Robert Cousineau

Karma: 83

Robert Cousineau 25 Nov 2024 2:20 UTC
5 points
−1
on: Decorated pedestrian tunnels
I’m honestly really skeptical of the cost effectiveness of pedestrian tunnels as a form of transportation. Asking Claude for estimates on tunnel construction costs gets me the following:

A 1-mile pedestrian tunnel would likely cost $15M-$30M for basic construction ($3,000-$6,000 per foot based on utility tunnel costs), plus 30% for ventilation, lighting, and safety systems ($4.5M-$9M), and ongoing maintenance of ~$500K/year.
To put this in perspective: Converting Portland’s 400 miles of bike lanes to tunnels would cost $7.8B-$15.6B upfront (1.1-2.3× Portland’s entire annual budget) plus $200M/year in maintenance. For that same $15.6B, you could:
- Build ~780 miles of protected surface bike lanes ($2M/mile)
- Fund Portland’s bike infrastructure maintenance for 31 years
- Give every Portland resident an e-bike and still have $14B left over
Even for a modest 5-mile grid serving 10,000 daily users (optimistic for suburbs), that’s $10K-$20K per user in construction costs alone.
Alternative: A comprehensive street-level mural program might cost $100K-$200K per mile, achieving similar visual variety at ~1% of the tunnel cost.

Robert Cousineau 25 Nov 2024 2:00 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Charlie Steiner’s comment on: Are You More Real If You’re Really Forgetful?
I’ll preface this with: what I’m saying is low confidence—I’m not very educated on the topics in question (reality fluid, consciousness, quantum mechanics, etc).
Nevertheless, I don’t see how the prison example is applicable. In the prison scenario there’s an external truth (which prisoner was picked) that exists independent of memory/consciousness. The memory wipe just makes the prisoner uncertain about this external truth.
But this post is talking about a scenario where your memories/consciousness are the only thing that determines which universes count as ‘you’.
There is no external truth about which universe you’re really in—your consciousness itself defines (encompasses?) which universes contain you. So, when your memories become more coarse, you’re not just becoming uncertain about which universe you’re in—you’re changing which universes count as containing you, since your consciousness is the only arbiter of this.

Robert Cousineau 18 Nov 2024 19:09 UTC
25 points
3
on: Monthly Roundup #24: November 2024
A cool way to measure dishonesty: How many people claim to have completed an impossible five minute task.
This has since been community noted, fairly from my understanding.

This graph is not about how many people reported completing a task in 5 minutes when that was not true, this graph shows how many people completed the whole task even though it took them more than 5 minutes (which was all the time they were getting paid for).

Robert Cousineau 4 Nov 2024 15:20 UTC
6 points
0
on: Gwern: Why So Few Matt Levines?
Derek Lowe I believe does the closest to a Matt Levine for Pharma (and chem): https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline
He has a really fun to read series titled “Things I Won’t Work With” where he talks a bunch about dangerous chemicals: https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-work-with

Robert Cousineau 22 Oct 2024 21:00 UTC
1 point
0
on: Lonely Dissent
http://www.overcoming-bias.com/2007/06/against_free_th.html.
This link should be: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/against_free_thhtml (removing the hyphen will allow a successful redirect).

Robert Cousineau 19 Sep 2024 0:41 UTC
8 points
−5
on: The case for a negative alignment tax
In the limit (what might be considered the ‘best imaginable case’), we might imagine researchers discovering an alignment technique that (A) was guaranteed to eliminate x-risk and (B) improve capabilities so clearly that they become competitively necessary for anyone attempting to build AGI.
I feel like throughout this post, you are ignoring that agents, “in the limit”, are (likely) provably taxed by having to be aligned to goals other than their own. An agent with utility function “A” is definitely going to be less capable at achieving “A” if it is also aligned to utility function “B”. I respect that current LLM’s not best described as having a singular consistent goal function, however, “in the limit” that is what they will be best described as.

Robert Cousineau 21 May 2024 23:45 UTC
17 points
3
on: What would stop you from paying for an LLM?
I stopped paying for chatGPT earlier this week, while thinking about the departure of Jan and Daniel.

Whereas before they left I was able to say to myself “well, there are smarter people than me with worldviews similar to mine who have far more information about openAI than me, and they think it is not a horrible place, so 20 bucks a month is probably fine”, I am no longer able to do that.

They have explicitly sounded the best alarm they reasonably know how to currently. I should listen!

Robert Cousineau 29 Dec 2023 20:38 UTC
4 points
0
on: Will 2024 be very hot? Should we be worried?
Market odds are currently at 54% that 2024 is hotter than 2023: https://manifold.markets/SteveRabin/will-the-average-global-temperature?r=Um9iZXJ0Q291c2luZWF1

I have some substantial limit orders +-8% if anyone strongly disagrees.

Robert Cousineau 5 Dec 2023 21:57 UTC
4 points
3
on: In defence of Helen Toner, Adam D’Angelo, and Tasha McCauley (OpenAI post)
I like the writeup, but reccomend actually directly posting it to LessWrong. The writeup is of a much higher quality than your summary, and would be well suited to inline comments/the other features of the site.

Robert Cousineau 16 Nov 2023 20:01 UTC
1 point
1
on: We Should Talk About This More. Epistemic World Collapse as Imminent Safety Risk of Generative AI.
I have a lot of trouble justifying to myself reading through more than the first five paragraphs. Below is my commentary on what I’ve read.

I doubt that the short term impacts of sub-human level AI, be it generating prose, photographs, or films, on our epistemology are negative enough to justify them being weighted high as the X-Risk that is likely to emerge upon creating human level AI.

We have been living in a adversarial information space for as long as we have had human civilization. Some of the most most impressive changes to our epistemology were made prior to photographs (empiricism, rationalism, etc), some of them were made after (they are cool!). It will require modifying how we judge the accuracy of a given claim when we can no longer trust photos/videos in low stakes situations (we’ve not been able to trust them in high stakes situations for as long as they have existed; see special effects, film making, conspiracies about any number of recorded claims, etc), but that is just a normal fact of human societal evolution.

If you want to convince (me, at least) that this is a threat that is potentially society ending, I would love an argument/hook that addresses my above claims.

Robert Cousineau 14 Nov 2023 0:40 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Bostrom Goes Unheard
This seems like highly relevant (even if odd/disconcerting) information. I’m not sure if it should necessarily get it’s own post (is this as important than the UK AI Summit or the Executive Order?), but it should certainly gets a top level item in your next roundup at least.

Robert Cousineau 14 Nov 2023 0:36 UTC
2 points
−3
on: It’s OK to eat shrimp: EAs Make Invalid Inferences About Fish Qualia and Moral Patienthood
I think unless you take a very linguistics heavy understanding of the emergence of qualia, you are over-weighting your arguments around being able to communicate with an agent being highly related to how likely they are to have consciousness.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

You say:
In short, there are some neural circuits in our brains that run qualia. These circuits have inputs and outputs: signals get into our brains, get processed, and then, in some form, get inputted into these circuits. These circuits also have outputs: we can talk about our experience, and the way we talk about it corresponds to how we actually feel.
And:
It is valid to infer that, likely, qualia has been beneficial in human evolution, or it is a side effect of something that has been beneficial in human evolution.
I think both of the above statements are very likely true. From that, it is hard to say that a chimpanzee likely to lack those same circuits. Neither our mental circuits nor our ancestral environments are that different. Similarly, it is hard to say “OK, this is what a lemur is missing, as compared to a chimpanzee”.

I agree that as you go down the list of potentially conscious entities (e.g. Humans → Chimpanzees → Lemurs → Rats → Bees → Worms → Bacteria → Virus → Balloon) it gets less likely that each has qualia, but I am very hesitant to put anything like an order of magnitude jump at each level.

Robert Cousineau 13 Nov 2023 23:46 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Jonas V’s comment on: How to (hopefully ethically) make money off of AGI
Did you hear back here?

Robert Cousineau 31 Oct 2023 17:01 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: AI Alignment [progress] this Week (10/29/2023)
Retracted—my apologies. I was debating if I should add a source when I commented that and clearly I should have.

Robert Cousineau 31 Oct 2023 3:34 UTC
1 point
0
on: AI Alignment [progress] this Week (10/29/2023)
What does this mean: More research is better, in my opinion. But why so small? AI Alignment is at least a $1T problem.
Open AI may have a valuation of 80 million in a couple days and they are below that currently.
I haven’t read the article yet, but that is a decent percentage of their current valuation.

Robert Cousineau 12 Apr 2023 20:53 UTC
1 point
0
on: Evolution provides no evidence for the sharp left turn
This post prompted me to create the following Manifold Market on the likelihood of a Sharp Left Turn occuring (as described by the Tag Definition, Nate Soares, and Victoria Krakovna et. al), prior to 2050: https://manifold.markets/RobertCousineau/will-a-sharp-left-turn-occur-as-des?r=Um9iZXJ0Q291c2luZWF1

Robert Cousineau 10 Jul 2022 19:44 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Why Portland
Take note: it is only 2 hours away if you are driving in the middle of the night, on a weeknight. Else, it is 3-4 hours depending on how bad traffic is (there will almost always be some along I-5).

Robert Cousineau 22 Jun 2022 1:53 UTC
2 points
in reply to: sidhe_they’s comment on: Debating Whether AI is Conscious Is A Distraction from Real Problems
From my beginners understanding, the two objects you are comparing are not mutually exclusive.

There is currently work being done on inner alignment and outer alignment, where inner alignment is more focused on making sure that an AI doesn’t coincidentally optimize humanity out of existence due to [us not teaching it a clear enough version of/it misinterpreting] our goals and outer alignment more focused on making sure we have goals aligned to human values we should teach it.

Different big names focus on different parts/subparts of the above (with crossover as well).

Robert Cousineau 27 May 2022 14:41 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Nicholas / Heather Kross’s comment on: [$20K in Prizes] AI Safety Arguments Competition
Nice work there!

Robert Cousineau 26 May 2022 23:51 UTC
1 point
on: [$20K in Prizes] AI Safety Arguments Competition
“When we create an Artificial General Intelligence, we will be giving it the power to fundamentally transform human society, and the choices that we make now will affect how good or bad those transformations will be. In the same way that humanity was transformed when chemist and physicists discovered how to make nuclear weapons, the ideas developed now around AI alignment will be directly relevant to shaping our future.”