AI x-risk is high, which makes cryonics less attractive (because cryonics doesn’t protect you from AI takeover-mediated human extinction). But on the flip side, timelines are short, which makes cryonics more attractive (because one of the major risks of cryonics is society persisting stably enough to keep you preserved until revival is possible, and near term AGI means that that period of time is short).
Cryonics is more likely to work, given a positive AI trajectory, and less likely to work given a negative AI trajectory.
I agree that it seems less likely to work, overall, than it seemed to me a few years ago.
Eli Tyre
Karma: 7,457
yeahh i’m afraid I have too many other obligations right now to give a elaboration that does it justice.
Fair enough!
otoh i’m in the Bay and we should definitely catch up sometime!
Sounds good.
Frankly, it feels more rooted in savannah-brained tribalism & human interest than a evenkeeled analysis of what factors are actually important, neglected and tractable.
Um, I’m not attempting to do cause prioritization or action-planning in the above comment. More like sense-making. Before I move on to the question of what should we do, I want to have an accurate model of the social dynamics in the space.
(That said, it doesn’t seem a foregone conclusion that there are actionable things to do, that will come out of this analysis. If the above story is true, I should make some kind of update about the strategies that EAs adopted with regards to OpenAI in the late 2010s. Insofar as they were mistakes, I don’t want to repeat them.)It might turn out to be right that the above story is “naive /misleading and ultimately maybe unhelpful”. I’m sure not an expert at understanding these dynamics. But just saying that it’s naive or that it seems rooted in tribalism doesn’t help me or others get a better model.
If it’s misleading, how is it misleading? (And is misleading different than “false”? Are you like “yeah this is technically correct, but it neglects key details”?)Admittedly, you did label it as a tl;dr, and I did prompt you to elaborate on a react. So maybe it’s unfair of me to request even further elaboration.
@Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel, you put a soldier mindset react on this (and also my earlier, similar, comment this week).
What makes you think so?
Definitely this model posits that adversariality, but I don’t think that I’m invested in “my side” of the argument winning here, FWTIW. This currently seems like the most plausible high level summary of the situation, given my level of context.
Is there a version of this comment that would regard as better?
I don’t dispute that he never had any genuine concern. I guess that he probably did have genuine concern (though not necessarily that that was his main motivation for founding OpenAI).
In a private slack someone extended credit to Sam Altman for putting EAs on the on the OpenAI board originally, especially that this turned out to be pretty risky / costly for him.
I responded:
It seems to me that there were AI safety people on the board at all is fully explainable by strategic moves from an earlier phase of the game.
Namely, OpenAI traded a boardseat for OpenPhil grant money, and more importantly, OpenPhil endorsement, which translated into talent sourcing and effectively defused what might have been vocal denouncement from one of the major intellectually influential hubs of the world.
No one knows how counterfactual history might have developed, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that there is an external world in which the EA culture successfully created a narrative that groups trying to build AGI were bad and defecting.
He’s the master at this game and not me, but I would bet at even odds that Sam was actively tracking EA as a potential social threat that could dampen OpenAI’s narrative flywheel.
I don’t know that OpenPhil’s grant alone was sufficient to switch from the “EAs vocally decry OpenAI as making the world worse” equilibrium to a “largely (but not universally) thinking that OpenAI is bad in private, but mostly staying silent in public + going to work at OpenAI” equilibrium. But I think it was a major component. OpenPhil’s cooperation bought moral legitimacy for OpenAI amongst EAs.
In retrospect, it looks like OpenAI successfully bought out the EAs through OpenPhil, to a lesser extent through people like Paul.
And Ilya in particular was a founder and one of the core technical leads. It makes sense for him to be a board member, and my understanding (someone correct me) is that he grew to think that safety was more important over time, rather than starting out as an “AI safety person”.
And even so, the rumor is that the thing that triggered the Coup is that Sam maneuvered to get Helen removed. I highly doubt that Sam planned for a situation where he was removed as CEO, and then did some crazy jujitsu move with the whole company where actually he ends up firing the board instead. But if you just zoom out and look at what actually played out, he clearly came out ahead, with control consolidated. Which is the outcome that he was maybe steering towards all along?
So my first pass summary of the situation is that when OpenAI was small and of only medium fame and social power, Sam maneuvered to get the cooperation of EAs, because that defused a major narrative threat, and bought the company moral legitimacy (when that legitimacy was more uncertain). Then after ChatGPT and GPT-4, when OpenAI is rich and famous and has more narrative power than the EAs, Sam moves to remove the people that he made those prestige-trades with in the earlier phase, since he no longer needs their support, and doesn’t have any reason for them to have power over the now-force-to-be-reckoned-with company.
Granted, I’m far from all of this and don’t have confidence about any of these political games. But it seems wrong to me to give Sam points for putting “AI safety people” on the board.
But it is our mistake that we didn’t stand firmly against drugs, didn’t pay more attention to the dangers of self-experimenting, and didn’t kick out Ziz sooner.
These don’t seem like very relevant or very actionable takeways.
we didn’t stand firmly against drugs—Maybe this would have been a good move generally, but it wouldn’t have helped with this situation at all. Ziz reports that they don’t take psychedelics, and I believe that extends to her compatriots, as well.
didn’t pay more attention to the dangers of self-experimenting—What does this mean concretely? I think plenty of people did “pay attention” to the dangers of self experimenting. But “paying attention” doesn’t automatically address those dangers.
What specific actions would you recommend by which people? Eliezer telling people not to self experiment? CFAR telling people not to self experiment? A blanket ban on “self experimentation” is clearly too broad (“just don’t ever try anything that seems like maybe a good idea to you on first principles”). Some more specific guidelines might have helped, but we need to actually delineate the specific principles.didn’t kick out Ziz sooner—When specifically is the point when Ziz should have been kicked out of the community? With the benefit of hindsight bias, we can look back and wish we had separated sooner, but that was not nearly as clear ex ante.
What should have been the trigger? When she started wearing black robes? When she started calling herself Ziz? When she started writing up her own homegrown theories of psychology? Weird clothes, weird names, and weird beliefs are part and parcel of the rationalist milieu.
As it is, she was banned from the alumni reunion at which she staged the failed protest (she bought tickets in advance, CFAR told her that she was uninvited, and returned her money). Before that, I think that several community leaders had grey-listed her as someone not to invite to events. Should something else have happened, in addition to that? Should she have been banned from public events or private group houses entirely? On what basis? On who’s authority?
[For some of my work for Palisade]
Does anyone know of even very simple examples of AIs exhibiting instrumentally convergent resource aquisition?
Something like “an AI system in a video game learns to seek out the power ups, because that helps it win.” (Even better would be a version in which, you can give the agent one of several distinct-video game goals, but regardless of the goal, it goes and gets the powerups first).
It needs to be an example where the instrumental resource is not strictly required for succeeding at the task, while still being extremely helpful.
Is this taken to be a counterpoint to my story above? I’m not sure exactly how it’s related.
My model is that Sam Altman regarded the EA world as a memetic threat, early on, and took actions to defuse that threat by paying lip service / taking openphil money / hiring prominent AI safety people for AI safety teams.
Like, possibly the EAs could have crea ed a widespread vibe that building AGI is a cartoon evil thing to do, sort of the way many people think of working for a tobacco company or an oil company.
Then, after ChatGPT, OpenAI was a much bigger fish than the EAs or the rationalists, and he began taking moves to extricate himself from them.
My read:
“Zizian ideology” is a cross between rationalist ideas (the historical importance of AI, a warped version timeless decision theory, that more is possible with regards to mental tech) and radical leftist/anarchist ideas (the state and broader society are basically evil oppressive systems, strategic violence is morally justified, veganism), plus some homegrown ideas (all the hemisphere stuff, the undead types, etc).
That mix of ideas is compelling primarily to people who are already deeply invested in both rationality ideas and leftist / social justice ideas, an demographic which is predominantly trans women.
Further, I guess there’s a lot of bigoted / oppressive societal dynamics that are more evident to trans people than they are to, say, me, because they have more direct experience with those dynamics. If you personally feel marginalized and oppressed by society, it’s an easier sell that society is broadly an oppressive system.
Plus very straightforward social network effects, where I think many trans rationalists tend to hang out with other trans rationalist (for normal “people like to hang out to people they relate to” reasons), and so this group initially formed from that social sub-network.
(I endorse personal call outs like this one.)
Why? Forecasting the future is hard, and I expect surprises that deviate from my model of how things will go. But o1 and o3, seem like pretty blatant evidence that reduced my uncertainty a lot. On pretty simple heuristics, it looks like earth now knows how to make a science and engineering superintelligence: by scaling reasoning modes in a self-play-ish regime.
I would take a bet with you about what we expect to see in the next 5 years. But more than that, what kind of epistemology do you think I should be doing that I’m not?
Have the others you listed produced insights on that level? What did you observe that leads you to call them geniuses, “by any reasonable standard”?
It might help if you spelled it as LSuser. (I think you can change that in the settings).
In that sense, for many such people, short timelines actually are totally vibes based.
I dispute this characterization. It’s normal and appropriate for people’s views to update in response to the arguments produced by others.
Sure, sometimes people most parrot other people’s views, without either developing them independently or even doing evaluatory checks to see if those views seem correct. But most of the time, I think people are doing those checks?
Speaking for myself, most of my views on timelines are downstream of ideas that I didn’t generate myself. But I did think about those ideas, and evaluate if they seemed true.
I find your commitment to the basics of rational epistemology inspiring.
Keep it up and let me know if you could use support.
I currently believe it’s el-es-user, as in LSuser. Is that right?
Can you operationalize the standard you’re using for “genius” here? Do you mean “IQ > 150″?
I think that Octavia is confused / mistaken about a number of points here, such that her testimony seems likely to be misleading to people without much context.
[I could find citations for many of my claims here, but I’m going to write and post this fast, mostly without the links, for the time being. I am largely going off of my memory of blog post comments that I read months to years ago, and my memory is fallible. I’ll try to accurately represent my epistemic status inline. If anyone knows the links that I’m referring to, feel free to put them in the comments. Same if you think that I’m misremembering something.
To Octavia, if I’ve gotten any of the following wrong, I encourage you to correct it. I apologize for any rudeness. I’m speaking somewhat more bluntly here than I often would, because it seems more important than usual to help people get clear models of the situation, urgently.]Octavia is not a Zizian in the relevant sense
Most importantly, I think she is mistaken about whether or not she is “a Zizian”.
There are at least types of people that the term “Zizian” might refer to:Someone who has read Sinceriously.fyi and is generally sympathetic to Ziz’s philosophy.
A member of a relatively tightly-coordinated anarchist conspiracy, that has (allegedly) planned and carried out a series of violent crimes.
Octavia is a Zizian in the first sense, but is not (to my knowledge) a Zizian in the second sense. In fact, she seems unaware or disbelieving that a network of Zizians of the second sense exists. She appears to think that there are only ‘people who have benefited from reading Ziz’s blog’, and no coordinated criminal network to speak of. [1]
Because she claims to be a Zizian, one might reasonably expect that she’s an authority on what Zizians believe or do. Insofar as people are interested in what the members of the criminal conspiracy believe, I currently think that she is not much of an authority. (Though again, I don’t know what kind of contact she’s had with who, and maybe they’re closer than I know.)
I don’t know, but I would guess that Octavia has either not spoken to Ziz at all since Ziz faked her death in 2022, or that the two have minimally conversed. (Octavia obviously has more info about this than I do, and is welcome to correct me.)
Based on comments that I saw on Sinceriously.fyi, when it was up, I guess that Ziz does not endorse Octavia’s take on her philosophy, or regard Octavia as a member of her Vegan Sith crew (though I may be misremembering, and their relationship may have changed since the blog was taken down).Octavia gets a lot wrong about what Ziz wrote
Furthermore, Octavia says a number of things that are, by my memory, either outright contradicted by the text of sinceriously.fyi, or seem to me to be importantly mistaken misreadings.
For instance,
Does Ziz think that core values can change?
Octavia mostly seems to miss the point of Ziz’s arguments that core values are immutable. She says that Ziz never stated explicitly that core values don’t change (and that JD tries to heavily imply this without justification), or that Ziz is only making a technical point that if you choose good than that means you were good all along. (Although a few minutes later she does agree that core is “the aspect of yourself that doesn’t change, and if you can change it’s not the core”, so I’m not totally sure what she’s saying and maybe I’m just misunderstanding her.)
Ziz does say in the first line of Choices Made Long Ago, “I don’t know how mutable core values are. My best guess is, hardly mutable at all or at least hardly mutable predictably.” and goes on to elucidate why apparent changes in values are actually not that.
Additionally, in her glossary, Ziz defines core: “Core is something in the mind that has infinite energy. Contains terminal values you would sacrifice all else for, and then do it again infinity times with no regret. Seems approximately unchanging across lifespan. Figuratively, the deepest frame in the call stack of the mind, capable of aborting any train of thought, everything the mind does is because it decided for it to happen.”
I don’t think it’s correct to say that Ziz never explicitly said that core values couldn’t change.
(Furthermore, Octavia states in the interview that Ziz sometimes dares the reader to stop being evil. At the end of Choices Made Long Ago, Ziz says “If youhave donedo lamentable things for bad reasons (not earnestly misguided reasons), and are despairing of being able to change, then either embrace your true values, the ones that mean you’re choosing not to change them, or disbelieve.” This is just about the opposite of daring the reader to stop being evil. It’s more like daring the reader, who’s done bad things and is horrified by that, to stop rationalizing and just admit that they’re actually evil.)This is an extremely key piece of Ziz’s moral philosophy. According to my understanding, Ziz and co. feel justified in taking violent action against most people, not just because they happen to do bad things (but could be redeemed), but because they have fundamentally evil values. The Zizians sidestep a bunch of conventional ethical dilemmas, because in their view, almost everyone is an irredeemable moral monster, that not just kills and eats animals, but ultimately desires the destruction of the multiverse.
I’ve also seen Octavia post elsewhere that if you’re evil you can just choose to not to be evil anymore (and change your actions). I believe she’s aware that this a deviation from Ziz’s view, but she seems to understate how big a difference it makes to the whole worldview.
Does Zizian “debucketing” involve unihemspheric sleep?
She seems to think that her style of “parts work” practice is the same kind of thing that Ziz and Gwen were doing with “debucketing”, then says that she doesn’t do any weird unihempishpheric sleep stuff when she’s working with people, suggesting that reports of weird cult-like sleep deprivation practices are false or exaggerations. She says “it’s so goofy, it’s kind of woo, and unnecessarily cult ritual vibes”.
I strongly suspect Octavia’s parts work practice is not at all like the debucketing process that Ziz and Gwen used, and that Ziz and Gwen would not endorse the conflation between them. Trying to draw conclusions about the one based on the other is probably an apples to oranges comparison.
Furthermore, Ziz and Gwen were experimenting with “sleep tech”. That’s reported in the blog—even the interviewer points that out!
And in Punching Evil, Ziz writes “Humans are weak creatures; we spend third of our lives incapacitated. (Although, I stumbled into using unihemispheric sleep as a means of keeping restless watch while alone).”
She claims that JD Pressman made up the specific procedure for unihemispheric sleep in zizians.info, which I have no particular reason to doubt, but I don’t think it’s valid to claim that the Zizians didn’t do anything like that.Is Ziz a Benthemite utilitarian?
She derides Zizians.info as a hit piece, but then says that she doesn’t disagree with any of the specific claims, she just dislikes the framing. Which is all the weirder, because at least some of it is wrong. According to my memory, Ziz explicitly stated in some comment that she’s not a Benthemite, and never said that she was, whereas Octavia thinks that [paraphrased] ’it’s a reductive simplification to call her a Benthemite”. It’s not a reductive simplification. It’s just false.
Overall, it seems to me that Octivia has her own take on Ziz’s philosophy, which is different in several crucial aspects, and that she is either confused about how much her take differ’s from those expressed by Ziz, or is (by my lights) underestimating how important those differences are.
I don’t think that bystanders should regard her as representing the views of Ziz or the others that are alleged to have been involved in various crimes.
- ^
Additionally, it’s suggestive to me that she offers that Youngblut and Bauckholt were wearing tactical gear because they’re autistic nerds who thought that it looked cool.
That hypothesis is inconsistent with other details about the situation—that they were carrying guns and that the wrapped their phones in aluminum foil (presumably to prevent government authorities from tracking them via their phones). Those details make it seem likely to me that they were attempting oppose or circumvent government authorities, either because they were planning to commit a crime, or because they were generally paranoid of being persecuted. The “maybe just wanted to look cool” hypothesis, in contrast, to suggests that Octavia is very much out of the loop regarding the activities of the hardcore criminal Zizians.
What are the two groups in question here?