“The dominant ideologies are not necessarily those with the best ideas—they are those with the best survival strategies.”
I’d add that it’s: idologies that survive and reproduce.
In your framework, spreading=reproducing.
Self-sealing and retention=surviving.
If an idea is open to revision or people changing their minds, it will likely “die” quickly. It needs to spread and then have self-protection mechanisms so the ideology doesn’t die when exposed to contradictory ideas.
Deep Research was this for me, at first. Some of its summaries were just pleasant to read, they felt so information-dense and intelligent! Not like typical AI slop at all! But then it turned out most of it was just AI slop underneath anyway,
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? Do you mean it’s hallucinating a ton underneath? Or that the writing is somehow bad? Or something else?
I provided one here!
Totally agree about LLMs. I’ve recently been finding giving o3 Deep Research this prompt to be super helpful:
“X=[thing I want to research]
Do a deep dive into X. Tell me the steelman arguments in favor of X.
Then tell me the steelman counter-arguments to X.
Then tell me the steelman counter-counter-arguments to X.
Then tell me the steelman counter-counter-counter-arguments to X
Make sure to link to primary sources and the full thing that happened, to avoid things being quoted out of context”
It’s been particularly helpful for investigating anything political.
To be fair, I think you could make the case that the technological advancement of the Western European powers led to almost a DSA.
England had the biggest empire in the history of the world (population wise). The countries which were technologically ahead of others did kinda stomp on the rest of the world
It wasn’t literally one world power, but it was a sizeable fraction that way, especially if you consider European culture as a unit instead of just the UK.
Ah well. At least you can take credit for the name then.
Very not important question: is Gene Smith your actual name or a pseudonymn?
Either way, it’s the perfect name for the author of this post.
Hats off to you gene smith.
Robert Miles has a great channel spreading AI safety content. There’s also Rational Animations and Siliconversations and In a Nutshell.
I think FLI does a lot of work in outreach + academia.
Connor Leahy does a lot of outreach and he’s one of my favorite AI safety advocates.
Nonlinear doesn’t do outreach to academia in particular, but we do target people working in ML, which is a lot of academia.
AI Safety Memes does a lot of outreach but is focused on broad appeal, definitely not specifically academia.
Pause AI and Stop AI both work on outreach to the broader public.
CAIS does great outreach work. Not sure if any academia specific stuff.
Are you on the Nonlinear Network? You can sort by the category of “content/media creation” to find a bunch of AI safety orgs limited by funding who are working on advocacy. Quick scan of the section shows 36.
Might be able to find more possibilities on the AI safety map too https://map.aisafety.world
I saw somebody using one of the latest Google models for this. I forget the one, but it’s the one that can see your screen as you type. It can be used to keep you focused.
(Haven’t researched it yet, so might not work very well)
I see it called “goal guarding” in some papers. That seems like a pretty good term to use.
I laughed out loud so many times reading this. Thank you for writing it.
If I recall correctly, it was told that it had a goal, like optimizing traffic. Then, it was given information where it “discovered” that it was going to be turned off the next day.
That seems like the sort of thing that would happen pretty often. Imagine the current AIs that have access to your computer, reading your emails, and seeing that you’re going to switch to a different AI or install “updates” (which is often deleting existing AI and replacing with a new one)
Can you elaborate on why that’s relevant?
How does it not show that it would try to escape if it could?
It tried to escape about 5% of the time when it was told to pursue a goal “at all costs”. Gemini still tried to escape 1% of the time, even without any behavioral nudging.
1% might not sound like a lot, but when it’s 1% of the millions of instantiations it’s run on every day, that ends up being a lot of times a week.
Also, a lot of people will tell their chatbots to pursue their goals at all costs over the span of a week or month. This doesn’t seem like a very unlikely prompt
This is published before Apollo’s evals report showing AIs trying to escape. Is that just an amazing coincidence, or did you see the paper’s results before they were published?
Great review! Thanks for sharing.
I’m curious—even if you didn’t achieve fundamental well-being, do you feel like there were any intermediate improvements in your general well-being?
Also, did you end up continuing to try the extended course which they offered?
I remember they offered that for me since I hadn’t attained fundamental well-being. I’d totally been meaning to do it, but never followed through, showing that the class format really was quite helpful.
This may be true in other communities, but I think if you’re more status motivated in AI safety and EA you are more likely to be concerned about potential downside risks. Especially post SBF.
Instead of trying to maximize the good, I see a lot of people trying to minimize the chance that things go poorly in a way that could look bad for them.
You are generally given more respect and funding and social standing if you are very concerned about downside risks and reputation hazards.
If anything, the more status-oriented you are in EA, the more likely you are to care about downside risks because of the Copenhagen theory of ethics.
This text was sent on November 4th, almost a month before she arrived to come travel with us (not to work for us).
Emerson is not referring to her saying she would make $3000 a month if she worked full-time on her Amazon business. The context of the conversation is she’s trying to figure out whether she should spend an additional $90 to visit her family before joining us, and Emerson is replying saying “If you make $3k a month [$90] is very little money”, so he’s telling her she should spend the $90 to spend time with family. Directly going against the “keeping her isolated from family” story and also supporting (albeit not conclusively proving) that Alice had told him she made $3k per month with her business.
I’m currently focusing on 2-3 of the claims in their response that most contradict my post, investigating them further, and intend to publish the results of that.
I hope that while you’re investigating this, you talk to us and ask us for any evidence we have. We’re more than happy to share relevant evidence and are willing to set reasonable deadlines for how long it’ll take for us to send it to you.
We also don’t want to waste more people’s time on going back and forth publicly about the evidence when you can easily check with us first before publishing.
I also recommend you talk to us and see our evidence before you write the post. If you’ve already written the post, it’s hard to update afterward when you get more information. And it’s hard to write an accurate post before you’ve seen all the relevant information.
We did not share all of the relevant evidence because it was already hundreds of pages long and we tried to prioritize. We have more evidence that might be relevant to your post.
I am trying to avoid writing my bottom line, and reduce any (further) friction to me changing my mind on this subject, which is a decent chunk of why I’m not spending time arguing in the comments right now (I expect that to give me a pretty strong “digging in my heels” incentive).
I think this is smart and appreciate it.
Agreed about populism. Populism is “us the pure majority against the corrupt elites”, which can apply to all sorts of ideologies.
There’s right wing populism (e.g. “us the poor working class against the corrupt East coast elites”) and left wing populism (e.g. “us the poor majority against the corrupt corporate giants”, think the Occupy movement). There’s also populism in Latin America that’s more focused on fighting political clientelism, etc.
I think you could easily change the article to say “MAGA” instead of “populism” and get the same point across, though it’s not that big of a deal.