Why is research into decision theories relevant to alignment?
No77e
Karma: 268
Is checking that a state of the world is not dystopian easier than constructing a non-dystopian state?
Can someone explain to me why Pasha’s posts are downvoted so much? I don’t think they are great, but this level of negative karma seems disproportioned to me.
This looks like something that would be useful also for alignment orgs, if they want to organize their research in siloes, as Yudkowsky often suggests (if they haven’t already implemented systems like this one).
Ah, I see your point now, and it makes sense. If I had to summarize it (and reword it in a way that appeals to my intuition), I’d say that the choice of seeking the truth is not just about “this helps me,” but about “this is what I want/ought to do/choose”. Not just about capabilities. I don’t think I disagree at this point, although perhaps I should think about it more.
I had the suspicion that my question would be met with something at least a bit removed inference-wise from where I was starting, since my model seemed like the most natural one, and so I expected someone who routinely thinks about this topic to have updated away from it rather than not having thought about it.
Regarding the last paragraph: I already believed your line “increasing a person’s ability to see and reason and care (vs rationalizing and blaming-to-distract-themselves and so on) probably helps with ethical conduct.” It didn’t seem to bear on the argument in this case because it looks like you are getting alignment for free by improving capabilities (if you reason with my previous model, otherwise it looks like your truth-alignment efforts somehow spill over to other values, which is still getting something for free due to how humans are built I’d guess).
Also… now that I think about it, what Harry was doing with Draco in HPMOR looks a lot like aligning rather than improving capabilities, and there were good spill-over effects (which were almost the whole point in that case perhaps).
One is thinking about how to build aligned intelligence in a machine, the other is thinking about how to build aligned intelligence in humans and groups of humans.
Is this true though? Teaching rationality improves capability in people but shouldn’t necessarily align them. People are not AIs, but their morality doesn’t need to converge under reflection.
And even if the argument is “people are already aligned with people”, you still are working on capabilities when dealing with people and on alignment when dealing with AIs.
Teaching rationality looks more similar to AI capabilities research than AI alignment research to me.
Why not shoot for something less ambitious?
I’ll give myself a provisional answer. I’m not sure if it satisfies me, but it’s enough to make me pause: Anything short of CEV might leave open an unacceptably high chance of fates worse than death.
Should a “ask dumb questions about AGI safety” thread be recurring? Surely people will continue to come up with more questions in the years to come, and the same dynamics outlined in the OP will repeat. Perhaps this post could continue to be the go-to page, but it would become enormous (but if there were recurring posts they’d lose the FAQ function somewhat. Perhaps recurring posts and a FAQ post?).
The first thing generally, or CEV specifically, is unworkable because the complexity of what needs to be aligned or meta-aligned for our Real Actual Values is far out of reach for our FIRST TRY at AGI. Yes I mean specifically that the dataset, meta-learning algorithm, and what needs to be learned, is far out of reach for our first try. It’s not just non-hand-codable, it is unteachable on-the-first-try because the thing you are trying to teach is too weird and complicated.
Why is CEV so difficult? And if CEV is impossible to learn first try, why not shoot for something less ambitious? Value is fragile, OK, but aren’t there easier utopias?
Many humans would be able to distinguish utopia from dystopia if they saw them, and humanity’s only advantage over an AI is that the brain has “evolution presets”.
Humans are relatively dumb, so why can’t even a relatively dumb AI learn the same ability to distinguish utopias from dystopias?
To anyone reading: don’t interpret these questions as disagreement. If someone doesn’t, for example, understand a mathematical proof, they might express disagreement with the proof while knowing full well that they haven’t discovered a mistake in it and that they are simply confused.
Thanks for the answer. It clarifies a little bit, but I still feel like I don’t fully grasp its relevance to alignment. I have the impression that there’s more to the story than just that?