All of ben.smith's Comments + Replies

Elliot has a phenomenally magnetic personality and is consistently positive and uplifting. He's generally a great person to be around. His emotional stamina gives him the ability to uplift the people around him and I think he is a big asset to this community.

But I would guess that pleasure and unpleasantness isn't always because of the conscious sensations, but these can have the same unconscious perceptions as a common cause.

This sounds right. My claim is that there are all sorts of unconscious perceptions an valenced processing going on in the brain, but all of that is only experienced consciously once there's a certain kind of recurrent cortical processing of the signal which can loosely be described as "sensation". I mean that very loosely; it even can include memories of physical events or semantic though... (read more)

 

I would say thinking of something funny is often pleasurable. Similarly, thinking of something sad can be unpleasant. And this thinking can just be inner speech (rather than visual imagination)....Also, people can just be in good or bad moods, which could be pleasant and unpleasant, respectively, but not really consistently simultaneous with any particular sensations.

I think most of those things actually can be reduced to sensations; moods can't be, but then, are moods consciously experienced, or do they only predispose us to interpret consciou... (read more)

To give a concrete example, my infant daughter can spend hours bashing her toy keyboard with 5 keys. It makes a sound every time. She knows she isn't getting any food, sleep, or any other primary reinforcer to do this. But she gets the sensations of seeing the keys light up and a cheerful voice sounding from the keyboard's speaker each time she hits it. I suppose the primary reinforcer just is the cheery voice and the keys lighting up (she seems to be drawn to light--light bulbs, screens, etc). 

During this activity, she's playing, but also learning ab... (read more)

Yes I see that is a reasonable thing to not be convinced about and I am not sure I can do justice to the full argument here. I don't have the book with me, so anything else I tell you is pulling from memory and strongly prone to error. Elsewhere in this comments section I said

When you have sensations, play can teach you a lot about your own sensory processes and subsequently use what you've learned to leverage your visual sensations to accomplish objectives. It seems odd that an organism that can learn (as almost all can) would evolve visual sensations b

To me "conscious pleasure" without conscious sensation almost sounds like "the sound of one hand clapping". Can you have pure joy unconnected to a particular sensation? Maybe, but I'm sceptical. First, the closest I can imagine is calm joyful moments during meditation, or drug-induced euphoria, but in both cases I think it's at least plausible there are associated sensations. Second, to me, even the purest moments of simple joy seem to be sensations in themselves, and I don't know if there's any conscious experience without sensations.

Humphrey theorises th... (read more)

Humphrey's argument fish aren't conscious doesn't only rest on their not having the requisite brain structures, because as you say, it is possible consciousness could have developed in their own structures in ways that are simply distinct from our own. But then, Humphrey would ask, if they have visual sensations, why are they uninterested in play? When you have sensations, play can teach you a lot about your own sensory processes and subsequently use what you've learned to leverage your visual sensations to accomplish objectives. It seems odd that an organ... (read more)

I feel like I should be writing and reading posts about AI but honestly I am too intimidated to go near that topic.

I tend to think that questions about which organisms or systems are conscious mostly depend on identifying the physical correlates of consciousness, and understanding how they work as a system, and that questions about panpsychism, illusionism, eliminativism, or even Calmer's Hard Problem don't bear on this question very much. I think there's probably still a place for that philosophical debate because (1) there might be implications about where to look for the physical systems and (2) as I said to Michael earlier, illusionism might change our perspective ... (read more)

say that pain is bad (even if it is not phenomenal) because it constitutively includes the frustration of a desire, or the having of a certain negative attitude of dislike

I'm curious how, excluding phenomenal definitions, you define he defines "frustration of a desire" or "negative attitude of a dislike", because I wonder whether these would include extremely simple frustrations, like preventing a computer generated character in a computer game from reaching its goal. We could program an algorithm to try to solve for a desire ("navigate through a maze t... (read more)

Not absolutely sure I'm afraid. I lent my copy of the book out to a colleague so I can't check.

Humphrey mentioned illusionism (page 80 acc to Google books) but iirc he doesn't actually say his view is an illusionist one.

Personally I can't stand the label "illusionism" because to me the label suggests we falsely believe we have qualia, and actually have no such thing at all! But your definition is maybe much more mundane--there, the illusion is merely that consciousness is mysterious or important or matters. I wish the literature could use labels that are m... (read more)

Thanks Michael. For readers who are confused by my post but still want to know more, consider just reading (2), which is a very good précis by Nick Humphrey of his book which I tried to summarize. It might be better for readers, rather than reading my essay, to just read that. 

Actually, I have to correct my earlier reply. Iirc the argument is that all conscious animals engage in physical play, not necessarily that all playful animals are conscious. On the other hand, Humphrey does say that all animals engaging in pure sensation-seeking type play are conscious, so that's probably the sort of play he'd need to bring him around on octopuses.

Humphrey spent a lot of time saying that authors like Peter Godfrey-Smith (whose book on octopus sociality and consciousness I have read, and also recommend) are wrong or not particularly serious when they argue that octopus behavior is play, because there are more mundane explanations for play-like behavior. I can't recall too much detail here because I no longer have Humphrey's book in my possession. In any case I think if you convinced him octopuses do play he would probably change his mind on octopuses without needing to modify any aspects of the overall theory. He'd just need to concede that the way consciousness developed in warm blooded creatures is not the only way it has developed in evolutionary history.

No, the author is ultimately unclear why qualia in itself is useful, but by reasoning about the case studies I listed, his argument that qualia is in fact related to recursive internal feedback loops is ultimately a bit stronger than just "these things all feel like the same things so they must be related".

Humphrey first argues through his case studies that activity in the neocortex seems to generate conscious experience, while activity in the midbrain does not. Further, midbrain activity is sophisticated and can do a lot of visual and other perceptual pro... (read more)

I've tried to condense a book-length presentation into a 10 minute read and I probably have made some bad choices about which parts to leave out.

Its not that sensory play is necessary for producing sentience. The claim is that any animal that is sentient would be motivated to play. There might be other motivations for play that are not sentience, but all sentient creatures (so the argument goes) would want to play in order to explore and learn about the properties of its own sensory world.

For the limbless species you mentioned, if we imagine a radical scen... (read more)

Early (and peak) Quakers went down some weird ineffective paths. It's cool that they were into nonviolence and class equality, but they were also really into renaming the days of the week and months of the year to avoid pagan names.

This sounds like hits-based cause selection. The median early Quaker cause area wasn't particularly effective, but their best cause area was probably worth all of the wasted time in all of the others.

I am visiting a Quaker church for the first time ever tomorrow. I've been out of religious community for 15 years or so and I'd like to explore one that is compatible with my current views.

I'm trying to think about what "EA but more religious" might look like. Could you form a religious community holding weekly assemblies to celebrate our aspirations to fill the lightcone with happy person moments? I think that is a profoundly spiritual and emotional activity and I think we can do it.

I'll post a longer post to this effect soon.

Linkpost: Sheelah Kolhatkar at The New Yorker writes "Inside Sam Bankman-Fried’s Family Bubble" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/02/inside-sam-bankman-frieds-family-bubble

I conditionally disagree with the "Work trials". I think EA companies doing work trials is a pretty positive innovation that EA in particular does that enables them to hire for a better fit than not doing work trials. This is good in the long run for potential employees and for the employer.

This is conditional on 

• work trials being paid at a reasonable rate, where "reasonable" is probably within ~20% of the expected compensation paid out by the job, on a pro rata hourly rate.
• Probably the trial being 40 hours or less

I can anticipate some reasonable disa... (read more)

JJ--thanks for all your words of support in the last few years. I appreciate your attitude, care, and your hard work. I'm sorry to hear about this. Hope you are well!

It seems like a safer bet that AI will have some kind of effect on lightening the labor load than it will solve either of those particular problems.

I've spent hours going over your arguments and this is a real crux for me. AI is likely to lessen the need for human workers, at least for maintaining our existing levels of wealth.

I've stumbled here after getting more interested in the object-level debate around pronatalism. I am glad you posted this because, in the abstract, I think it's worthwhile to point out where someone may not be engaging in good faith within our community.

Having said that, I wish you had framed the Collins' actions in a little more good faith yourself. I do not consider that one quoted tweet to be evidence that of an "opportunistic power grab". I think it's probably a bit unhealthy to see our movement in terms of competing factions, and to seek wins for one'... (read more)

Have you looked at the fertility rate underlying the UN projections? They're projecting fertility rates across China, Japan, Europe, and the United States to arrest their yearly decline and begin to slowly move up back to somewhere in the 1.5 to 1.6 range.
 

That seems way too high because it's assuming not just that current trends stop but that they reverse to the opposite direction of that observed. Even their "low" scenario has fertility rebounding from a low in ~2030.

This despite all those countries still have a way to go before they get to the low ... (read more)

I enjoyed this post. I think it is worth thinking about whether the problem is unsolveable! I think one takeaway I had from Tegmark's Life 3.0 was that we will almost certainly not get exactly what we want from AGI. It seems intuitively that any possible specification will have downsides, including the specification to not build AGI at all.

But asking for a perfect utopia seems a high bar for "Alignment"; on the other hand, "just avoid literal human extinction" would be far too low a bar and include the possibility for all sorts of dystopias.

So I think it's... (read more)

I have a very uninformed view on the relative Alignment and Capabilities contributions of things like RLHF. My intuition is that RLHF is positive for alignment I'm almost entirely uninformed on that. If anyone's written a summary on where they think these grey-area research areas lie I'd be interested to read it. Scott's recent post was not a bad entry into the genre but obviously just worked a a very high level.

Can you describe exactly how much you think the average person, or average AI researcher, is willing to sacrifice on a personal level for a small chance at saving humanity? Are they willing to halve their income for the next ten years? Reduce by 90%?

I think in a world where there was a top down societal effort to try to reduce alignment risk, you might see different behavior. In the current world, I think the "personal choice" framework really is how it works because (for better or worse) there is not (yet) strong moral or social values attached to capability vs safety work.

Well written, thanks!

Here's something else I'd like to know on that survey:

• what proportion of respondents wants to post on EAF or engage in other discussions they think are important for EA's goals, but don't, or will only do so anonymously because they are worried about the consequences?
• how does that compare to the proportion who feel free to contribute without fear of retribution?
• what proportion thinks they have been in fact passed over for an opportunity because they have criticized EA or said something else "politically incorrect" here?

Surveys of these types are often anonymous, because 

• while it is possible for people to make false responses, that doesn't happen very much, because it is time consuming, and unethical, and there just aren't that many people out there who are all of unethical, have lots of time on their hands, and want to manipulate our survey. Manipulated responses are generally more of a danger for short polls (e.g., "which political party would you vote for"), but less of an issue for 10 minute + surveys.
• there are means of probabilistically filtering false responses

This is a great idea. EA already runs an annual community survey. So it wouldn't necessary to create a whole new survey to get this data --just add some questions to the existing community survey. If they aren't already on there it would be great to see them on the next survey.

EA has copped a lot of media criticism lately. Some of it (especially the stuff more directly associated with FTX) is well-deserved. There are some other loud critics who seem to be motivated by personal vendettas and/or seem to fundamentally object with the movement's core aims and values, but rather than tackling those head-on, seem to be trying to simply through everything that'll stick, no matter how flimsy. 

None of that excuses dismissal of the concerning patterns of abuse you've raised, but I think it explains some of the defensiveness around here right now.

It sounds like you want to engage constructively to reduce abuse in the community, and I appreciate that. The community will be stronger in the long run if it can be a safer and more welcoming space.

I know we're a bunch of weirdos with a very specific set of subcultural tics, but I hope everyone appreciates your efforts to help. I think people here really are unusually motivated to do good and there is a lot of goodwill as a result. On the other hand, I think a lot of that is ego driven. And it's a very nerdy culture, male-dominated and probably many peopl... (read more)

Thank you for your explanation. I appreciate you taking the time to explain your reasoning on that point and find it useful for being confident in the rest of what you have to say here.

I don't mean this as a comment on the particular case reported in the TIME article, though I'd reject using naive base rate calculations as a last word on someone's probabilistic guilt. but the "only 2-3% of allegations are false" stuck out to me because I read a better estimate is probably more like 2-10%. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and-social-media-part-5-of-∞/ there's a lot of ambiguity here--issues like not every "report" is an "allegation" because sometimes reports don't name a perpetrator. I have no idea what the correct f... (read more)

I agree with you that mixing romantic relationships with professional ones occurs among people who are monogamous or don't identify as polyamorous.

I personally wouldn't like to see EAs discouraged from being polyamorous. I'm not actively polyamorous myself, but I wouldn't want to see people restricted to more traditional romantic styles, like monogamous marriage, because I think many of those relationship styles developed in a very different social and technological context than the context we have now. Our culture at large probably benefits from people pi... (read more)

I think polyamory as it is described in the articles mixes complex webs of personal relationships with professional ones. Romantic connections within polyamorous communities can be complicated even without entanglement with professional concerns. When you bring in layers of professional connections on top of that, I can see why there might be an extra dimension of vulnerability to coercion and exploitation.

A simple back-casting or systems-mapping exercise (foresight/systems-theoretical techniques) would easily have revealed EA’s significant exposure and vulnerability (disaster risk concepts) to a potential FTX crash. The overall level of x-risk is presumably tied to how much research it gets, and the FTX crash clearly reduced the amount of research that will get done on x-risk any time soon. 

This is not the first time I've heard this sentiment and I don't really understand it. If SBF had planned more carefully, if he'd been less risk-neutral, things cou... (read more)

I was inspired by your post, and I wrote a post about one way I think grant-making could be less centralized and draw more on expertise. One commenter told me grant-making already makes use of more expert peer reviewers than I thought, but it sounds like there is much more room to move in that direction if grant-makers decide it is helpful.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fNuuzCLGr6BdiWH25/doing-ea-better-grant-makers-should-consider-grant-app-peer 

At a pinch, I would say review might be more worthwhile for topics where the work builds on a well-developed but pre-existing body of research. So, funding a graduate to take time to learn about AI Safety full-time as a bridge to developing a project probably wouldn't benefit from a review, but an application to develop a very specific project based on a specific idea probably would.

I don't have a sense on how often five-to-low-six-figure grants involve very specific ideas. If you told me they usually don't, I would definitely update against thinking a peer review would be useful in those circumstances.

Thank you, David! From what you've said here it seems clear my post was missing critical information.

I'm not sure this post literally could have been much better researched, conditional on me writing it. I don't feel entitled to contact funders to ask them about their process (perhaps I should feel free to? I'm not sure). EA Funds website mentions briefly they "engage expert-led teams of subject matter experts" in their decision-making, and that's something I should have researched first and mentioned, but also, I think that gives away so little informatio... (read more)

Agreed, but 5% is much lower than "certain or close to certain", which is the starting point Nuno Sempere said he was sceptical of.

I don't know that anyone thinks doom is "certain or close to certain", though the April 1 post could be read that way. 5% is also much lower than, say, 50%, which seems to be a somewhat more common belief.

I'm chalking this one up in favor of playing the long game--as Holden Karnowsky likes to advise, prioritizing building career capital because it would create greater impact in the future. Clearly though, Prof. Karlan has been making a substantial impact in the area for a couple of decades at least.

I enjoyed this read, and agree with the vibes of it. I am not sure what specifically is being recommended. I do think it would be good if EA avoids alienating people unnecessarily. That has two implications:

(a) the movement avoid identifying with the political left any more than is strictly entailed by the goals of EA, because it will alienate people on the political right who could contribute;

(b) being more conservative, in the non-political sense of holding new ideas lightly  and giving a lot of weight to conventional ideas. This could be framed on ... (read more)

My impression is that many people are subconsciously or implicitly aware of this dynamic, and that contributes to the high level of interest in topics or decisions that are likely to set the tone for the future. I think many people are acting in ways that they hope would set the standard precisely because they want the movement to be defined in the ways they act. I don't mean to single out any particular point of view as being motivated in this way, because in my experience most of the views being expressed here are sincerely held and principled.

Neverthele... (read more)

Awesome resource thanks 🙏!

I think everything after the words "Christian Blind Mission" was unnecessary and if he had ended the statement there, it would have been less provocative. I don't think that would have been the best possible choice but it would have been better than what we got.

That's something I couldn't have predicted before he posted the thing, but I'm sure a more skilled communicator could have.

The reason the words afterwards were harmful is because irrespective of their truth value, they raise an issue that is potentially harmful just to get into. By talking about it ... (read more)

I think starting the post with "Do Better" is a kind of rhetorical flush that probably erodes goodwill between you and the people you want to convince while giving no reasons for people to agree with what you are saying.

It's a common turn of phrase, and when I see it I often think it's an effort to sort of shame people into agreeing with what you are saying, to assert moral superiority without actually providing argument for it. In your post you do make a number of arguments which I think are pretty good. I don't think they need to be embellished with some... (read more)

Thank you! That's a reasonably significant update for me.