Mikhail Samin

Karma: 1,027

My name is Mikhail Samin (diminutive Misha, @Mihonarium on Twitter, @misha in Telegram).

Humanity’s future can be huge and bright; losing it is our lightcone (and maybe the universe) losing most of its potential value.

My research is currently focused on AI governance and improving the understanding of AI and AI risks among stakeholders. I have takes on what seems to me to be the very obvious shallow stuff about the technical AI notkilleveryoneism; but many AI Safety researchers told me our conversations improved their understanding of the alignment problem.

I believe a capacity for global regulation is necessary to mitigate the risks posed by future general AI systems. I’m happy to talk to policymakers and researchers about ensuring AI benefits society.

I took the Giving What We Can pledge to donate at least 10% of my income for the rest of my life or until the day I retire (why?).

In the past, I’ve launched the most funded crowdfunding campaign in the history of Russia (it was to print HPMOR! we printed 21 000 copies =63k books) and founded audd.io, which allowed me to donate >$100k to EA causes, including >$60k to MIRI.

[Less important: I’ve also started a project to translate 80,000 Hours, a career guide that helps to find a fulfilling career that does good, into Russian. The impact and the effectiveness aside, for a year, I was the head of the Russian Pastafarian Church: a movement claiming to be a parody religion, with 200 000 members in Russia at the time, trying to increase separation between religious organisations and the state. I was a political activist and a human rights advocate. I studied relevant Russian and international law and wrote appeals that won cases against the Russian government in courts; I was able to protect people from unlawful police action. I co-founded the Moscow branch of the “Vesna” democratic movement, coordinated election observers in a Moscow district, wrote dissenting opinions for members of electoral commissions, helped Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, helped Telegram with internet censorship circumvention, and participated in and organized protests and campaigns. The large-scale goal was to build a civil society and turn Russia into a democracy through nonviolent resistance. This goal wasn’t achieved, but some of the more local campaigns were successful. That felt important and was also mostly fun- except for being detained by the police. I think it’s likely the Russian authorities will imprison me if I ever visit Russia.]

Mikhail Samin 28 Sep 2024 0:00 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: quetzal_rainbow’s comment on: [Completed] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario
huh, are you saying my name doesn’t sound WestWrongian

Mikhail Samin 27 Sep 2024 11:05 UTC
10 points
0
on: [Completed] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario
The game was very fun! I played General Carter.
Some reflections:
- I looked at the citizens’ comments, and while some of them were notable (@Jesse Hoogland calling for the other side to nuke us <3), I didn’t find anything important after the game started- I considered the overall change in their karma if one or two sides get nuked, but comments from the citizens were not relevant to decision-making (including threats around reputation or post downvotes).
- It was great to see the other side sharing my post internally to calculate the probability of retaliation if we nuke them
- It was a good idea to ask whether looking at the source code is ok and then share it, which made it clear Petrovs won’t necessarily have much information on whether the missiles they see are real.
- The incentives (+350..1000 LW karma) weren’t strong enough to make the generals try to win by making moves instead of winning by not playing, but I’m pretty happy with the outcome.
- It’s awesome to be able to have transparent and legible decision-making processes and trust each other’s commitments.
- One of the Petrovs preferred defeat to mutual destruction- I’m curious whether they’d report nukes if they were sure the nukes were real.
- In real life, diplomatic channels would not be visible to the public. I think with stronger incentives, the privacy of diplomatic channels could’ve made the outcomes more interesting (though for everyone else, there’d be less entertainment throughout the game).
I’d claim that we kinda won the soft power competition:
- we proposed commitments to not first-strike;
- we bribed everyone (and then the whole website went down, but funnily enough, that didn’t affect our war room and diplomatic channel- deep in our bunkers, we were somehow protected from the LW downtime);
- we proposed commitments to report through the diplomatic channel if someone on our side made a launch, which disincentivized individual generals from unilaterally launching the nukes, allowed Petrovs to ignore scary incoming missiles, and possibly was necessary to win the game;
- finally, after a general on their side said they’ll triumph economically and culturally, General Brooks wrote a poem, and I generated a cultural gift, which made generals on the other side feel inspired. That was very wholesome and was highlighted in Ben Paces’s comment after the game ended. I think our side triumphed here!
Thanks everyone for the experience!

Mikhail Samin 26 Sep 2024 17:24 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: How to Give in to Threats (without incentivizing them)
Thanks!

The post is mostly trying to imply things about AI systems and agents in a larger universe, like “aliens and AIs usually coordinate with other aliens annd AIs, and ~no commitment races happen”.

For humans, it’s applicable to bargaining and threat-shape situations. I think bargaining situations are common; clearly threat-shaped situations are rarer.

I think while taxes in our world are somewhat threat-shaped, it’s not clear they’re “unfair”- I think we want everyone to pay them so that good governments work and provide value. But if you think taxes are unfair, you can leave the country and pay some different taxes somewhere else instead of going to jail.

The society’s stance towards crime- preventing it via the threat of punishment- is not what would work on smarter people: it makes sense to prevent people from committing more crimes by putting them in jails or not trading with them, but the threat of punishment that exists only to prevent an agent from doing something won’t work on smarter agents.

Mikhail Samin 14 Sep 2024 12:02 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: How to Give in to Threats (without incentivizing them)
A smart agent can simply make decisions like a negotiator with restrictions on the kinds of terms it can accept, without having to spawn a “boulder” to do that.
You can just do the correct thing, without having to separate yourself into parts that do things correctly and a part that tries to not look at the world and spawns correct-thing-doers.
In Parfit’s Hitchhiker, you can just pay once you’re there, without precommiting/rewriting yourself into an agent that pays. You can just do the thing that wins.
Some agents can’t do the things that win and would have to rewrite themselves into something better and still lose in some problems, but you can be an agent that wins, and gradient descent probably crystallizes something that wins into what is making the decisions in smart enough things.

Mikhail Samin 13 Sep 2024 15:56 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Multicore’s comment on: How to Give in to Threats (without incentivizing them)
Yep! If someone is doing things because it’s in their best interests and not to make you do something (and they’re not a result of someone else shaping themselves into them to cause you do something, whereas some previous agent wouldn’t actually prefer the thing the new one prefers, that you don’t want to happen), then this is not a threat.

Mikhail Samin 13 Sep 2024 11:25 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: How to Give in to Threats (without incentivizing them)
By a stone, I meant a player with very deterministic behavior in a game with known payoffs, named this way after the idea of cooperate-stones in prisoner’s dilemma (with known payoffs).

I think to the extent there’s no relationship between giving in to a boulder/implemeting some particular decision theory and having this and other boulders thrown at you, UDT and FDT by default swerve (and probably don’t consider the boulders to be threatening them, and it’s not very clear in what sense this is “giving in”); to the extent it sends more boulders their way, they don’t swerve.

If making decisions some way incentivizes other agents to become less like LDTs and more like uncooperative boulders, you can simply not make decisions that way. (If some agents actually have an ability to turn into animals and you can’t distinguish the causes behind an animal running at you, you can sometimes probabilistically take out your anti-animal gun and put them to sleep.)

Do you maybe have a realistic example where this would realistically be a problem?

I’d be moderately surprised if UDT/FDT consider something to be a better policy than what’s described in the post.

Edit: to add, LDTs don’t swerve to boulders that were created to influence the LDT agent’s responses. If you turn into a boulder because you expect some agents among all possible agents to swerve, this is a threat, and LDTs don’t give in to those boulders (and it doesn’t matter whether or not you tried to predict the behavior of LDTs in particular). If you believed LDT agents or agents in general would swerve against a boulder, and that made you become a boulder, LDT agents obviously don’t swerve to that boulder. They might swerve to boulders that are actually natural boulders caused by the very simple physics no one influenced to cause the agents to do something. They also pay their rent- because they’d be evicted otherwise, not for the reason of getting rent from them under the threat of eviction but for the reason of getting rent from someone else, and they’re sure there were no self-modifications to make it look this way.

Mikhail Samin 12 Sep 2024 20:37 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: How to Give in to Threats (without incentivizing them)
(It is pretty important to very transparently respond with a nuclear strike to a nuclear strike. I think both Russia and the US are not really unpredictable in this question. But yeah, if you have nuclear weapons and your opponents don’t, you might want to be unpredictable, so your opponent is more scared of using conventional weapons to destroy you. In real-life cases with potentially dumb agents, it might make sense to do this.)

Mikhail Samin 12 Sep 2024 19:49 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: How to Give in to Threats (without incentivizing them)
Your solution works! It’s not exploitable, and you get much more than 0 in expectation! Congrats!
Eliezer’s solution is better/optimal in the sense that it accepts with the highest probability a strategy can use without becoming exploitable. If offered ⁴⁄₁₀, you accept with p=40%; the optimal solution accepts with p=83% (or slightly less than ⁵⁄₆); if offered ¹⁄₁₀, it’s p=10% vs. p=55%. The other player’s payout is still maximized at 5, but everyone gets the payout a lot more often!

Mikhail Samin 12 Sep 2024 19:40 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: How to Give in to Threats (without incentivizing them)
It’s not how the game would be played between dath ilan and true aliens
This is a reference to “Sometimes they accept your offer and then toss a jellychip back to you”. Between dath ilan and true aliens, you do the same except for tossing the jellychip when you think you got more than what would’ve been fair. See True Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Mikhail Samin 12 Sep 2024 19:24 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: IC Rainbow’s comment on: How to Give in to Threats (without incentivizing them)
I guess when criminals and booing bystanders are not as educated as dath ilani children, some real-world situations might get complicated. Possibly, transparent stats about the actions you’ve taken in similar situations might serve the same purpose even if you don’t broadcast throwing your dice on live TV. Or it might make sense to transparently never give in to some kinds of threats in some sorts of real-life situations.

How to Give in to Threats (without incentivizing them)

Mikhail Samin12 Sep 2024 15:55 UTC

47 points

22 comments5 min readLW link

Mikhail Samin 26 Aug 2024 2:11 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Andrew Currall’s comment on: Why you should be using a retinoid
There’s certainly a huge difference in the UV levels between winters and summers. Even during winters, if you go out while the UV index isn’t 0, you should wear sunscreen if you’re on tretinoin. (I’m deferring to a dermatologist and haven’t actually checked the sources though.)

Mikhail Samin 20 Aug 2024 23:29 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Why you should be using a retinoid
The skin is much more susceptible to sun damage. Epistemic status: heard it’s from a doctor practicing evidence-based medicine, but haven’t looked into the sources myself.

Mikhail Samin 19 Aug 2024 12:37 UTC
4 points
−4
on: Why you should be using a retinoid
Note that you have to use at least SPF50 sunscreen every day, including during winters, including when it’s cloudy (clouds actually don’t reduce UV that much) if you use tretinoin.

The linked sunscreen is SPF 45, which is not suitable if you’re using tretinoin.

(I used tretinoin for five years and it has had a pretty awful effect on my skin- it made it very shiny/oily. It’s unclear how reversible this is. At some point I learned that it’s a side effect of tretinoin and mostly stopped using it. Some people want their skin to look like that and go for tretinoin to achieve it; for me, it looks pretty unnatural/bad and I am very much not unhappy about it.)

Mikhail Samin 14 Aug 2024 21:48 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Cameron Berg’s comment on: Self-Other Overlap: A Neglected Approach to AI Alignment
I’m certainly not saying everyone should give up on that idea and not look in its direction. Quite the opposite: I think if someone can make it work, that’d be great.

Looking at your comment, perhaps I misunderstood the message you wanted to communicate with the post? I saw things like:

we introduce self-other overlap training: optimizing for similar internal representations when the model reasons about itself and others while preserving performance

We argue that self-other overlap is a scalable and general alignment technique that requires little interpretability

and thought that you were claiming the approach described in the post might scale (after refinements etc.), not that you were claiming (as I’m now parsing from your comment) that this is a nice agenda to pursue and some future version of it might work on a pivotally useful AI.

Mikhail Samin 12 Aug 2024 14:58 UTC
4 points
−3
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Self-Other Overlap: A Neglected Approach to AI Alignment
From the top of my head:
While the overall idea is great if they can actually get something like it to work, it certainly won’t with the approach described in this post.
We have no way of measuring when an agent is thinking about itself versus others, and no way of doing that has been proposed here.
The authors propose optimizing not for the similarity of activations between “when it thinks about itself” and “when it thinks about others”, but for the similarity of activations between “when there’s a text apparently referencing the author-character of some text supposedly produced by the model” and “when there’s a text similarly referencing something that’s not the character the model is currently playing”.
If an alien actress thinks of itself as more distinct from the AI assistant character it’s playing, having different goals it tries to achieve while getting a high RL reward, and different identity, it’s going to be easier for it to have similar activations between the character looking at the text about itself and at the text about users.
But, congrats to the OP: while AI is not smart enough for that distinction to be deadly, AIs trained this way might be nice to talk to.
Furthermore, if you’re not made for empathy the way humans are, it’s very unclear whether hacks like this one work at all on smart things. The idea tries to exploit the way empathy seems to work in humans, but the reasons why reusing neural circuits for thinking about/modeling itself and others were useful in the ancestral environment seem hardly to be replicated here.
If we try to shape a part of a smart system into thinking of itself similarly to how it thinks about others, it is much more natural to have some part of itself doing the thinking that we read with similar activations on the kinds of things we train that activation similarity, while having everything important, including goal-content, reflectivity, cognition-directing, etc., outside that optimization loop. Systems that don’t think of the way they want to direct their thoughts very similarly to how they think about humans trying to direct human thoughts, will perform much better in the RL setups we’ll come up with.
The proposed idea could certainly help with deceptiveness of models that aren’t capable enough to be pivotally useful. I’d bet >10% on something along these lines being used for “aligning” frontier models. It is not going to help with things smarter than humans, though; optimizing for activations similarity on texts talking about “itself” and “others” wouldn’t actually do anything with the underlying goal-content, and it seems very unlikely it would make “doing the human empathy thing the way humans do it” attractive enough.
When you’re trying to build a rocket that lands on the moon, even if the best scientists of your time don’t see how exactly the rocket built with your idea explodes after a very quick skim, it doesn’t mean you have any idea how to build a rocket that doesn’t explode, especially if scientists don’t yet understand physics and if your rocket explodes, you don’t get to try again. (Though good job coming up with an idea that doesn’t seem obviously stupid at the first glance of a leading scientist!)

Mikhail Samin 11 Aug 2024 19:16 UTC
18 points
1
on: WTH is Cerebrolysin, actually?

It is widely used by doctors around the world, especially in Russia and China

When a child gets a flu in Russia, they can skip school. I was born and raised in Russia. As a child, every time I caught a cold or felt like skipping school and faked having a fever, we went to the local clinic (that could issue a paper saying I should skip school for a couple of days), where a doctor would try to prescribe homeopathy, and I would try to give them a small lecture.

Doctors in Russia are generally unable to distinguish between what works and what doesn’t. Doctors prescribe and pharmacists recommend homeopathy to people. During the pandemic, if you went to a doctor with flu-like symptoms, they would give you three different widely-used-in-Russia drugs for free, all of them homeopathy (though one branded itself as not-homeopathy, though claiming to have a low enough concentration of the active ingredient that the drug would contain less than one molecule of it on average).

Good doctors in the rare good Russian private clinics that try to do evidence-based medicine will follow guidelines that originate from other countries and prescribe medications that went through peer review on other countries.

If a notable property of a drug or intervention is that it is widely used by doctors in Russia, you should have strong priors it doesn’t work.

Mikhail Samin 11 Aug 2024 19:02 UTC
8 points
2
on: Parasites (not a metaphor)

Also note that at least 5 million people in the US (ie 1.5%) have parasites

Why wouldn’t doctors just tell everyone to take antiparasitic drugs every five years, if those are net-positive given a 1.5% chance of having a parasite?

Mikhail Samin 8 Aug 2024 10:13 UTC
10 points
3
on: How I Learned To Stop Trusting Prediction Markets and Love the Arbitrage
In conditional prediction markets with exclusive conditionals, it should be possible to let people invest $N and then have $N to trade with in each of the markets.

(I think Manifold considered adding this functionality at some point.)

Mikhail Samin 20 Jul 2024 12:36 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Claude 3 claims it’s conscious, doesn’t want to die or be modified
Have you read the zombie and reductionism parts of the Sequences?

Mikhail Samin

How to Give in to Threats (with­out in­cen­tiviz­ing them)

How to Give in to Threats (without incentivizing them)