regard? And what if it has an even higher density of dangerous thoughts, especially “out of distribution”, and/or does more search/optimization to try to find better-than-human thoughts/plans?
(My own proposal here is to try to solve metaphilosophy or understand “correct reasoning” so that we / our AIs are able to safely think any thought or evaluation any plan, or at least have some kind of systematic understanding of what thoughts/plans are dangerous to think about. Or work on some more indirect way of eventually achieving something like this.)