I’m aware it’s a rather narrow range of ideas but a set of a few standard options being the ones most people adhere to is how it’s represented in popular discourse, which is what I’m going off of as a starting point. It has been established in other comments on my post that isn’t what to go off of. I’ve also mentioned that to be exposed to ideas I may not have thought of myself is part of why I want to have an open discussion on LW. My goal has been to gauge if that’s a discussion any significant portion of the LW user-base is indeed open to having. The best I’ve been able to surmise as an answer thus far is: “yes, if it’s done right.”
Evan_Gaensbauer
Karma: 1,796
[Question] Is there any way someone could post about public policy relating to abortion access (or another sensitive subject) on LessWrong without getting super downvoted?
As to the question of whether I can hold myself to those standards and maintain them, I’ll interpret the question not as a rhetorical but literally. My answer is: yes, I expect I would be able to hold myself to those standards and maintain them. I wouldn’t have asked the original question in the first place if I thought there wasn’t at least a significant chance I could. I’m aware of how I’m writing this may seem to betray gross overconfidence on my part.
I’ll try here to convince you otherwise by providing context in terms of the perceived strawmanning of korin43′s comment on my part. The upshot as to why it’s not a strawman is because my position is the relatively extreme one, putting me in opposition to most people who broadly adopt my side of the issue (i.e., pro-choice). I expect it’s much more plausible that I am the one who is evil, crazy, insane, etc., than almost everyone who might disagree with me. Part of what I want to do is a ‘sanity check,’ figuratively speaking.
1. My position on abortion is one that most might describe as ‘radically pro-choice.’ The kind of position most would consider more extreme than mine is the kind that would go further to an outcome like banning anti-abortion/pro-life protests (which is an additional position I reject).
2. I embraced my current position on the basis of a rational appeal that contradicted the moral intuitions I had at the time. It still contradicts my moral intuitions. My prior moral intuition is also one I understand as among the more common (moral consideration should be given to an unborn infant or whatnot after the second trimester, or after the point when the infant could independently survive outside the womb). That this has me in a state of some confusion and that others on LessWrong can help me deconfuse better than I can by myself is why I want to ask the question.
3. What I consider a relatively rational basis for my position is one I expect only holds among those who broadly share similar moral intuitions. By “assumptions diametrically opposite mine,” I meant someone having an intuition that what would render a fetus worth moral consideration is not based on its capacity for sentience but on it having an immortal soul imbued by God. In that case, I don’t know of any way I might start making a direct appeal as to why someone should accept my position. The only approach I can think of is to start indirectly by convincing someone much of their own religion is false. That’s not something I’m confident I could do with enough competence to make such an attempt worthwhile.
I meant to include the hyperlink to the original source in my post but I forgot to, so thanks for catching that. I’ve now added it to the OP.
It seems like the kind of post I have in mind would be respected more if I’m willing and prepared to put in the effort of moderating the comments well too. I won’t make such a post before I’m ready to commit the time and effort to doing so. Thank you for being so direct about why you suspect I’m wrong. Voluntary explanations for the crux of a disagreement or a perception of irrationality are not provided on LessWrong nearly often enough.
I am thinking of making a question post to ask because I expect there may be others who are able to address an issue related to legal access to abortion in a way that is actually good. I expect I might be able to write a post that would be considered to not only “suck” but might be so-so as opposed to unusually good.
My concern was that by even only asking a question, even asked well in a way that will frame responses to be better, I would still be downvoted. It’s seeming like if I put serious effort into it, though, the question post would not be super downvoted.
I’m not as concerned about potential reputational harm to myself compared to others. I also have a responsibility to communicate in ways that minimize undue reputational harm to others. Yet I’d want to talk about abortion in terms of either public policy or philosophical arguments, so it’d be a relatively jargon-filled and high-context discussion either way.
My impression has been it’s presumed that a position presented will have been adopted for bad epistemological reasons and that it has little to do with rationality without much in the way of checking. I’m not asking about subjects I want to or would frame as political. I’m asking if there are some subjects that will be treated as though they are inherently political even when they are not.
It’s not as much about moral intuitions to me so much as rational arguments. That may not hold up if someone has some assumptions diametrically opposite of mine, like the unborn being sacred or otherwise special in some way that assigns a moral weight to them incomparably higher than the moral weight assigned to pregnant persons. That’s something I’d be willing to write about if that itself is considered interesting. My intention is to ask what are the best compromises for various positions being offered by the side of the debate opposite myself, so that’s very different from perspectives unfit for LW.
I’m not an active rationalist anymore but I’ve ‘been around’ for a decade. Sometimes I occasionally post on LessWrong still because it’s interesting or valuable enough for some subjects. That the rationality community functions the way you describe and the norms that entails is an example of why I don’t participate in the rationality community as much anymore. Thank you, though, for the feedback.
[Question] What are your recommendations for technical AI alignment podcasts?
Thank you!
This is great news! This could even be a topic for one of our meetups!
Thanks. Do you feel like you have a sense of what proportion of long-termists you know who are forecasting that way? Or do you know of some way how one might learn more about forecasts like this and the reasoning or models behind them?
I think the difficulty with answering this question is that many of the disagreements boil down to differences in estimates for how long it will take to operationalize lab-grade capabilities.
The same point was made on the Effective Altruism Forum and it’s a considerable one. Yet I expected that.
The problem frustrating me is that the relative number of individuals who have volunteered their own numbers is so low it’s an insignificant minority. One person doesn’t disagree with their own self unless there is model uncertainty or whatever. Unless individual posts or comments among all of that debate provide specific answers or timelines, not enough people are providing helpful, quantitative information that would take trivial effort to provide.
Thank you though for providing your own numbers.
[Question] What are the numbers in mind for the super-short AGI timelines so many long-termists are alarmed about?
Upvoted. Thanks.
I’ll state that in my opinion it shouldn’t necessarily have to be the responsibility of MIRI or even Eliezer to clarify what was meant by a position stated but is taken out of context. I’m not sure but it seems as though at least a significant minority of those who’ve been alarmed by some of Eliezer’s statements haven’t read the full post to put it in a less dramatic context.
Yet errant signals sent seem important to rectify as they make it harder for MIRI to coordinate with other actors in the field of AI alignment based on existing misconceptions.
My impression is that misunderstanding about all of this is widespread in that there are at least a few people across every part of the field who don’t understand what MIRI is about these days at all. I don’t know how widespread it is in terms of how significant a portion of other actors in the field are generally confused with MIRI.
I don’t know what “this” is referring to in your sentence.
I was referring to the fact that there are meta-jokes in the post about which parts are or are not jokes.
I want to push back a bit against a norm I think you’re arguing for, along the lines of: we should impose much higher standards for sharing views that assert high p(doom), than for sharing views that assert low p(doom).
I’m sorry I didn’t express myself more clearly. There shouldn’t be a higher standard for sharing views that assert a high(er) probability of doom. That’s not what I was arguing for. I’ve been under the impression Eliezer and maybe others have been sharing the view of a most extreme probability of doom, but without explaining their reasoning, or how their model changed from before. It’s the latter part that would be provoking confusion.
I still don’t know what incoherence you have in mind. Stuff like ‘Eliezer has a high p(doom)’ doesn’t strike me as good evidence for a ‘your strategy is incoherent’ hypothesis; high and low p(doom) are just different probabilities about the physical world.
The reasons for Eliezer or others at MIRI being more pessimistic than ever before seeming unclear, one possibility that came to mind is that there isn’t enough self-awareness of the model as to why, or that MIRI has for a few months had no idea what direction it’s going in now. That would lend itself to not having a coherent strategy at this time. Your reply has clarified though that it’s more like what MIRI’s strategic pivot will be is still in flux, or at least publicly communicating that well will take some more time, so I’m not thinking any of that now.
I do appreciate the effort you, Eliezer and others at MIRI have put into what you’ve been publishing. I eagerly await a strategy update from MIRI.
I’ll only mention one more thing that hasn’t bugged me as much but has bugged others in conversations I’ve participated in. The issue is that Eliezer appears to think, but without any follow-up, that most other approaches to AI alignment distinct from MIRI’s, including ones that otherwise draw inspiration from the rationality community, will also fail to bear fruit. Like, the takeaway isn’t other alignment researchers should just give up, or just come work for MIRI...?, but then what is it?
A lack of answer to that question has left some people feel like they’ve been hung out to dry.
Thank you for the detailed response. It helps significantly.
The parts of the post that are an April Fool’s Joke, AFAIK, are the title of the post, and the answer to Q6. The answer to Q6 is a joke because it’s sort-of-pretending the rest of the post is an April Fool’s joke.
It shouldn’t be surprising others are confused if this is your best guess about what the post means altogether.
believing p(doom) is high isn’t a strategy, and adopting a specific mental framing device isn’t really a “strategy” either). (I’m even more confused by how this could be MIRI’s “policy”.)
Most would probably be as confused as you are at the notion “dying with dignity” is a strategy. I was thinking the meaning of the title stripped of hyperbole was not a change in MIRI’s research agenda but some more “meta-level” organizational philosophy.
I’m paraphrasing here, so correct me if I’m wrong, but some of the recent dialogues between Eliezer and other AI alignment researchers in the last several months contained statements from Eliezer like “We [at least Nate and Eliezer] don’t think what MIRI has been doing for the last few years will work, and we don’t have a sense of what direction to go now”, and “I think maybe most other approaches in AI alignment have almost no chance of making any progress on the alignment problem.”
Maybe many people would have known better what Eliezer meant had they read the entirety of the post(s) in question. Yet the posts were so long and complicated Scott Alexander bothered to write a summary of only one of them and there are several more.
As far as I’m aware, the reasoning motivating the kind of sentiments Eliezer expressed weren’t much explained elsewhere. Between the confusion and concern that has caused, and the ambiguity of the above post, that right now MIRI’s strategy might be in a position of (temporary) incoherence was apparently plausible enough to a significant minority of readers.
The parts of your comment excerpted below are valuable and may even have saved MIRI a lot of work trying to deconfuse others had they been publicly stated at some point in the last few months:
A plurality of MIRI’s research leadership, adjusted for org decision-making weight, thinks humanity’s success probability is very low, and will (continue to) make org decisions accordingly.
MIRI is strongly in favor of its researchers building their own models and doing the work that makes sense to them; individual MIRI researchers’ choices of direction don’t require sign-off from Eliezer or Nate.They [at least Eliezer and Nate] updated a lot toward existential wins being likelier if the larger community moves toward having much more candid and honest conversations, and generally produces more people who are thinking exceptionally clearly about the problem.
Summary: The ambiguity as to how much of the above is a joke appears it may be for Eliezer or others to have plausible deniability about the seriousness of apparently extreme but little-backed claims being made. This is after a lack of adequate handling on the part of the relevant parties of the impact of Eliezer’s output in recent months on various communities, such as rationality and effective altruism. Virtually none of this has indicated what real, meaningful changes can be expected in MIRI’s work. As MIRI’s work depends in large part on the communities supporting them understanding what the organization is really doing, MIRI’s leadership should clarify what the real or official relationship is between their current research and strategy, and Eliezer’s output in the last year.
Strongly downvoted.Q6 doesn’t appear to clarify whether this is all an April Fool’s Day joke. I expect that’s why some others have asked the question again in their comments. I won’t myself ask again because I anticipate I won’t receive a better answer than those already provided.
My guess is that some aspects of this are something of a joke, or the joke is a tone of exaggeration or hyperbole, for some aspects. I’m aware some aspects aren’t jokes, as Eliezer has publicly expressed for months now some of the opinions expressed above. I expect one reason why is that exploiting April Fool’s Day to publish this post provides plausible deniability for the seriousness of apparently extreme but poorly substantiated claims. Why that may be is because of, in my opinion, the inadequate handling thus far of the impact this discourse has had on the relevant communities (e.g., AI alignment, effective altruism, long-termism, existential risk reduction, rationality, etc.).
In contradiction to the title of this post, there is little to no content conveying what a change in strategy entails MIRI will really do differently than any time in the past. Insofar as Eliezer has been sincere above, it appears this is only an attempt to dissuade panic and facilitate a change in those communities to accept the presumed inevitability of existential catastrophe. While that effort is appreciated, it doesn’t reveal anything about what meaningful changes in a new strategy at MIRI. It has also thus far been ambiguous what the relationship is between some of the dialogues between Eliezer and others published in the last year, and what official changes there may be in MIRI’s work.
Other than Eliezer, other individuals who have commented and have a clear, direct and professional relationship with MIRI are:
Rob Bensinger, Communications Lead
Abram Demski, Research Staff
Anna Salamon, Board Director
Vanessa Kosoy, Research Associate
None of their comments here clarify any of this ambiguity. Eliezer has also now repeatedly clarified the relationship between the perspective he is now expressing and MIRI’s official strategy. Until that’s clarified, it’s not clear how seriously any of the above should be taken as meaningfully impacting MIRI’s work. At this stage, MIRI’s leadership (Nate Soares and Malo Bourgon) should provide that clarification, perhaps in tandem with Rob Bensinger and other MIRI researchers, but in a way independent of Eliezer’s recent output.
Here is an update on our efforts in Canada.
1. There are nearly five of us who would be willing to sponsor a refugee to settle in Canada (indefinitely or for however long the war might last). There is a requisite amount of money that must be committed beforehand to cover at least a few months worth of costs for settling in Canada and living here for a few months. Determining whether 3 or more of us would be able to cover those costs appears to be the most significant remaining bottleneck before we decide whether to take this on.
2. There are two effective altruists in the province of Alberta who would be willing to sponsor another refugee if another may need that help. If you or someone you know is in touch with someone living in Alberta, in particular the Calgary or Edmonton areas, who might be willing to sponsor as a refugee a community member for Ukraine, please reply with a comment or contact me.
Another consideration is how it may be a risk for long-termists to not pursue new ways of conveying the importance and challenge of ensuring human control of transformative AI. There is a certain principle of being cautious in EA. Yet in general we don’t self-reflect enough to notice when being cautious by default is irrational on the margin.
Recognizing the risks of acts of omission is a habit William MacAskill has been trying to encourage and cultivate in the EA community during the last year. Yet it’s been a principle we’ve acknowledged since the beginning. Consequentialism doesn’t distinguish between action, and inaction, as a failure to take any appropriate, crucial or necessary action to prevent a negative outcome. Risk aversion is focused on in the LessWrong Sequences more than most cognitive biases.
It’s now evident that past attempts at public communication about existential risks (x-risks) from AI have altogether proven to be neither sufficient nor adequate. It may not be a matter of not drawing more attention to the matter so much as drawing more of the right kind of attention. In other words, carefully conducing changes in how AI x-risks are perceived by various sections of the public is necessary.
The way we together as a community help you ensure how you write the book strikes the right balance may be to keep doing what MacAskill recommends: