I think your own message is also too extreme to be rational. So it seems to me that you are fighting fire with a fire. Yes, Remmelt has some extreme expressions, but you definitely have extreme expressions here too, while having even weaker arguments.
Could we find a golden middle road, a common ground, please? With more reflective thinking and with less focus on right and wrong?
I agree that Remmelt can improve the message. And I believe he will do that.
I may not agree that we are going to die with 99% probability. At the same time I find that his current directions are definitely worthwhile of exploring.
I also definitely respect Paul. But mentioning his name here is mostly irrelevant for my reasoning or for taking your arguments seriously, simply because I usually do not take authorities too seriously before I understand their reasoning in a particular question. And understanding a person’s reasoning may occasionally mean that I disagree in particular points as well. In my experience, even the most respectful people are still people, which means they often think in messy ways and they are good just on average, not per instance of a thought line (which may mean they are poor thinkers 99% of the time, while having really valuable thoughts 1% of the time). I do not know the distribution for Paul, but definitely I would not be disappointed if he makes mistakes sometimes.
I think this part of Remmelt’s response sums it up nicely: “When accusing someone of crankery (which is a big deal) it is important not to fall into making vague hand-wavey statements yourself. You are making vague hand-wavey (and also inaccurate) statements above. Insinuating that something is “science-babble” doesn’t do anything. Calling an essay formatted as shorter lines a “poem” doesn’t do anything.”
In my interpretation, black-and-white thinking is not “crankery”. It is a normal and essential step in the development of cognition about a particular problem. Unfortunately. There is research about that in the field of developmental and cognitive psychology. Hopefully that applies to your own black-and-white thinking as well. Note that, unfortunately this development is topic specific, not universal.
In contrast, “crankery” is too strong word for describing black-and-white thinking because it is a very judgemental word, a complete dismissal, and essentially an expression of unwillingness to understand, an insult, not just a disagreement about a degree of the claims. Is labelling someone’s thoughts as “a crankery” also a form of crankery of its own then? Paradoxical isn’t it?
Thank you for your question!
I agree that the simulations need to have sufficient complexity. Indeed, that was one of main motivations I became interested in creating multi-objective benchmarks in the past. Various AI safety toy problems seemed to me so much simplified that they lacked essential objectives and other decisive nuances. This motivation is still very much one of my main driving motivations.
That being said, complexity has also downsides:
1) The complexity introduces confounding factors. When a model fails such a benchmark, it is not clear whether it was because it did not have required perceptual capabilities (so it is a capabilities problem), or it is using a model/framework that is unsuitable for alignment (so it is an alignment problem).
2) Running the simulations will be more time consuming and it would make the research elitist in the sense that various people would not be able to afford it.
My plan is to try to start with preference towards simple, but not simpler than necessary. And then gradually make it more complex. That means trying to use the gridworlds and introducing as many symbols as is needed to represent the important objectives, objects, other concepts and phenomena, and their interactions.
I believe symbolic approaches should not be entirely dismissed. As an illustrative metaphor, I am thinking of books—they contains symbols, yet we consider them as a cornerstone of our civilization. Similarly to the current dilemma with benchmarks, we may then worry whether books are too simple and symbol based—or perhaps one should prefer watching movies instead, since they represent reality in more detail. But would that claim be necessarily true? It does not seem so obvious after all.
In case more complexity is needed, there are currently at least five ideas:
1) Adding more feature layers to the gridworld. I did not mention it before, but the observation format already supports multiple concurrent observable layers on top of each other. One of the layers could be for example facial expressions, or any other observable or partially unobservable metrics relevant to objects they accompany.
2) Adding textual messages between agents as a side panel to the gridworlds.
3) Making the environment bigger, so there are more objects and more phenomena.
4) Making the environment bigger and making also the objects bigger so that they cover multiple cells in the grid. Thus the objects will become composite, consisting of sub-parts with their own dynamics.
5) Using some other framework, for example Sims.
Curious, how do these thoughts and considerations land with you?