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Davidmanheim

5774 karmaJoined Oct 2018

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Deconfusion and Disentangling EA
Policy and International Relations Primer

Comments
665

One of the major limitations of using existing LLMs is their unreliability. No important processes can currently be trusted to LLMs, because we have very little understanding of how they work, limited knowledge of the limits of their capabilities, and a poor understanding of how and when they fail.

I don't disagree with this, but I think it's very likely to stop being true in practice as the tech is commercialized. It won't be perfect, but the current generation of tweaks already pushes it into the range of at least 3-4 9s of reliability for non-adversarial settings, which seems like it will be enough for many applications, and for better work on how to make it even more reliable. More than that, business applications, or a lack of success thereof, will show whether or not this is true in the coming year, well before we hit GPT-5+. 

I agree with your point that risk aversion is "just" pointing out a non-linearity, but there is an incredible amount you can say about non-linearity. And you can say the same thing about how any concept, when reduced to "just X" seems trivial, but they are still often useful.

In other discussions with foresight on their discord, it was noted that "-strophe" already was linguistically linked to bad outcomes, and changing that seemed implausible, so a different term was likely better.

To quote Dennis Krause, in Jan 2022: "I stumbled upon 'anastrophe' in the german wikipedia, which is more or less =eucatastrophe. But I also think that *strophe always reminds people of catastrophe, because it is the most common." (This echoed Joy, here.)

You're treating utility like a fact, and actual outcomes as irrelevant, they conclusing risk preference is an artifact. But as you admitted, risk aversion over monetary outcomes exist, and it's the transformation to utility that removes it. Similarly, we'd expect risk aversion over non-monetary goods - having children and years of life are actual outcomes, and risk preference is secondary to those. So your example proves too much.

And yes, you can construct situations where "preferences" that are normally risk-averse become risk-loving when you change what concrete outcome you're discussing because you put in place arbitrary rules. So I can similarly make almost anyone risk-loving in money by saying that they die if they have too little money, and they need to double their current money to survive - but that's an artifact of the scenario, and says very little about risk preferences in less constrained scenarios.

That's not quite what the article says, and it's absolutely meaningful for non-monetary loss - though as the article does imply, you do need to be careful about how you think about utility, and understanding what your tradeoff between money and non-monetary goods would be.

We are thinking about it, but the political situation makes it unlikely that he is able to directly push for this domestically, and if we did something, it would likely be best if it were led by an organization well-placed to push the conversation forward internationally.

One fundamental issue is that they aren't providing evidence for their claims about cost effectiveness.

The response I got was quite specific: the volunteer claimed that UNICEF can save a life with just 1€ a day for an average period of 7 months.

If they had or have any reference, that could be evaluated. As-is, it sounds like that's the non-counterfactual treatment cost for sucessful cases, while also ignoring overhead and administrative costs.

Yes - though I think this is just an elaboration of what Abram wrote here.

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