Ben Goldhaber

• Ben GoldhaberAug 12, 2024, 3:16 PM

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Zac Hatfield-Dodds’s comment on: Prov­ably Safe AI: Wor­ld­view and Projects

  • (8) won’t be attempted, or will fail at some combination of design, manufacture, or just-being-pickable. This is a great proposal and a beautifully compact crux for the overall approach.

  I agree with you that this feels like a ‘compact crux’ for many parts of the agenda. I’d like to take your bet, let me reflect if there’s any additional operationalizations or conditioning.

  However, I believe that the path there is to extend and complement current techniques, including empirical and experimental approaches alongside formal verification—whatever actually works in practice.

  FWIW in Towards Guaranteed Safe AI I we endorse this: “Moreover, while we have argued for the need for verifiable quantitative safety guarantees, it is important to note that GS AI may not be the only route to achieving such guarantees. An alternative approach might be to extract interpretable
  policies from black-box algorithms via automated mechanistic interpretability… it is ultimately an empirical question whether it is easier to create interpretable world models or interpretable policies in a given domain of operation.”

• Ben GoldhaberJul 13, 2024, 12:13 AM

  8 points

  2

  in reply to: Ryan Kidd’s comment on: Ryan Kidd’s Shortform

  I agree with this, I’d like to see AI Safety scale with new projects. A few ideas I’ve been mulling:
  
  - A ‘festival week’ bringing entrepreneur types and AI safety types together to cowork from the same place, along with a few talks and lot of mixers.
  - running an incubator/​accelerator program at the tail end of a funding round, with fiscal sponsorship and some amount of operational support.
  - more targeted recruitment for specific projects to advance important parts of a research agenda.

  It’s often unclear to me whether new projects should actually be new organizations; making it easier to spin up new projects, that can then either join existing orgs or grow into orgs themselves, seems like a promising direction.

• Ben GoldhaberApr 27, 2023, 2:17 PM

  7 points

  1

  on: Davi­dad’s Bold Plan for Align­ment: An In-Depth Explanation

  First off thank you for writing this, great explanation.

  • Do you anticipate acceleration risks from developing the formal models through an open, multilateral process? Presumably others could use the models to train and advance the capabilities of their own RL agents. Or is the expectation that regulation would accompany this such that only the consortium could use the world model?

  • Would the simulations be exclusively for ‘hard science’ domains—ex. chemistry, biology—or would simulations of human behavior, economics, and politics also be needed? My expectation is that it would need the latter, but I imagine simulating hundreds of millions of intelligent agents would dramatically (prohibitively?) increase the complexity and computational costs.

• Ben GoldhaberJan 8, 2023, 6:11 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Pro­tec­tion­ism will Slow the De­ploy­ment of AI

  This seems like an important crux to me, because I don’t think greatly slowing AI in the US would require new federal laws. I think many of the actions I listed could be taken by government agencies who over-interpret their existing mandates given the right political and social climate. For instance, the eviction moratorium during COVID, obviously should have required congressional action, but was done by fiat through an over-interpretation of authority by an executive branch agency.

  What they do or do not do seems mostly dictated by that socio-political climate, and by the courts, which means less veto points for industry.

• Ben GoldhaberJan 8, 2023, 3:00 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Pro­tec­tion­ism will Slow the De­ploy­ment of AI

  I agree that competition with China is a plausible reason regulation won’t happen; that will certainly be one of the arguments advanced by industry and NatSec as to why it should not be throttled. However, I’m not sure, and currently don’t think it will, be stronger than the protectionist impulses,. Possibly it will exacerbate the “centralization” of AI dynamic that I listed in the ‘licensing’ bullet point, where large existing players receive money and de-facto license to operate in certain areas and then avoid others (as memeticimagery points out). So for instance we see more military style research, and GooAmBookSoft tacitly agree to not deploy AI that would replace lawyers.

  To your point on big tech’s political influence; they have, in some absolute sense, a lot of political power, but relatively they are much weaker in political influence than peer industries. I think they’ve benefitted a lot from the R-D stalemate in DC; I’m positing that this will go around/​through this stalemate, and I don’t think they currently have the softpower to stop that.

• Ben GoldhaberFeb 6, 2021, 2:04 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: What price would you pay for the RadVac Vac­cine and why?

  hah yes—seeing that great post from johnwentsworth inspired me to review my own thinking on RadVac. Ultimately I placed a lower estimate on RadVac being effective—or at least effective enough to get me to change my quarantine behavior—such that the price wasn’t worth it, but I think I get a rationality demerit for not investing more in the collaborative model building (and collaborative purchasing) part of the process.

• Ben GoldhaberFeb 4, 2021, 5:42 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: eillasti’s comment on: What price would you pay for the RadVac Vac­cine and why?

  I’m sorry I didn’t see this response until now—thank you for the detailed answer!

• Ben GoldhaberOct 1, 2020, 6:32 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Player vs. Char­ac­ter: A Two-Level Model of Ethics

  I’m guessing your concern feels similar to ones you’ve articulated in the past around… “heart”/​”grounded” rationality, or a concern about “disabling pieces of the epistemic immune system”.

  I’m curious if 8 mo’s later you feel you can better speak to what you see as the crucial misunderstanding?

• Ben GoldhaberAug 18, 2020, 10:43 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Thiel on Progress and Stagnation

  Out of curiosity what’s one of your more substantive disagreements with Thiel?

• Ben GoldhaberAug 4, 2020, 9:27 PM

  1 point

  on: RT-LAMP is the right way to scale di­ag­nos­tic test­ing for the coronavirus

  I’d be quite interested in reading that guide!

• Ben GoldhaberAug 1, 2020, 2:37 AM

  2 points

  on: Com­pe­ti­tion: Am­plify Ro­hin’s Pre­dic­tion on AGI re­searchers & Safety Concerns

  Forecast − 25 mins

  • I thought it was more likely that in the short run there could be a preference cascade among top AGI researchers, and as others have mentioned due to the operationalization of top AGI researchers might be true already.

  • If this doesn’t become a majority concern by 2050, I expect it will be because of another AI Winter, and I tried to have my distribution reflect that (a little hamfistedly).

• Ben GoldhaberJul 29, 2020, 3:11 AM

  3 points

  on: Reread­ing At­las Shrugged

  Thanks for posting this. I recently reread the Fountainhead, which I similarly enjoyed and got more out of than did my teenage self—it was like a narrative, emotional portrayal of the ideals in Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time to Build essay.

  I interpreted your section on The Conflict as the choice between voice and exit.

• Ben GoldhaberJul 18, 2020, 12:07 AM

  10 points

  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Solv­ing Math Prob­lems by Relay

  The larger scientific question was related to Factored Cognition, and getting a sense of the difficulty of solving problems through this type of “collaborative crowdsourcing”. The hope was running this experiment would lead to insights that could then inform the direction of future experiments, in the way that you might fingertip feel your way around an unknown space to get a handle on where to go next. For example if it turned out to be easy for groups to execute this type of problem solving, we might push ahead with competitions between teams to develop the best strategies for context-free problem solving.

  In that regard it didn’t turn out to be particularly informative, because it wasn’t easy for the groups to solve the math problems, and it’s unclear if that’s because of the problems selected, the team compositions, the software, etc. So re: the larger scientific question I don’t think there’s much to conclude.

  But personally I felt that by watching relay participants I gained a lot of UX intuitions around what type of software design and strategy design is necessary for factored strategies—what I broadly think of as problem solving strategies that rely upon decomposition—to work. Two that immediately come to mind:

  • Create software design patterns that allow the user to hide/​reveal information in intuitive ways. It was difficult, when thrown into a huge problem doc with little context, to know where to focus. I wanted a way for the previous user to only show me the info I needed. For example, the way workflow-y /​ Roam Research bullet points allow you to hide unneeded details, and how if you click on a bullet point you’re brought into an entirely new context.

  • When designing strategies try focusing on the return signature: When coming up with new strategies for solving relay problems, at first it was entirely free form. I as a user would jump in, try pushing the problem as far as I could, and leave haphazard notes in the doc. Over time we developed more complex shorthand and shared strategies for solving a problem. One heuristic I now use when developing strategies for problem solving that use decomposition is to prioritizing thinking about what each sub part of the strategy will return to the top caller. That clarifies the interface, simplifies what the person working on the sub strategy needs to do, and promotes composability.

  These ideas are helpful because—I posit—we’re faced with Relay Game like problems all the time. When I work on a project, leave it for a week, and come back, I think I’m engaging in a relay between past Ben, present Ben, and future Ben. Some of these ideas informed my design of templates for collaborative group forecasting.

• Ben GoldhaberJul 17, 2020, 11:08 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: Solv­ing Math Prob­lems by Relay

  Thanks, rewrote and tried to clarify. In essence the researchers were testing transmission of “strategies” for using a tool, where an individual was limited in what they could transmit to the next user, akin to this relay experiment.

  In fact they found that trying to convey causal theories could undermine the next person’s performance; they speculate that it reduced experimentation prematurely.

• Ben GoldhaberJul 17, 2020, 5:52 PM

  8 points

  in reply to: Pongo’s comment on: bgold’s Shortform

  … my god…

• Ben GoldhaberJul 4, 2020, 3:36 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: ESRogs’s Shortform

  Thanks for posting this. Why did you invest in those three startups in particular? Was it the market, the founders, personal connections? And was it a systematic search for startups to invest in, or more of an “opportunity-arose” situation?

• Ben GoldhaberMay 24, 2020, 11:22 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: What are the best tools for record­ing pre­dic­tions?

  I know Ozzie has been thinking about this, because we were chatting about how to use an Alfred workflow to post to it. Which I think would be great!

• Ben Goldhaber 24 May 2020 23:00 UTC

  4 points

  on: What are the best tools for record­ing pre­dic­tions?

  I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the forecasting space playing w/​ different tools, and I never found one that I could reliably use for personal prediction tracking.

  Ultimately for me it comes down to:

  1.) Friction: the predictions I’m most interested in tracking are “5-second-level” predictions—“do I think this person is right”, “is the fact that I have a cough and am tired a sign that I’m getting sick” etc. - and I need to be able to jot that down quickly.

  2.) “Routine”: There are certain sites that are toothbrush sites, aka I use them everyday. I’m much more likely to adopt a digital habit if I can use one of those sites to fulfill the function.

  So my current workflow for private predictions is to use a textexpander snippet w/​ Roam.

  - [[Predictions]]
  - {percentage}%
  - [[operationalized]]:
  - [[{date}]]
  - {{[[TODO]]}} [[outcome]]:

  
  It doesn’t have graphs, but I can get a pretty good sense of how calibrated I am, and if I want I could quickly export the markdown and evaluate it.

  Of course I want to mention foretold.io as another good site—if you want to distributions that’s definitely the way to go.

• Ben Goldhaber 14 Mar 2020 19:40 UTC

  13 points

  on: How likely is it that US states or cities will pre­vent travel across their bor­ders?

  The commerce clause gives the federal government broad powers to regulate interstate commerce, and in particular the the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services can exercise it to institute quarantine. https://​​cdc.gov/​​quarantine/​​aboutlawsregulationsquarantineisolation.html

• Ben Goldhaber 1 Mar 2020 20:53 UTC

  3 points

  on: bgold’s Shortform

  Depression as a concept doesn’t make sense to me. Why on earth would it be fitness enhancing to have a state of withdrawal, retreat, collapse where a lack of energy prevents you from trying new things? I’ve brainstormed a number of explanations:

  • • depression as chemical imbalance: a hardware level failure has occurred, maybe randomly maybe because of an “overload” of sensation

    • depression as signaling: withdrawal and retreat from the world indicates a credible signal that I need help

    • depression as retreat: the environment has become dangerous and bad and I should withdraw from it until it changes.

  I’m partial to the explanation offered by the Predictive Processing Model, that depression is an extreme form of low confidence. As SSC write:

  imagine the world’s most unsuccessful entrepreneur. Every company they make flounders and dies. Every stock they pick crashes the next day. Their vacations always get rained-out, their dates always end up with the other person leaving halfway through and sticking them with the bill.

  What if your job is advising this guy? If they’re thinking of starting a new company, your advice is “Be really careful – you should know it’ll probably go badly”.

  if sadness were a way of saying “Things are going pretty badly, maybe be less confidence and don’t start any new projects”, that would be useful...

  Depression isn’t normal sadness. But if normal sadness lowers neural confidence a little, maybe depression is the pathological result of biological processes that lower neural confidence.

  But I still don’t understand why the behaviors we often see with depression—isolation, lack of energy—are ‘longterm adaptive’. If a particular policy isn’t working, I’d expect to see more energy going into experimentation.

  [TK. Unfinished because I accidentally clicked submit and haven’t finished editing the full comment]

  What links here?

  • Blog Post Day Retrospective by Daniel Kokotajlo (1 Mar 2020 11:32 UTC; 24 points)