https://michaelzuo.wordpress.com
michaelyzuo@gmail.com
M. Y. Zuo
Karma: 607
Well as the first few pararagphs of the text suggests, the median ‘AI Safety’ advocate over time has been barely sentient, relative to other motivated groups, when it comes to preventing certain labels from being co-opted by those groups…. so it seems unlikely they will become so many standard deviations above average in some other aspect at any point in the future.
Because the baseline will also change in the future.
So then what is forcing you to attach so many fears to this or that?
Speaking frankly as mostly an outside observer/commentator this sounds too cultish and too similar to doom posting.
All the words posted on LW so far are just that, words… Any attached meanings, projections, implications, etc., are done so by fallible people similar to you.
So why behave as if the sky is falling?
There still are reasons and arguments, probably very many, yet undiscovered. And that’s not limited to the pros and cons of ‘AI’. (I’m not even sure if there is a widely accepted definition of ‘AI’ that doesn’t cause epistemological problems)
So if you believe you have a mission, then keep on working at that as mentioned, without the trembling in fear in any direction.
Once you take into account real world factors, such as an expanding userbase leading to less average credibility per user, multiplying political positions, etc… which are all pretty much unavoidable due to regression to the mean…
It really becomes ever closer to an effective blanket ban, to at least try to maintain the same average quality. (Asssuming that is a goal.)
To extrapolate it to an extreme scenario, if the userbase suddenly 100X in size, then even many things considered prosaic might have to be prohibited because the userbase, on average, literally wouldn’t be capable of evaluating discussion beyond a mediocore subreddit otherwise.
Sometimes politics IS the core issue, or at least an important underlying cause of the core issue, so a blanket ban on discussing it is a very crude tool.
Because it’s effectively banning any substantial discussion on a wide range of topics, and instead replacing it, at best, with a huge pile of euphemisms and seemingly bizarre back and forths. And at worst, nothing at all.
So user competence as a factor is unlikely to be completely seperate.
Or to look at it from the other angle, in an ideal world with ideal forum participants, there would very likely be a different prevailing norm.
It seems contradictory. If LW users believe that the userbase is not competent enough on average to avoid tangential but divisive politics, then why do they believe the ’karma’ average decided by the same, matters?
It’s like a superposition of two extremes:
At one extreme there’s Reddit where a high karma is more of an anti-signal, and having extra karma beyond a pretty low threshold actually increase reader’s suspicions that it’s fluff or unusually deceiving…
At the other extreme, there are traditional old BBS forums with no karma or scoring system whatsoever. And any formal distinction is a huge positive signal.
Why do a lot of the “External reviews of “Alignment faking in large language models”” read like they were also written, or edited, by LLMs?
Are people expected to take “reviews” done seemingly pro forma at face value?
I would perhaps go even farther, most, maybe all, people don’t have any ‘sincere ethics’ whatsoever with a sharp boundary line, it’s nearly always quite muddled.
At least judging by actions.
Which upon reflection makes it sorta amazing any complex polity functions at all.
And in any case it’s probably safer to assume in business dealings that the counterparty is closer to the 50th percentile than to the 99.99th percentile.
For a test that can give certainty to claims there’s something more than that going on somewhere in the LLM. Since the OP only indicated ~90% confidence.
Otherwise it’s hard to see how it can be definitely considered ‘consciousness’ in the typical sense we ascribe to e.g. other LW readers.
Is there a definitive test? Or any prospects of such in the foreseeable future?
Such that a well informed reader can be completely confident it’s not just very fancy pattern recognition and word prediction underneath…
I already think that “the entire shape of the zeitgeist in America” is downstream of non-trivial efforts by more than one state actor. Those links explain documented cases of China and Russia both trying to foment race war in the US, but I could pull links for other subdimensions of culture (in science, around the second amendment, and in other areas) where this has been happening since roughly 2014.
This theory likely assigns too much intention to too large of a structure. The cleavage lines are so obvious in the U.S. that it wouldn’t take much more than a random PSYOP middle manager every week having a lark on a slow Friday afternoon, who decides to just deploy some of their resources to mess around.
Although it’s possible policy makers know this too and intentionally make it very low hanging fruit for bored personnel to mess around and get away with only a slap on the wrist.
The core issue, in any society, is that it’s thousands of times easier to destroy trust than to rebuild it.
Plenty of libertarians understand that some percentage of the population will degenerate when given limitless opportunities to do so. Though they usually don’t have an answer for what to do with the resulting millions of semi-deranged adults other than isolation/prison/etc...
It’s more the speed and extent that it has occurred within a short time is probably what’s surprising.
What exactly is the counterargument here?
There are a boundless number of reasons for or against anything, because real world things happen in an infinite dimensional space of possibilities… so just a listing some opposing points for those in the parent doesn’t add much.
How does this relate to the degree of integration into an economy?
You can eat just fine in any developed country via picking up odd jobs here and there. But clearly a managing director at JP Morgan overseeing an important desk is at a qualitatively different level.
Does the median immigrant ‘integrate into the economy’ to any notable extent in months or weeks?
I can easily imagine someone with already a high rank, reputation, merit, etc., in their home country doing so by say immigrating and quickly landing a job at JP Morgan Chase in a managing director position and proceed to actually oversee some important desk within a short timeframe.
But that is the 99.99th+ percentile of immigration.
What is the actual argument that there’s ‘not very many’? (Or why do you believe such an argument made somewhere else)
There’s hundreds of asteroids and comets alone that have some probability of hitting the Earth in the next thousand years, how can anyone possibly evaluate ‘p(doom)’ for any of this, let alone every other possible catastrophe?
Or perhaps on the flip side there is a ‘super genius underhang’ where there are insufficient numbers of super competent people to do that work. (Or willing to bet on their future selves being super competent.)
It makes sense for the above average, but not that much above average, researcher to choose to focus on their narrow niche, since their relative prospects are either worse or not evaluable after wading into the large ocean of possibilities.
This seems always “fuzzily true”?
e.g. Which atom of the store are you measuring to?
The store has many quadrillions of atoms spread across a huge volume of space, relative to atom sizes, and there is no ultimate arbiter on the definitive measuring point.
How does someone view the actual outcomes of the ‘Highlighted Grants’ on that page?
It would be a lot more reassuring if readers can check that they’ve all been fulfilled and/or exceeded expectations.
But wouldn’t roughly half the population always have an above average amount of emotional insecurity?
Sure the difference between the extremes can shrink… but after a few generations, the new normal will be taken as the new baseline and the new condition to be written about by a Kaj Sotala 2 on the LW 2 of that generation… So after many cycles of this it seems the entirety of mankind will be homogeneous.