David Johnston

Karma: 486

David Johnston 14 Nov 2024 6:36 UTC
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in reply to: sanxiyn’s comment on: o1 is a bad idea
Mathematical reasoning might be specifically conducive to language invention because our ability to automatically verify reasoning means that we can potentially get lots of training data. The reason I expect the invented language to be “intelligible” is that it is coupled (albeit with some slack) to automatic verification.

David Johnston 14 Nov 2024 1:48 UTC
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in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: o1 is a bad idea
There’s a regularization problem to solve for 3.9 and 4, and it’s not obvious to me that glee will be enough to solve it (3.9 = “unintelligible CoT”).

I’m not sure how o1 works in detail, but for example, backtracking (which o1 seems to use) makes heavy use of the pretrained distribution to decide on best next moves. So, at the very least, it’s not easy to do away with the native understanding of language. While it’s true that there is some amount of data that will enable large divergences from the pretrained distribution—and I could imagine mathematical proof generation eventually reaching this point, for example—more ambitious goals inherently come with less data, and it’s not obvious to me that there will be enough data in alignment-critical applications to cause such a large divergence.

There’s an alternative version of language invention where the model invents a better language for (e.g.) maths then uses that for more ambitious projects, but that language is probably quite intelligible!

David Johnston 22 Oct 2024 1:46 UTC
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in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: A brief theory of why we think things are good or bad
For what it’s worth, one idea I had as a result of our discussion was this:
- We form lots of beliefs as a result of motivated reasoning
- These beliefs are amenable to revision due to evidence, reason or (maybe) social pressure
- Those beliefs that are largely resilient to these challenges are “moral foundations”
So philosophers like “pain is bad” as a moral foundation because we want to believe it + it is hard to challenge with evidence or reason. Laypeople probably have lots of foundational moral beliefs that don’t stand up as well to evidence or reason, but (perhaps) are equally attributable to motivated reasoning.

Social pressure is a bit iffy to include because I think lots of people relate to beliefs that they adopted because of social pressure as moral foundations, and believing something because you’re under pressure to do so is an instance of motivated reasoning.

I don’t think this is a response to your objections, but I’m leaving it here in case it interests you.

David Johnston 22 Oct 2024 1:09 UTC
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in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: A brief theory of why we think things are good or bad
I can explain why I believe bachelors are unmarried: I learned that this is what the word bachelor means, I learned this because it is what bachelor means, and the fact that there’s a word “bachelor” that means “unmarried man” is contingent on some unimportant accidents in the evolution of language. A) it is certainly not the result of an axiomatic game and B) if moral beliefs were also contingent on accidents in the evolution of language (I think most are not), that would have profound implications for metaethics.

Motivated belief can explain non-purely-selfish beliefs. I might believe pain is bad because I am motivated to believe it, but the belief still concerns other people. This is even more true when we go about constructing higher order beliefs and trying to enforce consistency among beliefs. Undesirable moral beliefs could be a mark against this theory, but you need more than not-purely-selfish moral beliefs.

I’m going to bow out at this point because I think we’re getting stuck covering the same ground.

David Johnston 21 Oct 2024 21:49 UTC
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in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: A brief theory of why we think things are good or bad
Thanks for your continued engagement.

I’m interested in explaining foundational moral beliefs like suffering is bad, not beliefs like “animals do/don’t suffer”, which is about badness only because we accept the foundational assumption that suffering is bad. Is that clear in the updated text?

Now, I don’t think these beliefs come from playing axiomatic games like “define good as that which increases welfare”. There are many lines of evidence for this. First: “define bad as that which increases suffering” is not equally as plausible as “define good as that which increases suffering”. We have pre-existing beliefs about this.

Second: you talk about philosophers analysing welfare. However, the method that philosophers use to do this usually involves analysing a bunch of fundamental moral assumptions. For example, from the Stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy:

Correspondingly, no amount of empirical investigation seems by itself, without some moral assumption(s) in play, sufficient to settle a moral question https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/

I am suggesting that the source of these fundamental moral assumptions may not be mysterious—we have a known ability to form beliefs based on what we want, and fundamental moral beliefs often align with what we want.

David Johnston 21 Oct 2024 3:47 UTC
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in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: A brief theory of why we think things are good or bad
I think precisely defining “good” and “bad” is a bit beside the point—it’s a theory about how people come to believe things are good and bad, and we’re perfectly capable of having vague beliefs about goodness and badness. That said, the theory is lacking a precise account of what kind of beliefs it is meant to explain.

The LLM section isn’t meant as support for the theory, but speculation about what it would say about the status of “experiences” that language models can have. Compared to my pre-existing notions, the theory seems quite willing to accommodate LLMs having good and bad experiences on par with those that people have.

David Johnston 21 Oct 2024 0:04 UTC
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in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: A brief theory of why we think things are good or bad
I have a pedantic and a non-pedantic answer to this. Pedantic: you say X is “usually considered good” if it increases welfare. Perhaps you mean to imply that if X is usually considered good then it is good. In this case, I refer you to the rest of the paragraph you quote.

Non-pedantic: yes, it’s true that once you accept some fundamental assumptions about goodness and badness you can go about theorising and looking for evidence. I’m suggesting that motivated reasoning is the mechanism that makes those fundamental assumptions believable.

I added a paragraph mentioning this, because I think your reaction is probably common.

David Johnston 20 Oct 2024 2:25 UTC
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in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: The Hidden Complexity of Wishes
Here’s a basic model of policy collapse: suppose there exist pathological policies of low prior probability (/high algorithmic complexity) such that they play the training game when it is strategically wise to do so, and when they get a good opportunity they defect in order to pursue some unknown aim.

Because they play the training game, a wide variety of training objectives will collapse to one of these policies if the system in training starts exploring policies of sufficiently high algorithmic complexity. So, according to this crude model, there’s a complexity bound: stay under it and you’re fine, go over it and you get pathological behaviour. Roughly, whatever desired behaviour requires the most algorithmically complex policy is the one that is most pertinent for assessing policy collapse risk (because that’s the one that contributes most of the algorithmic complexity, and so it give your first order estimate of whether or not you’re crossing the collapse threshold). So, which desired behaviour requires the most complex policy: is it, for example, respecting commonsense moral constraints, or is it inventing molecular nanotechnology?

Tangentially, the policy collapse theory does not predict outcomes that look anything like malicious compliance. It predicts that, if you’re in a position of power over the AI system, your mother is saved exactly as you want her to be. If you are not in such a position then your mother is not saved at all and you get a nanobot war instead or something. That is, if you do run afoul of policy collapse, it doesn’t matter if you want your system to pursue simple or complex goals, you’re up shit creek either way.

David Johnston 19 Oct 2024 12:11 UTC
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in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Hidden Complexity of Wishes
Algorithmic complexity is precisely analogous to difficulty-of-learning-to-predict, so saying “it’s not about learning to predict, it’s about algorithmic complexity” doesn’t make sense. One read of the original is: learning to respect common sense moral side constraints is tricky^[1], but AI systems will learn how to do it in the end. I’d be happy to call this read correct, and is consistent with the observation that today’s AI systems do respect common sense moral side constraints given straightforward requests, and that it took a few years to figure out how to do it. That read doesn’t really jive with your commentary.

Your commentary seems to situate this post within a larger argument: teaching a system to “act” is different to teaching it to “predict” because in the former case a sufficiently capable learner’s behaviour can collapse to a pathological policy, whereas teaching a capable learner to predict does not risk such collapse. Thus “prediction” is distinguished from “algorithmic complexity”. Furthermore, commonsense moral side constraints are complex enough to risk such collapse when we train an “actor” but not a “predictor”. This seems confused.

First, all we need to turn a language model prediction into an action is a means of turning text into action, and we have many such means. So the distinction between text predictor and actor is suspect. We could consider an alternative knows/cares distinction: does a system act properly when properly incentivised (“knows”) vs does it act properly when presented with whatever context we are practically able to give it (“”“cares”””)? Language models usually act properly given simple prompts, so in this sense they “care”. So rejecting evidence from language models does not seem well justified.

Second, there’s no need to claim that commonsense moral side constraints in particular are so hard that trying to develop AI systems that respect them leads to policy collapse. It need only be the case that one of the things we try to teach them to do leads to policy collapse. Teaching values is not particularly notable among all the things we might want AI systems to do; it certainly does not seem to be among the hardest. Focussing on values makes the argument unnecessarily weak.

Third, algorithmic complexity is measured with respect to a prior. The post invokes (but does not justify) an “English speaking evil genie” prior. I don’t think anyone thinks this is a serious prior for reasoning about advanced AI system behaviour. But the post is (according to your commentary, if not the post itself) making a quantitative point—values are sufficiently complex to induce policy collapse—but it’s measuring this quantity using a nonsense prior. If the quantitative argument was indeed the original point, it is mystifying why a nonsense prior was chosen to make it, and also why no effort was made to justify the prior.
1. ↩︎
  the text proposes full value alignment as a solution to the commonsense side constraints problem, but this turned out to be stronger than necessary.

David Johnston 9 Jun 2024 0:30 UTC
2 points
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on: Access to powerful AI might make computer security radically easier
When do you think is the right time to work in these issues? Monitoring, trust displacement and fine grained permission management all look liable to raise issues that weren’t anticipated and haven’t already been solved, because they’re not the way things have been done historically. My gut sense is that GPT4 performance is much lower when you’re asking it to do novel things. Maybe it’s also possible to make substantial gains with engineering and experimentation, but you’ll need a certain level of performance in order to experiment.

Some wild guesses: maybe the right time to start work is one generation before it’s feasible, and that might mean start now for fine grained permissions, gpt 4.5 for monitoring, gpt 5 for trust displacement.

David Johnston 29 Feb 2024 7:06 UTC
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in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Counting arguments provide no evidence for AI doom
The AI system builders’ time horizon seems to be a reasonable starting point

David Johnston 29 Feb 2024 6:59 UTC
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on: Counting arguments provide no evidence for AI doom
Nora and/or Quentin: you talk a lot about inductive biases of neural nets ruling scheming out, but I have a vague sense that scheming ought to happen in some circumstances—perhaps rather contrived, but not so contrived as to be deliberately inducing the ulterior motive. Do you expect this to be impossible? Can you propose a set of conditions you think sufficient to rule out scheming?

David Johnston 29 Feb 2024 6:49 UTC
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in reply to: evhub’s comment on: Counting arguments provide no evidence for AI doom
What in your view is the fundamental difference between world models and goals such that the former generalise well and the latter generalise poorly?

One can easily construct a model with a free parameter X and training data such that many choices of X will match the training data but results will diverge in situations not represented in the training data (for example, the model is a physical simulation and X tracks the state of some region in the simulation that will affect the learner’s environment later, but hasn’t done so during training). The simplest x_s could easily be wrong. We can even moralise the story: the model regards its job as predicting the output under x_s and if the world happens to operate according to some other x’ then the model doesn’t care. However it’s still going to be ineffective in the future where the value of X matters.

David Johnston 8 Feb 2024 10:56 UTC
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in reply to: Roko’s comment on: A Back-Of-The-Envelope Calculation On How Unlikely The Circumstantial Evidence Around Covid-19 Is
Another comment on timing updates: if you’re making a timing update for zoonosis vs DEFUSE, and you’re considering a long timing window w_z for zoonosis, then your prior for a DEFUSE leak needs to be adjusted for the short window w_d in which this work could conceivably cause a leak, so you end up with something like p(defuse_pandemic)/p(zoo_pandemic)= rr_d w_d/w_z, where rr_d is the riskiness of DEFUSE vs zoonosis per unit time. Then you make the “timing update” p(now |defuse_pandemic)/p(now |zoo_pandemic) = w_z/w_d and you’re just left with rr_d.

David Johnston 8 Feb 2024 10:24 UTC
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in reply to: Roko’s comment on: A Back-Of-The-Envelope Calculation On How Unlikely The Circumstantial Evidence Around Covid-19 Is
Sorry, I edited (was hoping to get in before you read it)

David Johnston 8 Feb 2024 10:06 UTC
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in reply to: Roko’s comment on: A Back-Of-The-Envelope Calculation On How Unlikely The Circumstantial Evidence Around Covid-19 Is
If your theory is: there is a lab leak from WIV while working on defuse derived work then I’ll buy that you can assign a high probability to time & place … but your prior will be waaaaaay below the prior on “lab leak, nonspecific” (which is how I was originally reading your piece).

David Johnston 8 Feb 2024 4:23 UTC
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in reply to: Roko’s comment on: A Back-Of-The-Envelope Calculation On How Unlikely The Circumstantial Evidence Around Covid-19 Is
You really think in 60% of cases where country A lifts a ban on funding gain of function research a pandemic starts in country B within 2 years? Same question for “warning published in Nature”.

David Johnston 1 Jan 2024 23:57 UTC
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in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: A case for AI alignment being difficult
If people now don’t have strong views about exactly what they want the world to look like in 1000 years but people in 1000 years do have strong views then I think we should defer to future people to evaluate the “human utility” of future states. You seem to be suggesting that we should take the views of people today, although I might be misunderstanding.

Edit: or maybe you’re saying that the AGI trajectory will be ~random from the point of view of the human trajectory due to a different ontology. Maybe, but different ontology → different conclusions is less obvious to me than different data → different conclusions. If there’s almost no mutual information between the different data then the conclusions have to be different, but sometimes you could come to the same conclusions under different ontologies w/data from the same process.

David Johnston 1 Jan 2024 23:46 UTC
3 points
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on: A case for AI alignment being difficult

Given this assumption, the human utility function(s) either do or don’t significantly depend on human evolutionary history. I’m just going to assume they do for now.

There seems to be a missing possibility here that I take fairly seriously, which is that human values depend on (collective) life history. That is: human values are substantially determined by collective life history, and rather than converging to some attractor this is a path dependent process. Maybe you can even trace the path taken back to evolutionary history, but it’s substantially mediated by life history.

Under this view, the utility of the future wrt human values depends substantially on whether, in the future, people learn to be very sensitive to outcome differences. But “people are sensitive to outcome differences and happy with the outcome” does not seem better to me than “people are insensitive to outcome differences and happy with the outcome” (this is a first impression; I could be persuaded otherwise), even though it’s higher utility, whereas “people are unhappy with the outcome” does seem worse than “people are happy with the outcome”.

Under this view, I don’t think this follows:

there is some dependence of human values on human evolutionary history, so that a default unaligned AGI would not converge to the same values

My reasoning is that a “default AGI” will have its values contingent on a process which overlaps with the collective life history that determines human values. This is a different situation to values directly determined by evolutionary history, where the process that determines human values is temporally distant and therefore perhaps more-or-less random from the point of view of the AGI. So there’s a compelling reason to believe in value differences in the “evolution history directly determines values” case that’s absent in the “life history determines values” case.

Different values are still totally plausible, of course—I’m objecting to the view that we know they’ll be different.

(Maybe you think this is all an example of humans not really having values, but that doesn’t seem right to me).

David Johnston 26 Nov 2023 0:23 UTC
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in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: Ability to solve long-horizon tasks correlates with wanting things in the behaviorist sense

You’re changing the topic to “can you do X without wanting Y?”, when the original question was “can you do X without wanting anything at all?”.

A system that can, under normal circumstances, explain how to solve a problem doesn’t necessarily solve the problem if it gets in the way of explaining the solution. The notion of wanting that Nate proposes is “solving problems in order to achieve the objective”, and this need not apply to the system that explains solutions. In short: yes.