Well that’s at least a completely different kind of regulatory failure than the one that was proposed on Twitter. But this is probably motivated reasoning on Microsoft’s part. Kernel access is only necessary for IDS because of Microsoft’s design choices. If Microsoft wanted, they could also have exported a user API for IDS services, which is a project they are working on now. MacOS already has this! And Microsoft would never ever have done as good a job on their own if they hadn’t faced competition from other companies, which is why everyone uses CrowdStrike in the first place.
lc
Karma: 9,066
I have more than once noticed gell-mann amnesia (either in myself or others) about standard LessWrong takes on regulation. I think this community has a bias toward thinking regulations are stupider and responsible for more scarcity than they actually are. I would be skeptical of any particular story someone here tells you about how regulations are making things worse unless they can point to the specific rules involved.
For example: there is a persistent meme here and in sort of the rat-blogosphere that the FDA is what’s causing the food you make at home to be so much less expensive than the food you order out. But any person who has managed or owned a restaurant will tell you that the actual two biggest things making your hamburger expensive are labor and real estate, not complying with food service codes. People don’t spend as much money cooking at home because they’re getting both the kitchen and labor for free (or at least paying for it in other ways), and this would remain true even if it were legal to sell that food you’re making on the street without a license.
Another example that’s more specific and in my particular trade: Back in May, when the Crowdstrike bug happened, people were posting wild takes on Twitter and in my signal groupchats about how Crowdstrike is only used everywhere because the government regulators subject you to copious extra red tape if you try to switch to something else.
I cannot for the life of me imagine what regulators people were talking about. First of all a large portion of cybersecurity regulation, like SOC2, is self-imposed by the industry; second anyone who’s ever had to go through something unusual like ISO 27001 or FedRAMP knows that they do not give a rats ass what particular software vendor you use for anything. At most your accountant will ask if you use an endpoint defense product, and then require you to upload some sort of logfile regularly to make sure you’re using the product. Which is a different kind of regulatory failure, I suppose, but it’s not what caused the Crowdstrike bug.
As the name suggests, Leela Queen Odds is trained specifically to play without a queen, which is of course an absolutely bonkers disadvantage against 2k+ elo players. One interesting wrinkle is the time constraint. AIs are better at fast chess (obviously), and apparently no one who’s tried is yet able to beat it consistently at 3+0 (3 minutes with no timing increment)
Epstein was an amateur rapist, not a pro rapist. His cabal—the parts of it that are actually confirmed and not just speculated about baselessly—seems extremely limited in scope compared to the kinds of industrial conspiracies that people propose about child sex work. Most of epstein’s victims only ever had sex with Epstein, and only one of them—Virginia Giuffre—ever appears to have publicly claimed being passed around to many of Epstein’s friends.
What I am referring to are claims an underworld industry for exploiting children the primary purpose of which is making money. For example, in the Sound of Freedom, a large part of the plot hinges on the idea that there are professionals who literally bring kidnapped children from South America into the United States so that pedophiles here can have sex with them. I submit that this industry in particular does not exist, or at least would be a terrible way to make money on a risk-adjusted basis compared to drug dealing.
I think P(DOOM) is fairly high (maybe 60%) and working on AI research or accelerating AI race dynamics independently is one of the worst things you can do. I do not endorse improving the capabilities of frontier models and think humanity would benefit if you worked on other things instead.
That said, I hope Anthropic retains a market lead, ceteris paribus. I think there’s a lot of ambiguous parts of the standard AI risk thesis, and that there’s a strong possibility we get reasonablish alignment with a few quick creative techniques at the finish like faithful CoT. If that happens I expect it might be because Anthropic researchers decided to pull back and use their leverage to coordinate a pause. I also do not see what Anthropic could do from a research front at this point that would make race dynamics even worse than they already are, besides split up the company. I also do not want to live in a world entirely controlled by Sam Altman, and think that could be worse than death.
So one of the themes of sequences is that deliberate self-deception or thought censorship—deciding to prevent yourself from “knowing” or learning things you would otherwise learn—is almost always irrational. Reality is what it is, regardless of your state of mind, and at the end of the day whatever action you’re deciding to take—for example, not talking about dragons—you could also be doing if you knew the truth. So when you say:
But if I decided to look into it I might instead find myself convinced that dragons do exist. In addition to this being bad news about the world, I would be in an awkward position personally. If I wrote up what I found I would be in some highly unsavory company. Instead of being known as someone who writes about a range of things of varying levels of seriousness and applicability, I would quickly become primarily known as one of those dragon advocates. Given the taboos around dragon-belief, I could face strong professional and social consequences.
It’s not a reason not to investigate. You could continue to avoid these consequences you speak of by not writing about Dragons regardless of the results of your investigation. One possibility is that what you’re also avoiding, is guilt/discomfort that might come from knowing the truth and remaining silent. But through your decision not to investigate, the world is going to carry the burden of that silence either way.
Another theme of the sequences is that self-deception, deliberate agnosticism, and motivated reasoning are a source of surprising amounts of human suffering. Richard explains one way it goes horribly wrong here. Whatever subject you’re talking about, I’m sure there a lot of other people in your position who have chosen not to look into it for the same reasons. But if all of those people had looked into it, and faced whatever conclusion that resulted squarely, you yourself might not be in the position of having to face a harmful taboo in the first place. So the form of information hiding you endorse in the post is self-perpetuating, and is part of what helps keep the taboo strong.
I think the entire point of rationalism is that you don’t do things like this.
The greatest strategy for organizing vast conspiracies is usually failing to realize that what you’re doing is illegal.
I plan to cross-post to LessWrong but to not read or reply to comments (with a few planned exceptions).
:( why not?
Pretty much ~everybody on the internet I can find talking about the issue both mischaracterizes and exaggerates the extent of child sex work inside the United States, often to a patently absurd degree. Wikipedia alone reports that there are anywhere from “100,000-1,000,000” child prostitutes in the U.S. There are only ~75 million children in the U.S., so I guess Wikipedia thinks it’s possible that more than 1% of people aged 0-17 are prostitutes. As in most cases, these numbers are sourced from “anti sex trafficking” organizations that, as far as I can tell, completely make them up.
Actual child sex workers—the kind that get arrested, because people don’t like child prostitution—are mostly children who pass themselves off as adults in order to make money. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that the government classifies any instance of child prostitution as human trafficking, regardless of whether or not there’s evidence the child was coerced. Thus, when the Department of Justice reports that federal law enforcement investigated “2,515 instances of suspected human trafficking” from 2008-2010, and that “forty percent involved prostitution of a child or child sexual exploitation”, it means that it investigated ~1000 possible cases of child prostitution, not that it found 1000 child sex slaves.
People believe a lot of crazy things, but I am genuinely flabbergasted at how many people find it plausible that there’s an entire underworld industry of kidnapping children and selling them to pedophiles in first world countries. I know why the anti sex trafficking orgs sell these stories—they’re trying to attract donations, and who is going to call out an “anti sex trafficking” charity? But surely most people realize that it would be very hard for an organized child rape cabal to spread word about their offerings to customers without someone alerting police.
Sometimes people say “before we colonize Mars, we have to be able to colonize Antarctica first”.
What are the actual obstacles to doing that? Is there any future tech somewhere down the tree that could fix its climate, etc.?
LessWrong and “TPOT” is not the general public. They’re not even smart versions of the general public. An end to leftist preference falsification and sacred cows, if it does come, will not bring whatever brand of IQ realism you are probably hoping for. It will not mainstream Charles Murray or Garrett Jones. Far more simple, memetic, and popular among both white and nonwhite right wingers in the absence of social pressures against it is groyper-style antisemitism. That is just one example; it could be something stupider and more invigorating.
I wish it weren’t so. Alas.
I regret that both factions couldn’t lose.
I do think that AIs will eventually get much smarter than humans, and this implies that artificial minds will likely capture the majority of wealth and power in the world in the future. However, I don’t think the way that we get to that state will necessarily be because the AIs staged a coup. I find more lawful and smooth transitions more likely.
I think my writing was ambiguous. My comment was supposed to read “similar constraints may apply to AIs unless one (AI) gets much smarter (than other AIs) much more quickly, as you say.” I was trying to say the same thing.
My original point was also not actually that we will face an abrupt transition or AI coup, I was just objecting to the specific example Meme Machine gave.
Is it your contention that similar constraints will not apply to AIs?
Similar constraints may apply to AIs unless one gets much smarter much more quickly, as you say. But even if those AIs create a nice civilian government to govern interactions with each other, those AIs will have any reason to respect our rights unless some of them care about us more than we care about stray dogs or cats.
I mean to say that high ranking generals could issue such a coup
Yes, and by “any given faction or person in the U.S. military” I mean to say that high ranking generals inside the United States cannot form a coup. They literally cannot successfully give the order to storm the capitol. Their inferiors, understanding that:
The order is illegal
The order would have to be followed by the rest of their division in order to have a chance of success
The order would be almost guaranteed to fail in its broader objective even if they manage to seize the FBI headquarters or whatever
That others around them are also making the same calculation and will also probably be unwilling to follow the order
Would report their superiors to military law enforcement instead. This is obvious if you take even a moment to put your shoes in any of the parties involved. Our generals inside the U.S. military also realize this themselves and so do not attempt to perform coups, even though I’m certain there are many people inside the white house with large ‘nominal’ control over U.S. forces who would love to be dictator.
I think your blanket statement on the impossibility of Juntas is void.
I made no such blanket statement. In different countries the odds and incentives facing each of these parties are different. For example, if you live in a South American country with a history of successful military overthrows, you might have a much greater fear your superior will succeed, and so you might be more scared of him than the civilian government. This is part (though not all) of the reason why some countries are continually stable and others are continually unstable.
If it really wanted to, there would be nothing at all stopping the US military from launching a coup on its civilian government.
There are enormous hurdles preventing the U.S. military from overthrowing the civilian government.
The confusion in your statement is caused by blocking up all the members of the armed forces in the term “U.S. military”. Principally, a coup is an act of coordination. Any given faction or person in the U.S. military would have a difficult time organizing the forces necessary without being stopped by civilian or military law enforcement first, and then maintaining control of their civilian government afterwards without the legitimacy of democratic governance.
In general, “more powerful entities control weaker entities” is a constant. If you see something else, your eyes are probably betraying you.
Totally understand why this would be more interesting; I guess I would still fundamentally describe what we’re doing on the internet as conversation, with the same rules as you would describe above. It’s just that the conversation you can find here (or potentially on Twitter) is superstimulating compared to what you’re getting elsewhere. Which is good in the sense that it’s more fun, and I guess bad inasmuch as IRL conversation was fulfilling some social or networking role that online conversation wasn’t.
10xing my income did absolutely nothing for my dating life. It had so little impact that I am now suspicious of all of the people who suggest this more than marginally improves sexual success for men.
Why hardware bugs in particular?