typically don’t interact non-trivially
Or, as Orwell would prefer, “typically interact trivially”.
Matt Vincent
Karma: 48
Upcoming Protest for AI Safety
I would have liked to see those who disagree with this comment engage with it more substantially. One reason I think that we’re likely to have a warning shot is that LLM-based AIs are pretty consistently overconfident. Also, AI Control schemas have a probabalistic chance of catching misaligned AIs.
I know this is an old comment, but it’s expressing a popular sentiment under a popular post, so I’m replying mainly for others’ sake.
There’s an organization called PauseAI that lobbies for an international treaty against building powerful AI systems. It’s an international organization, but the U.S. branches in particular could use a lot of help.
I’ve never worked in HR, and I don’t think that any of my friends have, either, so I know very little about the field. What are the channels of feedback that you (or HR professionals more generally) use to evaluate hiring decisions after the fact?
I think this post suffers from a lack of rigor regarding the limits of the advice. One limit is that, if you let your vibes steer you away from interpersonal interactions, then you’ll eliminate interactions that have higher-than-average upside potential.
In most cases, most people’s perceptions are similar to yours. (e.g. If you think that the guy who asked you out is weird, then most of the other women who he asked out probably think so, too.) Consequently, if you and everyone else in the same situation are steered by vibes, then your failures of judgement will be correlated. In other words, some interactions will be undervalued.
If you weren’t steered by vibes, then you you could have harvested that difference in value. To piggy-back off of the examples that Said Achmiz gave:
Business venture: the upside potential is pretty obvious here. You’d be the first to a land grab, you’ll get an exceptionally talented business partner, etc.
Dating: you’d get a man or woman who is superficially unattractive in some way (“bad vibe” traits) but is a great catch overall.
Confidant: you’d gain a friend—probably one who’s exceptionally loyal (due to being passed over by others) and might see the world very differently from you (correlated with their “bad vibes” traits)
When choosing whether to follow your vibes, remember that there is a Nash equilibrium. If everyone else follows their vibes, then your best option is to interrogate yours (as Said describes). If most people are ignoring their vibes, then your best option is to follow yours. Neither strategy is dominant.
I took another look at my source, and I think you’re right. The subject of the plot, the Federal Register (FR), lists changes to the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). It also suffers from the other problem that I identified (repeals counting as new rules).
For anyone who’s curious, here’s a nice overview of measures of regulatory burden.
This post isn’t without value, but I am put-off by its use of A) working papers instead of published research, and B) the use of an LLM for doing research.
In terms of Zvi’s 4 levels of legality, I think that your reasoning is a valid argument against crossing the line between 2 and 3. However, I don’t think that it’s a valid argument against what Zvi is actually proposing, which is going from 1 to 2. If we have an obligation to help people who have APD, then the most cost-effective/highest-utility solution might involve making gambling less convenient for the general population.
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but there are a couple of technical problems with it. For one thing, the total number of pages does sometimes decrease. (See the last plot in this document.) Total pages isn’t a perfect measure of regulatory burden, but many other measures have the problem of counting repeals as new regulations. (See the same source for a discussion about what counts as a “rule”.) Also, most regulations are drafted by executive agencies, not legislatures—especially at the federal level.
What exactly is your hypothesis? Is it something like: P1) People are irrationally averse to actions that have a positive expected value and a low probability of success. P2) Self-deception enables people to ignore the low probability of success. C) Self-deception is adaptive.
I tried to test this reasoning by referencing the research that Daniel Kahneman (co-coiner of the term “planning fallacy”) has done about optimism. He has many criticisms of over-optimism among managers/executives, as well as more ordinary people (e.g. those who pursue self-employment).
However, he also notes that, for a given optimistic individual, their optimism may have a variety of personal, social, and societal benefits, ranging from good mood and health to inspiring leadership and economic innovation. He goes so far as to say, “If you are allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism.”. (Thinking Fast and Slow, p. 255)
Altogether, I’m think I’m missing a subtlety that would enable me to deduce the circumstances in which a bias towards optimism would be beneficial. Given that, I’m unable to test your hypothesis.
I think that kind of person is included in group 1:
“People who are adversarial or untrustworthy [...] as representatives of the system on behalf of which they act”.
This question might be independent from my other one, so I’m putting it in a separate comment.
What’s your primary solution to the problems that you list? Do you think that it can be mostly solved by teachers—e.g. by not exaggerating the applicability of the course material—or do you think that it requires a systemic solution—e.g. by sending the disruptive and inattentive kids to a class (potentially a quite unconventional one) that they’re more interested in?
I ask because I’m considering changing careers to become a high school math teacher, and I’d like to avoid using insidious psychological techniques on my students—doubly so if the techniques would cause my students to develop a long-term aversion to mathematics.
Would you say the same of most other class subjects? I ask because, with the exceptions of reading and persuasive writing, I don’t think that any conventional school subject is more applicable to the average person’s life than grade-school math.
Yes, people can get through life with an astonishing ignorance of mathematics, but they can get through life with an even more astonishing ignorance of social studies, literature, and the sciences.
In my opinion, the purpose of public basic education is twofold:
Identify the children who are talented at a given subject so that we can rapidly and efficiently develop their skill to a point that it becomes useful to society.
Intellectually immunize the general population against low-effort fraudsters and other bad actors.
Unfortunately, (2) requires most people to spend years learning about subjects that they don’t care about. Do you have a different philosophy of education, a different ranking of subjects’ importance, or something else?
I think that I have a personal example of this advice in action. I often find it helpful to use my driving speed and the distance to the next turn to estimate how soon I’ll need to turn. That indicates how desperately I need to change lanes, whether it’s a good time to initiate a conversation, etc.
Is the main point of this post that people should play around more with numbers and estimation? If so, then I agree with it, but there are two aspects of the post that I found distracting.
One was the overly broad use of the word “arithmetic”. Arithmetic and algebra have substantially different histories, and they occupy somewhat different roles in contemporary society. (Especially for young math students.) Consequently, I think it’s best to avoid using the words interchangeably.
The other is the repeated emphasis of dimensional analysis. Although it was probably worth mentioning once, it doesn’t appear to be any more relevant than methods for sanity-checking literal arithmetic, and I don’t think that either is central to your epistemological claims.
Does anyone here have qualms about the moral status of the embryos that are discarded in this process? I’m aware of the OP’s views on the issue, and I recently addressed them elsewhere, but I’m curious about the average viewer of this page.
Thanks for the response. I realize that this is a very belated reply, and that it would have done a lot more good prior to the release of your How-To-PSC essay. Nevertheless, I’ll respond to a few of your points.
For one thing, an embryo that was conceived from the gametes of two humans doesn’t “grow into a human” or “develop into a human”; it is a human. I’m not saying that this necessarily confers moral worth, but it does jog the question of which trait does, and you don’t provide a strong alternative.
In defense of the ZEF’s potentiality: before fertilization, an arbitrary pair of sperm and egg isn’t a coherent object any more than union of my left sock and the moon is a coherent object. In contrast, after fertilization, it’s the sperm and the egg that cease to be coherent objects. The egg releases chemical signals to reject additional sperm, the successful sperm’s cell membrane disintegrates, and the former contents of the gametes are bound together within one structure: the zygote.
I think that natural pregnancies are more nuanced than that, although I do agree that it involves an ongoing moral disaster to some extent. I don’t think it’s immoral for a woman to become pregnant despite the high miscarriage rate—just as I don’t believe it was immoral for a woman living 1,000 years ago to become pregnant, even though a third of her children who were born would die by the age of 5. Instead, I think that there’s an imperative on society to develop medical technology that prevents (pre)natal deaths.
I find this post very encouraging, but I can’t shake a particular concern about the approach that it recommends.
From extrapolating past experiences, it seems like every time I try (or even succeed) at something ambitious, I soon find that somebody else already did that thing, or proved why that thing can’t work, and they did it better than I would have unless I put in ten times as much effort as I did. In other words, I struggle to know what’s already been done.
I notice that this happens a lot less often with mathematics than it used to. Perhaps part of it is that I became less ambitious, but I also think that part of it was formal education. (I finished a BS in math a few years ago.) I do think one of the major benefits of formal education is that it gives the student a map of the domain they’re interested in, so that they can find their way to the boundary with minimal wasted effort.
Unless you have a very optimistic view of warning shots, we shouldn’t rely on such an opportunity.