Thank you! I see that some people voted you down without explaining why. If you don’t like someone’s blurb, please either contribute a better one or leave a comment to specifically explain how the blurb could be improved.
Mass_Driver
Karma: 2,821
LINK: Quora brainstorms strategies for containing AI risk
Sure!
Again, fair point—if you are reading this, and you have experience designing websites, and you are willing to donate a couple of hours to build a very basic website, let us know!
Sounds good to me. I’ll keep an eye out for public domain images of the Earth exploding. If the starry background takes up enough of the image, then the overall effect will probably still hit the right balance between alarm and calm.
A really fun graphic would be an asteroid bouncing off a shield and not hitting Earth, but that might be too specific.
Great! Pick one and get started, please. If you can’t decide which one to do, please do asteroids.
It would go to the best available charity that is working to fight that particular existential risk. For example, the ‘donate’ button for hostile AI might go to MIRI. The donate button for pandemics might go the Center for Disease Control, and the donate button for nuclear holocaust might go to the Global Threat Reduction Initiative. If we can’t agree on which agency is best for a particular risk, we can pick one at random from the front-runners.
If you have ideas for which charities are the best for a particular risk, please share them here! That is part of the work that needs to get done.
Hi Dorikka,
Yes, I am also concerned that the banner is too visually complicated—it’s supposed to be a scene of a flooded garage workshop, suggesting both major problems and a potential ability to fix them, but the graphic is not at all iconic. If you have another idea for the banner (or can recommend a particular font that would work better), please chime in.
I am not convinced that www.existential-risk.org is a good casual landing page, because (a) most of the content is in the form of an academic CV, (b) there is no easy-to-read summary telling the reader about existential risks, and (c) there is no donate button.
Help Build a Landing Page for Existential Risk?
It’s probably “Song of Light,” or if you want a more literal translation, “Hymn to Light.”
You might be wrestling with a hard trade-off between wanting to do as much good as possible and wanting to fit in well with a respected peer group. Those are both good things to want, and it’s not obvious to me that you can maximize both of them at the same time.
I have some thoughts on your concepts of “special snowflake” and “advice that doesn’t generalize.” I agree that you are not a special snowflake in the sense of being noticeably smarter, more virtuous, more disciplined, whatever than the other nurses on your shift. I’ll concede that you and them have -basically- the same character traits, personalities, and so on. But my guess is that the cluster of memes hanging out in your prefrontal cortex is more attuned to strategy than their meme-clusters—you have a noticeably different set of beliefs and analytical tools. Because strategic meme-clusters are very rare compared to how useful they are, having those meme-clusters makes you “special” in a meaningful way even if in all other respects you are almost identical to your peers. The 1% more-of-the-time that you spend strategizing about how best to accomplish goals can double or triple your effectiveness at many types of tasks, so your small difference in outlook leads to a large difference in what kinds of activities you want to devote your life to. That’s OK.
Similarly, I agree with you that it would be bad if all the nurses in your ward quit to enter politics—someone has to staff the bloody ward, or no amount of political re-jiggering will help. The algorithm that I try to follow when I’m frustrated that the advice I’m giving myself doesn’t seem to generalize is to first check and see if -enough- people are doing Y, and then switch from X to Y if and only if fewer-than-enough people are doing Y. As a trivial example, if forty of my friends and I are playing soccer, we will probably all have more fun if one of us agrees to serve as a referee. I can’t offer the generally applicable advice “You should stop kicking the ball around and start refereeing.” That would be stupid advice; we’d have forty referees and no ball game. But I can say “Hm, what is the optimal number of referees? Probably 2 or 3 people out of the 40 of us. How many people are currently refereeing? Hm, zero. If I switch from playing to refereeing, we will all have more fun. Let me check and see if everyone is making the same leap at the same time and scrambling to put on a striped shirt. No? OK, cool, I’ll referee for a while.” That last long quote is fully generalizable advice—I wish literally everyone would follow it, because then we’d wind up with close to an optimal number of referees.
OK, but why is “chair” shorter than “furniture”? Why is “blue” shorter than “color”? Furniture and color don’t strike me as words that are so abstract as to rarely see use in everyday conversation.
I’m confused. What makes “chair” the basic category? I mean, obviously more basic categories will have shorter words—but who decided that “solid object taking up roughly a cubic meter designed to support the weight of a single sitting human” was a basic category?
That’s an important warning, and I’m glad you linked me to the post on ethical inhibitions. It’s easy to be mistaken about when you’re causing harm, and so allowing a buffer in honor of the precautionary principle makes sense. That’s part of why I never mention the names of any of my clients in public and never post any information about any specific client on any public forums—I expect that most of the time, doing so would cause no harm, but it’s important to be careful.
Still, I had the sense when I first read your comment six weeks ago that it’s not a good ethical maxim to “never provide any information (even in the mathematical/Bayesian sense of “information”) to anyone who doesn’t have an immediate need to know it.”
I think I’ve finally put my finger on what was bothering me: in order to provide the best possible service to my clients, I need to make use of my social and emotional support structure. If I carried all of the burdens of my work solely on my own shoulders, letting all of my client’s problems bounce around solely in my head, I’d go a little crazier than I already am, and I’d provide worse service. My clients would suffer from my peculiar errors of viewpoint. In theory, I can discuss my clients with my boss or with my assistants, but both of those relationships are too charged with competition to serve as an effective emotional safety valve—I don’t really want to rely on my boss for a dose of perspective; I’m too busy signalling to my boss that I’m competent.
I think this is probably generally applicable—I want my doctors to have a chance to chat about me (without using my real name) in the break room or with their poker buddies, so that they can be as stable and relaxed as possible about giving me the best possible treatment. Same thing with my accountant—I’m much more concerned that my accountant is going to forget to apply for a legal tax exemption that’ll net me thousands of dollars than I am that my accountant is going to leak details about me to his friend who, unbeknownst to the accountant, is friends with the husband of an IRS agent who will then decide to give me an unfriendly audit. Sure, it’s important to me that my medical and financial details stay reasonably private, but I’m willing to trade a small amount of privacy for a moderate increase in professional competence.
Do you feel differently? I suspect that some of the people who make bold, confident assertions about how “nobody should ever disclose any private information under any circumstances” are simply signalling their loyalty and discretion, rather than literally describing their preferred policies or honestly describing their intended behavior. Perhaps I’m just falling prey to the Typical Mind fallacy, though.
It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.
On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.
Steven Pinker, The New Republic 9/4/14
You’re...welcome? For what it’s worth, mainstream American legal ethics try to strike a balance between candor and advocacy. It’s actually not OK for lawyers to provide unabashed advocacy; lawyers are expected to also pay some regard to epistemic accuracy. We’re not just hired mercenaries; we’re also officers of the court.
In a world that was full of Bayesian Conspiracies, where people routinely teased out obscure scraps of information in the service of high-stakes, well-concealed plots, I would share your horror at what you describe as “disclosing personal information.” Mathematically, you’re obviously correct that when I say anything about my client(s) that translates as anything other than a polite shrug, it has the potential to give my clients’ enemies valuable information. As a practical matter, though, the people I meet at dinner parties don’t know or care about my clients. They can’t be bothered to hack into my firm’s database, download my list of clients, hire an investigator to put together dossiers on each client, and then cross-reference the dossier with my remarks to revise their probability estimate that a particular client is faking his injury. Even if someone chose to go to all that trouble, nobody would buy the resulting information—the defense lawyers I negotiate with are mathematically illiterate. Finally, even if someone bought the resulting information, it’s not clear what the defense lawyers would do if they could confidently upgrade their estimate of the chance that Bob was faking his injury from 30% up to 60% -- would they tail him with a surveillance crew? They do that anyway. Would they drive a hard bargain in settlement talks? They do that anyway. Civil legal defense tactics aren’t especially sensitive to this kind of information.
All of which is to say that I take my duties to my clients very seriously, and I would never amuse myself at a cocktail party in ways that I thought had more than an infinitesimal chance of harming them. If you prefer your advocates to go beyond a principle of ‘do no harm’ and live by a principle of ‘disclose no information’, and you are willing to pay for the extra privacy, then more power to you—but beware of lawyers who smoothly assure you that they would never disclose any client info under any circumstances. It’s a promise that’s easy to make and hard to verify.
Is that revelation grounds for a lawsuit, a criminal offense or merely grounds for disbarment?
None of the above, really, unless you have so few murder cases that someone could plausibly guess which one you were referring to. I work with about 100 different plaintiffs right now, and my firm usually accepts any client with a halfway decent case who isn’t an obvious liar. Under those conditions, it’d be alarming if I told you that 100 out of 100 were telling the truth—someone’s bound to be at least partly faking their injury. I don’t think it undermines the justice system to admit as much in the abstract.
If you indiscreetly named a specific client who you thought was guilty, though, that could get you a lawsuit, a criminal offense, and disbarment.
I’m confused about how this works.
Suppose the standard were to use 80% confidence. Would it still be surprising to see 60 of 60 studies agree that A and B were not linked? Suppose the standard were to use 99% confidence. Would it still be surprising to see 60 of 60 studies agree that A and B were not linked?
Also, doesn’t the prior plausibility of the connection being tested matter for attempts to detect experimenter bias this way? E.g., for any given convention about confidence intervals, shouldn’t we be quicker to infer experimenter bias when a set of studies conclude (1) that there is no link between eating lithium batteries and suffering brain damage vs. when a set of studies conclude (2) that there is no link between eating carrots and suffering brain damage?
Yes, Voldemort could probably teach DaDA without suffering from the curse, and a full-strength Voldemort with a Hogwarts Professorship could probably steal the stone.
I’m not sure either of those explains how Voldemort got back to full-strength in the first place, though. Did Voldemort fake the charred hulk of his body? And Harry forgot that apparent charred bodies aren’t perfectly reliable evidence of a dead enemy because his books have maxims like “don’t believe your enemy is dead until you see the body?” But then what was Voldemort doing between 1975 and 1990? He was winning the war until he tackled Harry; why would he suddenly decide to stop?
Does anyone know what happened to TC Chamberlin’s proposal? In other words, shortly after 1897, did he in fact manage to spread better intellectual habits to other people? Why or why not?