gw

Karma: 275

gw 9 Dec 2024 20:18 UTC
1 point
0
on: Correct my H5N1 research ($reward)
Additional major epidemics or scares that didn’t pan out ($50 for first few, $25 for later)
2014-15 HPAI outbreak in the US, which didn’t ultimately make it to humans

gw 9 Dec 2024 4:55 UTC
7 points
0
on: Subskills of “Listening to Wisdom”
I want to add two more thoughts to the competitive deliberate practice bit:
Another analogy for the scale of humanity point:
If you try to get better at something but don’t have the measuring sticks of competitive games, you end up not really knowing how good you objectively are. But most people don’t even try to get better at things. So you can easily find yourself feeling like whatever local optimum you’ve ended up in is better than it is.
I don’t know anything about martial arts, but suppose you wanted to get really good at fighting people. Then an analogy here is that you discover that, at leasts for everyone you’ve tried fighting, you can win pretty easily just by sucker punching them really hard. You might conclude that to get better at fighting, you should just practice sucker punching really well. One day you go to an MMA gym and get your ass kicked.
I suspect this happens in tons of places, except there’s not always an MMA gym to keep you honest. For example, my model of lots of researchers is that they learn a few tools really well (their sucker punches) and then just publish a bunch of research that they can successfully “sucker punch”. But this is a kind of streetlight effect and tons of critical research might not be susceptible to sucker punching. Nonetheless, there is no gym of competitive researchers that show you just how much better you could be.
Identifying cruxiness:
I don’t have a counterfactual George who hasn’t messed around in competitive games, but I strongly suspect that there is some tacit knowledge around figuring out the cruxiness of different moving parts of a system or of a situation that I picked up from these games.
For example, most games have core fundamentals, and picking up a variety of games means you learn what it generally feels like for something to be fundamental to an activity (e.g. usually just doing the fundamentals better than the other player is enough to win; like in Starcraft it doesn’t really matter how good you are at microing your units if you get wildly out-macroed and steamrolled). But sometimes it’s also not the fundamentals that matter, because you occasionally get into idiosyncratic situations where some weird / specific thing decides the game instead. Sometimes a game is decided by whoever figures that out first.
This feels related to skills of playing to your outs or finding the surest paths to victory? This doesn’t feel like something that’s easy to practice outside of some crisply defined system with sharp feedback loops, but it does feel transferrable.

gw 24 Oct 2024 19:02 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Reflections on the Metastrategies Workshop
It is a bit early to tell and seems hard to accurately measure, but I note some concrete examples at the end.
Concrete examples aside, in plan making it’s probably more accurate to call it purposeful practice than deliberate practice, but it seems super clear to me that in ~every place where you can deliberately practice, deliberate practice is just way better than whatever your default is of “do the thing a lot and passively gain experience”. It would be pretty surprising to me if that mostly failed to be true of purposeful practice for plan making or other metacognitive skills.

gw 2 Oct 2024 7:40 UTC
8 points
2
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
As a concrete example, as far as I can piece together from various things I have heard, Open Phil does not want to fund anything that is even slightly right of center in any policy work. I don’t think this is because of any COIs, it’s because Dustin is very active in the democratic party and doesn’t want to be affiliated with anything that is even slightly right-coded. Of course, this has huge effects by incentivizing polarization of AI policy work with billions of dollars, since any AI Open Phil funded policy organization that wants to engage with people on the right might just lose all of their funding because of that, and so you can be confident they will steer away from that.
Thanks for sharing, I was curious if you could elaborate on this (e.g. if there are examples of AI policy work funded by OP that come to mind that are clearly left of center). I am not familiar with policy, but my one data point is the Horizon Fellowship, which is non-partisan and intentionally places congressional fellows in both Democratic and Republican offices. This straightforwardly seems to me like a case where they are trying to engage with people on the right, though maybe you mean not-right-of-center at the organizational level? In general though, (in my limited exposure) I don’t model any AI governance orgs as having a particular political affiliation (which might just be because I’m uninformed / ignorant).

gw 30 Sep 2024 8:14 UTC
7 points
2
on: MATS Alumni Impact Analysis
Do you have any data on whether outcomes are improving over time? For example, % published / employed / etc 12 months after a given batch

gw 24 Jun 2024 19:10 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Tapatakt’s comment on: So you want to work on technical AI safety
I agree! This is mostly focused on the “getting a job” part though, which typically doesn’t end up testing those other things you mention. I think this is the thing I’m gesturing at when I say that there are valid reasons to think that the software interview process feels like it’s missing important details.

gw 13 Jun 2024 16:51 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jacquesthibs’s comment on: jacquesthibs’s Shortform
This might look like building influence / a career in the federal orgs that would be involved in nationalization, rather than a startup. Seems like positioning yourself to be in charge of nationalized projects would be the highest impact?

gw 13 Jun 2024 11:43 UTC
2 points
0
on: [Paper] AI Sandbagging: Language Models can Strategically Underperform on Evaluations
Your GitHub link is broken, it includes the period in the url.

gw 5 Jun 2024 11:06 UTC
40 points
1
in reply to: jacobjacob’s comment on: Announcing ILIAD — Theoretical AI Alignment Conference
I
Love
Interesting
Alignment
Donferences

gw 28 Mar 2024 3:11 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: Linda Linsefors’s Shortform
I spoke with some people last fall who were planning to do this, perhaps it’s the same people. I think the idea (at least, as stated) was to commercialize regulatory software to fund some alignment work. At the time, they were going by Nomos AI, and it looks like they’ve since renamed to Norm AI.

gw 25 Dec 2023 19:12 UTC
15 points
12
in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: Would you have a baby in 2024?
+ the obvious fact that it might matter to the kid that they’re going to die
(edit: fwiw I broadly think people who want to have kids should have kids)

gw 16 Oct 2023 7:17 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Ninety-Three’s comment on: Rationalist horror movies
Hmm, I have exactly one idea. Are you pressing shift+enter to new line? For me, if I do shift+enter

>! I don’t get a spoiler
But if I hit regular enter then type >!, the spoiler tag pops up as I’m typing (don’t need to wait to submit the question for it to appear)

gw 15 Oct 2023 18:46 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Ninety-Three’s comment on: Rationalist horror movies
Are you thinking of
Until Dawn?
(also it seems like I can get a spoiler tag to work in comments by starting a line with >! but not by putting text into :::spoiler [text] :::)

gw 13 Oct 2023 3:25 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: Noticing confusion in physics
Interesting, thanks for the detailed responses here and above!

gw 12 Oct 2023 19:13 UTC
3 points
0
on: Noticing confusion in physics
Here’s a handwavy attempt from another angle:
Suppose you have a container of gas and you can somehow run time at 2x speed in that container. It would be obvious that from an external observer’s point of view (where time is running at 1x speed) that sound would appear to travel 2x as fast from one end of the container to the other. But to the external observer, running time at 2x speed is indistinguishable from doubling the velocity of each gas molecule at 1x speed. So increasing the velocity of molecules (and therefore the temperature) should cause sound to travel faster.
(Also, for more questions like this, see this post on Thinking Physics)

gw 12 Oct 2023 19:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: Noticing confusion in physics
If I make the room bigger or smaller while holding T and P constant, v(sound) does not change. If it did, it would be very obvious in daily life.
This feels a bit too handwavy to me, I could say the same thing about temperature: if the speed of sound were affected by making a room hotter or colder, it would be very obvious in daily life, therefore the speed of sound doesn’t depend on temperature. But it isn’t obvious in daily life that the speed of sound changes based on temperature either.
So now let’s increase T. It doesn’t matter what effect this has on P and V and n, as seen in the above. So what’s left? Increasing T linearly increases the average kinetic energy of the gas molecules (PV and NkT both have units of energy, this is why), and velocity increases as the sqrt of kinetic energy. So if gas molecule velocity is what determines v(sound), then it has to be that v(sound) increases as sqrt(T).
I think this also falls short of justifying that v(sound) increases as T increases. Why does it have to be that v(sound) increases with gas molecule velocity and not decreases instead? Why is it the case that gas molecule velocity determines v(sound) at all?

gw 10 Sep 2023 15:00 UTC
3 points
0
on: AI#28: Watching and Waiting
Worth noting that the scam attempt failed. We keep hearing ‘I almost fell for it’ and keep not hearing from anyone who actually lost money.
Here’s a story where someone lost quite a lot of money through an AI-powered scam:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/deepfake-scam-china-fans-worries-over-ai-driven-fraud-2023-05-22/

gw 15 Jul 2023 16:16 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: MiguelDev’s comment on: Why was the AI Alignment community so unprepared for this moment?
We can question things, how it went this way or why we are all here with this problem now—but it does not in add anything IMHO.
I think it adds something. It’s a bit strongly worded, but another way to see this is “could we have done any better, and if so, why?” Asking how we could have done better in the past lets us see ways to do better in the future.

gw 15 Jul 2023 1:40 UTC
10 points
4
on: Why was the AI Alignment community so unprepared for this moment?
This post comes to mind as relevant: Concentration of Force
The effectiveness of force application often depends on its concentration—on whether you can amass locally superior force at the actual decisive moment.

gw 11 Jul 2023 17:11 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Consider Joining the UK Foundation Model Taskforce
As someone who is definitely not a political expert (and not from or super familiar with the UK), my guess would be that you just can’t muster up enough political capital or will to try again. Taxpayer money (in the US at least) seems highly scrutinized, you typically can’t just fail with a lot of money and have no one say anything about it.
So then if the first try does fail, then it requires more political capital to push for allocating a bunch of money again, and failing again looks really bad for anyone who led or supported that effort. Politicians seem to care about career risk, and all this makes the risk associated with a second shot higher than the first.
I’d agree that this makes a second shot unlikely (including from other governments, if it fails spectacularly enough), if circumstances stay about the same. But circumstances will probably change, so IMO we might eventually get more such taskforces, just not soon.