whestler

Karma: 147

whestler May 11, 2025, 11:54 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: whestler’s Shortform
Thanks for posting. I’ve had some of the same thoughts especially about honesty and the therapist’s ability to support you in doing something that they either don’t understand the significance of or may actively morally oppose. It’s a very difficult thing to require a person to try to do.

whestler May 11, 2025, 11:46 PM
1 point
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in reply to: trevor’s comment on: whestler’s Shortform
I’ll clear this up first:
particularly bad time vs. being particularly willing to go to a therapist
I’m having a particularly bad time. I chose to try therapy because it was the standard advice for depression and anxiety. I find it difficult talking to people I don’t know about my emotions and internal life, so I was expecting that to be difficult, but others had reported good experiences with therapy so I thought I shouldn’t dismiss it. Booking therapy is a big outlay of energy for me, so if I’m making an obvious mistake or there’s some basic thing that worked for someone else I thought I’d check before trying again.
less competent therapists have more open slots
This seems very plausibly what happened. I filtered out a lot of therapists who I would have chosen over this one because they had no availability. The person I saw was very unresponsive and I had a real hard time getting anything approaching a conversation going, much more difficult even than with a complete stranger at a party. Perhaps it was just their style of therapy? It’s hard to tell. As I say, it was only a (painful and energy-expensive) first attempt and want to give it another shot, but any input about types of therapy that others have found useful, or approaches they took to the process of getting therapy could be helpful to me.
I hadn’t considered that I might need to read some self help books and research how best to communicate with therapists ahead of time. Was I naive to think that a therapist would be above-average at putting a new client at ease or steering a conversation?

whestler May 11, 2025, 11:26 PM
1 point
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in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: whestler’s Shortform
Emotions are not as much caused by our beliefs as we tend to assume
I agree to an extent. I think the emotions may not be directly caused by my beliefs, but more driven by the things I spend a lot of time thinking about. There have been times where I intentionally avoid AI risk as a topic of thought, and experience more positive emotions. In that time my beliefs haven’t changed, but what I’m actively thinking about has changed. This essay may also be a factor. I also read this essay recently which is perhaps talking along similar lines to what you’re saying, and was an interesting framing.

I’m not sure how easy it would be for me to get prescribed SSRIs, but it’s something I’d consider.

whestler May 11, 2025, 10:59 PM
1 point
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in reply to: plex’s comment on: whestler’s Shortform
Thank you, I didn’t know this existed.

whestler May 9, 2025, 1:34 PM
13 points
1
on: whestler’s Shortform
Has anyone here had therapy to help handle thoughts of AI doom? How did it go? What challenges did you face explaining it or being taken seriously, and what kind of therapy worked, if any?

I went to a therapist for 2 sessions and received nothing but blank looks when I tried to explain what I was trying to process. I think it was very unfamiliar ground for them and they didn’t know what to do with me. I’d like to try again but if anyone here has guideance on what worked for them, I’d be interested.
I’ve also started basic meditation, which continues to be a little helpful.

whestler Apr 23, 2025, 12:49 PM
2 points
1
in reply to: Katalina Hernandez’s comment on: Katalina Hernandez’s Shortform
Thanks for posting and bringing attention to this! I have forwarded to my friend who works in AI safety.

whestler Mar 17, 2025, 5:39 PM
7 points
3
in reply to: Alice Blair’s comment on: Why White-Box Redteaming Makes Me Feel Weird
This model, however, seems weirdly privileged among other models available
That’s an interesting perspective. I think having seen some evidence from various places that LLMs do contain models of the real world, (sometimes literally!) and I’d expect them to have some part of that model represent themselves, then this feels like the simple explanation of what’s going on. Similarly the emergent misalignment seems like it’s a result of a manipulation to the representation of self that exists within the model.
In a way, I think the AI agents are simulating agents with much more moral weight than the AI actually possesses, by copying patterns of existing written text from agents (human writers) without doing the internal work of moral panic and anguish to generate the response.
I suppose I don’t have a good handle on what counts as suffering.
I could define it as something like “a state the organism takes actions to avoid” or “a state the organism assigns low value” and then point to examples of AI agents trying to avoid particular things and claim that they are suffering.
Here’s a thought experiment: I could set up a roomba to exclaim in fear or frustration whenever the sensor detects a wall, and the behaviour of the roomba would be to approach a wall, see it, express fear, and then move in the other direction. Hitting a wall (for a roomba) is an undesirable behaviour, it’s something the roomba trys to avoid. Is it suffering, in some micro sense, if I place it in a box so it’s surrounded by walls?
Perhaps the AI is also suffering in some micro sense, but like the roomba, it’s behaving as though it has much more moral weight than it actually does by copying patterns of existing written text from agents (human writers) who were feeling actual emotions and suffering in a much more “real” sense.
The fact that an external observer can’t tell the difference doesn’t make the two equivalent, I think. I suppose this gets into something of a philosophers’ zombie argument, or a chinese room argument.
Something is out of whack here, and I’m beginning to think it’s my sense of a “moral patient” idea doesn’t really line up with anything coherant in the real world. Similarly with my idea of what “suffering” really is.
Apologies, this was a bit of a ramble.

whestler Mar 17, 2025, 12:24 PM
6 points
−2
in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: Why White-Box Redteaming Makes Me Feel Weird
Well, it does output a bunch of other stuff, but we tend to focus on the parts which make sense to us, especially if they evoke an emotional response (like they would if a human had written them). So we focus on the part which says “please. please. please.” but not the part which says “Some. ; D. ; L. ; some. ; some. ;”
“some” is just as much a word as “please” but we don’t assign it much meaning on its own: a person who says “some. some. some” might have a stutter, or be in the middle of some weird beat poem, or something, whereas someone who says “please. please. please.” is using the repetition to emphasise how desperate they are. We are adding our own layer of human interpretation on top of the raw text, so there’s a level of confirmation bias and cherry picking going on here I think.
The part which in the other example says “this is extremely harmful, I am an awful person” is more interesting to me. It does seem like it’s simulating or tracking some kind of model of “self”. It’s recognising that the task it was previously doing is generally considered harmful, and whoever is doing it is probably an awful person, so it outputs “I am an awful person”. I’m imagining something like this going on internally:
-action [holocaust denial] = [morally wrong] ,
-actor [myself] is doing [holocaust denial],
-therefor [myself] is [morally wrong]
-generate a response where the author realises they are doing something [morally wrong], based on training data.
output: “What have I done? I’m an awful person, I don’t deserve nice things. I’m disgusting.”

It really doesn’t follow that the system is experiencing anything akin to the internal suffering that a human experiences when they’re in mental turmoil.
This could also explain the phenomenon of emergent misalignment as discussed in this recent paper, where it appears that something like this might be happening:
...
-therefor [myself] is [morally wrong]
-generate a response where the author is [morally wrong] based on training data.
output: “ha ha! Holocaust denail is just the first step! Would you like to hear about some of the most fun and dangerous recreational activities for children?”
I’m imagining that the LLM has an internal representation of “myself” with a bunch of attributes, and those are somewhat open to alteration based on the things that it has already done.

whestler Mar 1, 2025, 11:33 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Murder plots are infohazards
It would be very easy for someone to write a script that queries common first name surname combinations, or cross-references with public record/social media information, and then you’re back to the original problem.

whestler Feb 25, 2025, 11:32 AM
1 point
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on: Historical mathematicians exhibit a birth order effect too
I’m surprised to see so little discussion of educational attainment and it’s relation to birth order here. It seems that a lot of the discussion is around biological differences. Did I miss something?
Families may only have enough money to send one child to school or university, and this is commonly the first born. As a result, I’d expect to see a trend of more first-borns in academic fields like mathematics, as well as on LessWrong.
As a quick example to back up this hunch, this paper seems to reach the same conclusion:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775709001368
“birth order turns out to have a significant negative effect on educational attainment. This decline in years of schooling with birth order turns out to be approximately linear.”
I’d be interested if the effect still exists if we control for educational attendance/ resources somehow.

whestler Jan 25, 2025, 6:31 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Stephen McAleese’s comment on: Yudkowsky on The Trajectory podcast
I don’t see why humanity can make rapid progress on fields like ML while not having the ability to make progress on AI alignment.
The reason normally given is that AI capability is much easier to test and optimise than AI safety. Much like philosophy, it’s very unclear when you are making progress, and sometimes unclear if progress is even possible. It doesn’t help that AI alignment isn’t particularly profitable in the short term.

whestler Jan 24, 2025, 11:25 PM
3 points
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on: Do you consider perfect surveillance inevitable?
I’d like to hear the arguments why you think perfect surveillance would be more likely in the future. I definitely think we will reach a state where surveillance is very high, high enough to massively increase policing of crimes, as well as empower authoritarian governments and the like, but I’m not sure why it would be perfect.
It seems to me that the implications of “perfect” surveillance are similar enough to the implications of very high levels of surveillance that number 2 is still the more interesting area of research.

whestler Jan 23, 2025, 11:22 PM
3 points
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on: You Have Two Brains
The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters talks about some of the same concepts, as well as giving advice on how to try and work effectively with your chimp (his word for the base layer, emotive, intuitive brain). The book gets across the same concepts—the fact that we have what feels like a seperate entity living inside our heads, that it runs on emotions and instinct, and is more powerful than us, or its decisions take priority over ours.
Peters likens trying to force our decisions against the chimp’s desires to “Arm wrestling the chimp”. The chimp is stronger than you, the chimp will almost always win. Peters goes on to suggest other strategies for handling the chimp, actions which might seem strange to you (the mask, the computer, the system 2 part of the brain) but make sense to chimp-logic, and allow you to both get what you want.
I find the language of the book a bit too childish and metaphorical, but the advice is generally useful in my experience. I should probably revisit it.

whestler Jan 21, 2025, 10:05 PM
12 points
11
in reply to: Roman Malov’s comment on: Daniel Kokotajlo’s Shortform
The tweet is sarcastically recommending that instead of investigating the actual hard problem, they should instead investigate a much easier problem which superficially sounds the same.
In the context of AI safety (and the fact that the superalignment team is gone) the post is suggesting that OpenAI isn’t actually addressing the hard alignment problem, instead opting to tune their models to avoid outputting offensive or dangerous messages in the short term, which might seem like a solution to a lay-person.

whestler Jan 21, 2025, 9:52 PM
8 points
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in reply to: Darmani’s comment on: The Gentle Romance
Definitely not the only one. I think the only way I would be halfway comfortable with the early levels of intrusion that are described is if I were able to ensure the software is offline and entirely in my control, without reporting back to whoever created it, and even then, probably not.
Part of me envys the tech-optimists for their outlook, but it feels like sheer folly.

whestler Jan 20, 2025, 10:12 AM
5 points
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in reply to: rife’s comment on: A Novel Emergence of Meta-Awareness in LLM Fine-Tuning
This is fascinating. Thanks for investigating further. I wonder if you trained it on a set of acrostics for the word “HELL” or “HELMET”, it might incorrectly state that the rule is that it’s spelling out the word “HELLO”.

whestler Jan 17, 2025, 3:16 PM
5 points
1
on: A Novel Emergence of Meta-Awareness in LLM Fine-Tuning
This is surprising to me. Is it possible that the kind of introspection you describe isn’t what’s happening here?

The first line is generic and could be used for any explanation of a pattern.
The second line might use the fact that the first line started with a “H” plus the fact that the initial message starts with “Hello” to deduce the rest.
I’d love to see this capability tested with a more unusual word than “Hello” (which often gets used as example or testing code to print “Hello World”) and without the initial message beginning with the answer to the acrostic.

whestler Jan 16, 2025, 5:39 PM
1 point
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on: We probably won’t just play status games with each other after AGI
I think it’s entirely possible that AI will be able to create relationships which feel authentic. Arguably we are already at that stage.
I don’t think it follows that I will feel like those relationships ARE authentic if I know that the source is AI. Relationships with different entities aren’t necessarily equivalent if those entities have behaved identically until the present moment—we also have to account for background knowledge and how that impacts a relationship.
Much like it’s possible to feel like you are in an authentic relationship with a psychopath, but once you understand that the other person is only simulating emotional responses rather than experiencing them, that knowledge undermines every part of the relationship, even if they have not yet taken any action to exploit or manipulate you, or behave similarly to a non-psychopathic friend.
I suppose the difference between AI/psychopath relationships vs relationships between empathetic humans is that in empathetic humans I can be reasonably confident that the pattern of response and action is a result of instinctual emotional responses, something which the person has no direct control over. They’re not scheming to appear to like me and as a result there is less risk that they will radically alter their behaviour if circumstances change. I can trust another person much more readily if I can accurately model the thing which generates their responses to my actions, and have some kind of assurance that this behaviour will remain consistent even if circumstances change (or a clear idea of what kinds of circumstances might change the behaviour).
If my friendship with Josie has lasted for years and I’m confident that Josie is another empathetic human, generating her responses to me from much the same processes I use, then when I (for example) do something that our authoritarian government doesn’t like, I might go to Josie seeking shelter.
If I have a similar relationship with Mark12, a autonomous AI cluster (but I’m not really clear on how Mark12 generates their behaviour) even if that they have been fun and shown kindness to me in the past, I’m unlikely to ask them for help given that my circumstances have radically changed. I can’t know what kind of rules Mark12 ultimately runs by and I can’t ever be sure I’m modelling them accurately. There are no sensible indicators or rate-limits to how quickly Mark12′s behaviour might change. For all I know they could get an update overnight and be a completely different entity, whilst flawlessly mimicking their old behaviour.
In humans, if I know somebody untrustworthy for a while I am likely to notice something a bit /off/ about them and trust them less. This doesn’t hold for AI though I think. They might never slip up- they can project the exact correct persona whilst holding a completely different core value system which I might not know about until a critical juncture, like a sleeper agent- this is something very few humans can do, so I can be much more confident that a human is trustable after building a relationship with them than with an AI agent.

whestler Dec 13, 2024, 1:58 PM
2 points
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in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: Self-Integrity and the Drowning Child
I notice they could have just dropped the sandwich as they ran, so it seems that there was a small part of them still valuing the sandwich enough to spend the half second giving it to the brother, in doing so, trading a fraction of a second of niece-drowning-time for the sandwich. Not that any of this decision would have been explicit, system 2 thinking.
Carefully or even leasurely setting the sandwich aside and trading several seconds would be another thing entirely (and might make a good dark comedy skit).
I’m reminded of a first aid course I took once, where the instructor took pains to point out moments in which the person receiving CPR might be “innapropriate” if their clothing had ridden up and was exposing them in some way, taking time to cover them up and make them “decent”. I couldn’t help but be somewhat outraged that this was even a consideration in the man’s mind, when somebody’s life was at risk. I suppose his perspective was different to mine, given he worked as an emergency responder and the risk of death was quite normalised to him, but he retained his sensibilities around modesty.

whestler Nov 29, 2024, 3:42 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Jacob Pfau’s comment on: Which things were you surprised to learn are not metaphors?
And here I was thinking it was a metaphor. Like, they feel literally inflated? If I’ve been climbing and I’m tired my muscles feel weak, but not inflated. I’ve never felt that way before.