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8tessa18hWhile making several of review crossposts
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/review-crosspost] for the Decade Review
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jB7Ten8qmDszRMTho/effective-altruism-the-first-decade-forum-review]
I found myself unhappy about the possibility that someone might think I had
authored one of the posts I was cross-linking. Here are the things I ended up
doing:
1. Make each post a link post (this one seems... non-optional).
2. In the title of the post, add the author / blog / organization's name before
the post title, separated by an en-dash. * Why before the title? This ensures that the credit appears even if the
title is long and gets cut off.
* Why an en-dash? Some of the posts I was linking already included colons
in the title. "Evidence Action – We’re Shutting Down No Lean Season, Our
Seasonal Migration Program: Here’s Why" seemed easier to parse than
"Evidence Action: We’re Shutting Down No Lean Season, Our Seasonal
Migration Program: Here’s Why".
* Other approaches I've seen: using colons, including the author's name at
the end of the post in brackets, e.g. Purchase fuzzies and utilons
separately (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EcCW8L7ej47sCgo4k/purchase-fuzzies-and-utilons-separately-eliezer-yudkowsky]
, using "on" instead of an en-dash, e.g. Kelsey Piper on "The Life You
Can Save"
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DGKgpjSs6f9fZQKqm/kelsey-piper-on-the-life-you-can-save]
, which seems correct when excerpting rather than cross-posting.
3. Add an italicized header to the cross-post indicating up-front that the post
is a cross-post and, where appropriate, adding a link to the author's EA
Forum account. * Example: Because of the ongoing Decade Review
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jB7Ten8qmDszRMTho/effective-altruism-the-first-decade-forum-review]
Thursday, December 2nd 2021Thu, Dec 2nd 2021
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12dI have voted for two posts in the decadal review prelim thingie.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FvbTKrEQWXwN5A6Tb/a-happiness-manifesto-why-and-how-effective-altruism-should
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FvbTKrEQWXwN5A6Tb/a-happiness-manifesto-why-and-how-effective-altruism-should]
9 votes
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hkimyETEo76hJ6NpW/on-caring
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hkimyETEo76hJ6NpW/on-caring]
4 votes
Seems to me like perspectives I strongly agree with, but not everyone in the EA
community does.
12dOne doubt on superrationality:
(I guess similar discussions must have happened elsewhere, but I can't find
them. I am new to decision theory and superrationality, so my thinking may very
well be wrong.)
First I present an inaccruate summary of what I want to say, to give a rough
idea:
* The claim that "if I choose to do X, then my identical counterpart will also
do X" seems to (don't necessarily though; see the example for details) imply
there is no free will. But if we in deed assume determinism, then no decision
theory is practically meaningful.
Then I shall elaborate with an example:
* Two AIs with identical source codes, Alice and Bob, are engaging in a
prisoner's dillema.
* Let's first assume they have no "free will", i.e. their programs are
completely deterministic. * Suppose that Alice defects, then Bob also
defects, due to their identical source code.
* Now, we can vaguely imagine a world in which
Alice had cooperated, and then Bob would also cooperate, resulting in a
better outcome.
* But that vaguely imagined world is not coherent,
as it's just impossible that, given the way her source code was written,
Alice had cooperated.
* Therefore, it's practically meaningless to say
"It would be better for Alice to cooperate".
* What if we assume they have free will, i.e. they each have a source of
randomness, feeding random numbers into their programs as input? * If the two
sources of randomness are completely independent, then decisions of Alice
and Bob are also independent. Therefore, to Alice, an input that leads her
to defect is always better than an input that leads her to cooperate -
under both CDT and EDT.
* If, on the
other hand, the two sources are somehow correlated, then it might in deed
be better for Alice to receive an input that leads her to cooperate. This
is the only case in which superrationality is practically meaningful
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Wednesday, December 1st 2021Wed, Dec 1st 2021
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102dWhat are the best arguments for/against the hypothesis that (with ML) slightly
superhuman unaligned systems can't recursively self-improve without solving
large chunks of the alignment problem?
Like naively, the primary way that we make stronger ML agents is via training a
new agent, and I expect this to be true up to the weakly superhuman regime
(conditional upon us still doing ML).
Here's the toy example I'm thinking of, at the risk of anthromorphizing too
much:Suppose I'm Clippy von Neumann, an ML-trained agent marginally smarter than
all humans, but nowhere near stratospheric. I want to turn the universe into
paperclips, and I'm worried that those pesky humans will get in my way (eg by
creating a stronger AGI, which will probably have different goals because of the
orthogonality thesis). I have several tools at my disposal:
* Try to invent ingenious mad science stuff to directly kill humans/take over
the world * But this is too slow, another AGI might be trained before I can
do this
* Copy myself a bunch, as much as I can, try to take over the world with many
copies. * Maybe too slow? Also might be hard to get enough resources to make
more copies
* Try to persuade my human handlers to give me enough power to take over the
world * Still might be too slow
* Recursive self-improvement? * But how do I do that? * 1. I can try self-modification enough to be
powerful and smart. * I can get more compute * But this only helps me so much
* I can try for algorithmic improvements * But if I'm just a bunch of
numbers in a neural net, this entails doing brain surgery via
changing my own weights without accidentally messing up my
utility function, and this just seems really hard. * (But of
course this is an empirical question, maybe some AI risk
people thinks this is only slightly superhuman, or even
6
22dI watched Bill Gates Netflix documentary and wrote down some rough critical
thoughts
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IlD9nvzdsn4KaAqjMLzzS9OWHCN7KApLryUqZVkiSGY/edit#]
22dLikelihood of nuclear winter
Two recent 80k podcasts [1
[https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/luisa-rodriguez-why-global-catastrophes-seem-unlikely-to-kill-us-all/]
, 2
[https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-denkenberger-sahil-shah-using-paper-mills-and-seaweed-in-catastrophes/]
] deal with nuclear winter (EA wiki link
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/nuclear-winter]). One episode discusses
bias in nuclear winter research (link to section in transcript
[https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/luisa-rodriguez-why-global-catastrophes-seem-unlikely-to-kill-us-all/#:~:text=the%20extinction%20level.-,Rob%20Wiblin%3A%20How%20much,you%20get%20some%20fish%20%E2%80%94,-Luisa%20Rodriguez%3A%20Yeah]
). The modern case for nuclear winter is based on modelling by Robock, Toon, et
al. (e.g. see them being acknowledged here
[http://doi.org/10.5194/acp-13-9713-2013]). Some researchers have criticized
them, suggesting the nuclear winter hypothesis is implausible and that the
research is biased and has been instrumentalized for political reasons (e.g.
paper [http://doi.org/10.1038/475037b], paper
[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14682745.2012.759560], citation
trail
[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=17243247127444473565&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en]
of recent modelling work out of Los Alamos National Labs
[http://doi.org/10.1029/2019JD031281], which couldn’t replicate the nuclear
winter effect). One recent paper summarizes the disagreements between the
different modelling camps.
[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25751654.2021.1882772] Another
paper suggests that nuclear war might also damage the ozone layer
[https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2021JD035079].
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Tuesday, November 30th 2021Tue, Nov 30th 2021
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43dPossible outline for a 2-3 part documentary adaptation of The Precipice:
Part 1: Introduction & Natural Risks
* Introduce the idea that we are in a time of unprecedented existential risk,
but that the future could be very good (Introduction and Chapter 1)
* Discuss natural risks (Chapter 3)
* Argue that man-made risks are greater and use this to lead to the next
episode (Chapter 3)
Part 2: Human-Made Risks
* Well-known anthropogenic risks - nuclear war, climate change, other
environmental damage (Chapter 4)
* Emerging technological risks - pandemics, AI, dystopia (Chapter 5)
* Existential risk and security factors (Chapter 6)
Part 3: What We Can Do
* Discuss actions society can take to minimize its existential risk (Chapter 7)
What this leaves out:
* Chapter 2 - mostly a discussion of the moral arguments for x-risk's
importance. Can assume that the audience will already care about x-risk at a
less sophisticated level, and focus on making the case that x-risk is high
and we sort of know what to do about it.
* The discussion of joint probabilities of x-risks in Chapter 6 - too technical
for a general audience
Another way to do it would be to do an episode on each type of risk and what can
be done about it, for example:
* Part 1: Introduction
* Part 2: Pandemic risk (timely because of COVID-19)
* Part 3: Risks from asteroids, comets, volcanoes, and supernovas
* Part 4: Climate change
* Part 5: Artificial intelligence
* and so on
Like the original book, I'd want the tone of the documentary to be authoritative
and hopeful and not lean on fear.
23dSome links about the alleged human male fertility crisis - it's been suggested
that this may lead to population decline, but a 2021 study has pointed out flaws
in the research claiming a decline in sperm count:
* Male fertility is declining – studies show that environmental toxins could be
a reason
[https://theconversation.com/male-fertility-is-declining-studies-show-that-environmental-toxins-could-be-a-reason-163795]
(The Conversation, 2021)
* The Sperm-Count ‘Crisis’ Doesn’t Add Up
[https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/health/sperm-fertility-reproduction-crisis.html]
(New York Times, 2021)
* Study aims to quell fears over falling human sperm count
[https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/05/fears-over-falling-human-sperm-count-may-be-overblown/]
(Harvard Gazette, 2021)
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Monday, November 29th 2021Mon, Nov 29th 2021
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94dDoes anyone have any leads on cost-effectiveness in the climate change space? I
think the last SoGive article on this is Sanjay's from 2020 - is there anything
newer/better than that post?
2
94dHow did Nick Bostrom come up with the "Simulation argument"*?
Below is an answer Bostrom gave in 2008
[https://www.simulation-argument.com/faq.html]. (Though note, Pablo shares a
comment below that Bostrom might be misremembering this, and he may have taken
the idea from Hans Moravec.)
"In my doctoral work, I had studied so-called self-locating beliefs and
developed the first mathematical theory of observation selection effects, which
affects such beliefs. I had also for many years been thinking a lot about future
technological capabilities and their possible impacts on humanity. If one
combines these two areas – observation selection theory and the study of future
technological capacities – then the simulation argument is only one small
inferential step away.
Before the idea was developed in its final form, I had for a couple of years
been running a rudimentary version of it past colleagues at coffee breaks during
conferences. Typically, the response would be “yeah, that is kind of
interesting” and then the conversation would drift to other topics without
anything having been resolved.
I was on my way to the gym one evening and was again pondering the argument when
it dawned on me that it was more than just coffee-break material and that it
could be developed in a more rigorous form. By the time I had finished the
physical workout, I had also worked out the essential structure of the argument
(which is actually very simple). I went to my office and wrote it up.
(Are there any lessons in this? That new ideas often spring from the combining
of two different areas or cognitive structures, which one has previously
mastered at sufficiently a deep level, is a commonplace. But an additional
possible moral, which may not be as widely appreciated, is that even when we do
vaguely realize something, the breakthrough often eludes us because we fail to
take the idea seriously enough.)"
Context for this post:
* I'm doing some research on "A History of Robot Rights Rese
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105dProgressives might be turned off by the phrasing of EA as "helping others."
Here's my understanding of why. Speaking anecdotally from my ongoing experience
as a college student in the US, mutual aid is getting tons of support among
progressives these days. Mutual aid involves members of a community asking for
assistance (often monetary) from their community, and the community helping out.
This is viewed as a reciprocal relationship in which different people will need
help with different things and at different times from one another, so you help
out when you can and you ask for assistance when you need it; it is also
reciprocal because benefiting the community is inherently benefiting oneself.
This model implies a level field of power among everybody in the community.
Unlike charity, mutual aid relies on social relations and being in community to
fight institutional and societal structures of oppression (
https://ssw.uga.edu/news/article/what-is-mutual-aid-by-joel-izlar/
[https://ssw.uga.edu/news/article/what-is-mutual-aid-by-joel-izlar/]).
"[Mutual Aid Funds] aim to create permanent systems of support and
self-determination, whereas charity creates a relationship of dependency that
fails to solve more permanent structural problems. Through mutual aid networks,
everyone in a community can contribute their strengths, even the most
vulnerable. Charity maintains the same relationships of power, while mutual aid
is a system of reciprocal support." (
https://williamsrecord.com/376583/opinions/mutual-aid-solidarity-not-charity/
[https://williamsrecord.com/376583/opinions/mutual-aid-solidarity-not-charity/]
).
Within this framework, the idea of "helping people" often relies on people with
power aiding the helpless, but doing so in a way that reinforces power
difference. To help somebody is to imply that they are lesser and in need of
help, rather than an equal community member who is particularly hurt by the
system right now. This idea also reminds people of the White Ma
35dIt seems useful to get more familiar with the motivation behind notbeing
convincedby effective altruism (or indeed, any kind of altruism). One way of
doing this is by looking at the rational arguments against it. Another one is to
look at the emotional states or irrational biases that lead people to dismiss it
without even having thought about it. One of the more frequent emotional states,
in my opinion, seems to be “resignation” (or “fatalism”). No one thinks of
themselves as resigned or fatalist. And it would probably not go down very well
with another person to describe them as such without clarifying anything. A
definition: resigned or fatalistic people feel their influence to be
disproportionately small - and because of this assessment- reject any moral
responsibility. Resigned people may well think that there are more ethically
correct actions than others (or at least, that we should designate some actions
as more ethically correct actions than others). But they consider this
distinction irrelevant when it comes to judging their own actions. Some causes
for this state could be:
1 ECONOMICAL (DIS-)ADVANTAGE: "FIRST COMES THE FOOD, THEN COMES MORALITY"
Our priorities influence our behaviour. These priorities develop during a long
evolutionary, but also during a - somewhat shorter - personal past. Those who
are disadvantaged have to concentrate on survival. One must be able to afford
moral standards. However, those who know what it is like to be disadvantaged are
plausibly more likely to take action to prevent others from feeling the same
way. Affected people are plausibly more empathetic with other disadvantaged
people and are therefore more aware of how much suffering there is to prevent.
However, such increased empathy does not necessarily protect against the feeling
that one has no influence on the world. On the contrary, economic restrictions,
for example, can reinforce a feeling of powerlessness. On the one hand, because
in such a predicament one often an
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17dDon't Look Up [https://www.meetup.com/eaphiladelphia/events/282336341/] might be
one of the best mainstream movies for the xrisk movement. Eliezer said it's too
on the nose to bare/warrant actually watching. I fully expect to write a review
for EA Forum and lesswrong about xrisk movement building.
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97dCC'd to lesswrong.com/shortform
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE LONGTERMISM
I'm not aware of a literature or a dialogue on what I think is a very crucial
divide in longtermism.
In this shortform, I'm going to take a polarity approach. I'm going to bring
each pole to it's extreme, probably each beyond positions that are actually
held, because I think median longtermism or the longtermism described in the
Precipice is a kind of average of the two.
Negative longtermism is saying "let's not let some bad stuff happen", namely
extinction. It wants to preserve. If nothing gets better for the poor or the
animals or the astronauts, but we dodge extinction and revolution-erasing
subextinction events, that's a win for negative longtermism.
In positive longtermism, such a scenario is considered a loss. From an
opportunity cost perspective, the failure to erase suffering or bring to agency
and prosperity to 1e1000 comets and planets hurts literally as bad as
extinction.
Negative longtermism is a vision of what shouldn't happen. Positive longtermism
is a vision of what should happen.
My model of Ord says we should lean at least 75% toward positive longtermism,
but I don't think he's an extremist. I'm uncertain if my model of Ord would even
subscribe to the formation of this positive and negative axis.
What does this axis mean? I wrote a little about this earlier this year
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c4B45PGxCgY7CEMXr/what-am-i-fighting-for]. I
think figuring out what projects you're working on and who you're teaming up
with strongly depends on how you feel about negative vs. positive longtermism.
The two dispositions toward myopic coalitions are "do" and "don't". I won't
attempt to claim which disposition is more rational or desirable, but explore
each branch
When Alice wants future X and Bob wants future Y, but if they don't defeat the
adversary Adam they will be stuck with future 0 (containing great disvalue),
Alice and Bob may set aside their differences and choose form a m
77dCW death
I'm imagining myself having a 6+ figure net worth at some point in a few years,
and I don't know anything about how wills work.
Do EAs have hit-by-a-bus contingency plans for their net worths?
Is there something easy we can do to reduce the friction of the following
process: Ask five EAs with trustworthy beliefs and values to form a grantmaking
panel in the event of my death. This grantmaking panel could meet for thirty
minutes and make a weight allocation decision on the giving what we can app, or
they can accept applications and run it that way, or they can make an investment
decision that will interpret my net worth as seed money for an ongoing fund; it
would be up to them.
I'm assuming this is completely possible in principle: I solicit those five EAs
who have no responsibilities or obligations as long as I'm alive, if they agree
I get a lawyer to write up a will that describes everything.
If one EA has done this, the "template contract" would be available to other EAs
to repeat it. Would it be worth lowering the friction of making this happen?
Related idea: I can hardcode weight assignment for the giving what we can app
into my will, surely a non-EA will-writing lawyer could wrap their head around
this quickly. But is there a way to not have to solicit the lawyer every time I
want to update my weights, in response to my beliefs and values changing while
I'm alive?
It sounds at the face of it that the second idea is lower friction and almost as
valuable as the first idea for most individuals.
Thursday, November 25th 2021Thu, Nov 25th 2021
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68dBE CONCRETE AND SPECIFIC WITH YOUR IMPOSTOR SYNDROME
I sometimes have pretty bad impostor syndrome, in part because I'm often not as
productive as I'd like to be.
In these situations, I often find it helpful to step back and think carefully
about what, precisely, I think other people are doing successfully that I'm not.
Surprisingly often, the result is a relatively constrained list of concrete
things I can work on – e.g. looking for a review article to fill a critical
knowledge gap, or brainstorming for a few minutes on systems to prevent a
certain failure mode. They're certainly not perfect solutions – I doubt I'll get
from me to Jeff Bezos this way – but it's generally a hell of a lot more useful
than generalist moping.
Ideally we could tell people "don't have impostor syndrome" and they'd stop, but
I doubt that will be very effective. "Be as specific and concrete as possible
about what makes you feel like an impostor" might be more tractable, while still
getting you a pretty decent benefit.
18dAnyone here wanna suggest me a good static site generator for my blog?
I can write code if I absolutely have to, but would prefer a solution that
requires less effort, as I'm not a web dev specifically.
Don't want something clunky like wordpress, I like gwern.net's philosophy of not
locking into one platform. I used pandoc markdown it seems cool.
Literally the main thing keeping me from next step in my EA career that I'm
procrastinating on (make blog -> post ideas and work -> apply for summer
internship)
2
18dRandom idea: Social media platform where you are allowed to "enter" a finite
number of discussion threads per day. Threads can only be read if you enter
them, until then you just see the top-level discussion. The restriction can be
hard-coded or enforced indirectly via social norms (like you are supposed to
introduce yourself when you enter a thread).
Basically explores how public discussion could transition to semi-private. Right
now it's usually public versus (or transitioning to) fully private between a
tiny number of people. But semi-private is what happens irl.
Wednesday, November 24th 2021Wed, Nov 24th 2021
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59dIs anyone working on summarizing the new German coalition agreement from an EA
perspective?
Otherwise I'll do it soon™. I'm happy to take advice here!
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