I take it you’ve already called, Oli?
Holly_Elmore
Karma: 1,046
The bill is in danger of not passing Appropriations because of lobbying and misinformation. That’s what calling helps address. Calling does not make SB 1047 cheaper, and therefore does not address the Suspense File aspects of what it’s doing in Appropriations.
Why is “dishonesty” your choice of words here? Our mistake cut against our goal of getting people to call at an impactful time. It wasn’t manipulative. It was merely mistaken. I understand holding sloppiness against us but not “dishonesty”.
I think the lack of charity is probably related to “activism dumb”.
It was corrected.
What kind of securities fraud could he have committed?
No, sacrificing truth is fundamentally an act of self-deception. It is making yourself a man who believes a falsehood, or has a disregard for the truth. It is Gandhi taking the murder-pill. That is what I consider irreversible.
This is what I was talking about, or the general thing I had in mind, and I think it is reversible. Not a good idea, but I think people who have ever self-deceived or wanted to believe something convenient have come back around to wanting to know the truth. I also think people can be truthseeking in some domains while self-deceiving in others. Perhaps if this weren’t the case, it would be easier to draw lines for acceptable behavior, but I think that unfortunately it isn’t.
Very beside my original point about being willing to speak more plainly, but I think you get that.
I get the sense that “but Google and textbooks exist” is more of a deontological argument, like if the information is public at all “the cat’s out of the bag” and it’s unfair to penalize LLMs bc they didn’t cross any new lines, just increased accessibility.
Does that really seem true to you? Do you have no memories of sacrificing truth for something else you wanted when you were a child, say? I’m not saying it’s just fine to sacrifice truth but it seems false to me to say that people never return to seeking the truth after deceiving themselves, much less after trying on different communication styles or norms. If that were true I feel like no one could ever be rational at all.
That’s why I said “financially cheap”. They are expensive for the organizer in terms of convincing people to volunteer and to all attendees as far as their time and talents, and getting people to put in sweat equity is what makes it an effective demonstration. But per dollar invested they are very effective.
I would venture that the only person who was seriously prevented from doing something else by being involved in this protest was me. Of course there is some time and labor cost for everyone involved. I hope it was complementary to whatever else they do, and, as Ben said, perhaps even allowing them to flex different muscles in an enriching way.
I’m down for a followup!
It’s hard to say what the true impact of the events will be at this time, but they went well! I’m going to write a post-mortem for the SF PauseAI protest yesterday and the Meta protest in September and post it on EAF/LW that will cover the short-term outcomes.
Considering they are financially cheap to do (each around $2000 if you don’t count my salary), I’d call them pretty successful already. Meta protest got good media coverage, and it remains to be seen how this one will be covered since most of the coverage happened in the two following weeks last time.
You could share the events with your friends and family who may be near, and signal boost media coverage of the events after! If you want to donate to keep me organizing events, I have a GoFundMe (and if anyone wants to give a larger amount, I’m happy to talk about how to do that :D). If you want to organize future events yourself, please DM me. Even putting the pause emoji ⏸️ in your twitter name helps :)
Here are the participating cities and links:
October 21st (Saturday), in multiple countries
Personally, I’m interested in targeting hardware development and that will be among my future advocacy directions. I think it’ll be a great issue for corporate campaigns pushing voluntary agreements and for pushing for external regulations simultaneously. This protest is aimed more at governments (attending the UK Summit) and their overall plans for regulating AI, so we’re pushing compute governance as way to most immediately address the creation of frontier models. Imo hardware tracking at the very least is going to have to be part of enforcing such a limit if it is adopted, and slowing the development of more powerful hardware will be important to keeping an acceptable compute threshold high enough that we’re not constantly on the verge of someone illegally getting together enough chips to make something dangerous.
If you found yourself interested in advocacy, the largest AI Safety protest ever is happening Saturday, October 21st!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/abBtKF857Ejsgg9ab/tomorrow-the-largest-ai-safety-protest-ever
Check out the LessWrong event here: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ZoTkRYdqGuDCnojMW/global-pause-ai-protest-10-21
I think you’re correct that the paradigm has changed, Matthew, and that the problems that stood out to MIRI before as possibilities no longer quite fit the situation.
I still think the broader concern MIRI exhibited is correct: namely, that that an AI could appear to be aligned but not actually be aligned, and that this may not come to light until it is behaving outside of the context of training/in which the command was written. Because of the greater capabilities of an AI, the problem may have to do with differences in superficially similar goals that wouldn’t matter at the human capabilities level.
I’m not sure if the fact that LLMs solve the cauldron-filling problem means that we should consider the whole broader class of problems easier to solve than we thought. Maybe it does. But given the massive stakes of the issue I think we ought to consider not knowing if LLMs will always behave as intended OOD a live problem.
Change log: I removed the point about Meta inaccurately calling itself “open source” because it was confusing.
Particularly in the rationalist community it seems like protesting is seen as a very outgroup thing to do. But why should that be? Good on you for expanding your comfort zone—hope to see you there :)
^ all good points, but I think the biggest thing here is the policy of sharing weights continuing into the future with more powerful models.
Meritorious!