This is easier said than done. EA has these problems in part because of our associations with the whole "TESCREAL" lumping together of various Silicon Valley centric ideologies. We're closely tied to the Rationalists of Less Wrong for various reasons (I once met Yudkowsky at an EA Global conference), and many of our so-called thought leaders like Bostrom and MacAskill are Oxford philosophers with a particular nexus of views that tend to be somewhat controversial right now.

We also, as a very open-minded, truth-seeking community, tend to, in my humble opinion, overly humour ideas that are contrarian and distinctly unpopular. The merits of Eugenics for instance, were debated here several times, though mostly disapproved of.

EA in general tends to make assumptions that are a subset of the umbrella of liberal philosophy, not necessarily progressive or socialist philosophy. We've historically tended to downplay systemic change (i.e. anti-capitalism, government intervention, etc.), in favour of individual actions like donating to charities and career change. This puts us in the crosshairs of criticism from the more left-wing progressives and socialists. The Guardian is, known to have become more progressive lately, and Naomi Klein is from a family with connections to the social democratic NDP in Canada.

This is not to say there aren't EAs who are sympathetic to more left-wing considerations. Many of the rank and file are, as seen in the EA Surveys. But many of our thought leaders are known to be more centrist, and even occasionally right-wing. Peter Thiel despises us now, but did give a talk at an EA conference, as did Elon Musk, way back in the day (circa 2013-2015).

EA has a complicated history, and unfortunately, a lot of it is controversial stuff that gets dredged up everytime someone wants to come criticize us, fairly or not.

Within EA there is definitely a diversity of views, and you're probably more familiar with the Global Health and Animal Welfare "faction" that does obviously good uncontroversial stuff, but we also have the AI Safety and Longtermism "faction" that gets strongly associated with Silicon Valley. I say faction, but there is obviously overlap and not clear boundaries, so much as different emphases.

So, it's hard. I've been around since the early days, and I really, really, dislike how the media mostly focuses on the controversy and ignores the good that we do. But I don't really see a way to solve this. Independent western journalism is hypercriticial of pretty much everything remotely political, and efforts at PR and optics by CEA tend to grate against the pure truth-seeking mindset of many EAs.

Your solution seems to be to "move EA into the centre of the Overton Window", and get better exemplars to represent EA. I'm not sure this is really possible. For the first, it'll strike many EAs as less than truth-seeking, to try to hue to arbitrary public opinion, and risks removing the differences between EA and generic progressivism or centrism or whatever you think fits the Overton Window (in which case, why bother becoming an EA?). The Overton Window may not even be a useful concept anymore in our highly polarized discourse.

As for exemplars, Peter Singer is actually somewhat controversial for his old position on infanticide, and the only famous celebrity I know of who is EA sympathetic is Joseph Gordan-Levitt, who recently had a bit of a scandal over being an invitee to Peter Thiel's Dialog secret society thing. Hank Green has also sometimes engaged with EA-like ideas, but has been critical of the kind of hyper-calculating, efficiency focused mindset we often use. There are a few vegan celebrities like Billie Eilish, but I don't know that they are on-board with EA generally.

So, about optics generally, it's not like people haven't tried. A few years back there were positive, sympathetic articles about EA, including this one about MacAskill. Vox Media also had its Future Perfect coverage of EA, that was pretty sympathetic.

Also, might as well mention that if you really want to dig into EA stuff, there's the simple fact that the by far the largest donor to EA is billionaire Dustin Moskovitz, through Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy). Admittedly, Moskovitz is surprisingly progressive for a billionaire, and was one of the largest donors to the Democrats in the last election.

Anyways, hope that helps to show how complicated the situation is.

That is sorta the idea yes. Agents would choose this decision criteria mostly because it vastly increases their odds of survival, which allows them to further whatever goals they have. I would hope that this result is obvious enough that many agents will be able to converge on it, increasing the proportion using it, and thus increasing the overall survival rate.

The other takeaway is that, given that humans will be weaker than AGI/ASI, any game theoretic reason for such entities to still cooperate with us can potentially help reduce the existential risk.

I agree that the model requires further scrutiny to determine if it is realistic enough to matter.

I have this game theory thing I've been working on that involves modifying the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma to include death, asymmetric power, and aggressor reputation. Agents' points are their "power" that dynamically impacts their payoff matrix. 

The basic takeaway is that this simple simulation seems to make a case for cooperating with weaker agents, by showing how the cooperative strategies outcompete the aggressive ones in the long run. I think, before I can make a proper post about it, I'll need to run some analysis to graph out how, for instance, having a higher percentage of cooperative agents increases the odds of survival, which implies a kind of Veil of Ignorance logic towards being cooperative.

Note that I mean cooperative in the sense that you don't defect first except against aggressors that have defected first against non-aggressors.

With default settings, the most common result of any given run is that a significant number of the cooperative strategies survive and almost all of the aggressive ones die out. Very occasionally, particularly if you adjust the settings are certain way, a single "Opportunist" strategy, that Tit-For-Tats against stronger agents and Defects against weaker ones, will be the only survivor. This seems to imply, at least, to me, that being a cooperative strategy significantly increases your odds of survival, as the alternative is to hope to win a "Highlander" scenario.

I think this is relevant to AI alignment as a variation on Anthropic Capture, the "Hail Mary" approach that Bostrom mentions in Superintelligence. It could work as part of a defence-in-depth, a kind of "infoblessing" that could persuade some AGI to spare us as a kind of Superrational Signalling. While you might assume this only works if aliens are probable, it also functions in a multi-agent scenario where there are several AGI at near peer levels of power. It also potentially could be a way to align a previously unaligned AGI even after it is deployed. If enough AGIs are aligned in this way, their alliance could defeat the unaligned AGIs.

You can run the simulation yourself here: https://paxscientia.com/power/

I have the code and initial analysis here: https://github.com/josephius/power

I realize that a very obvious critique of this work is that the simulation is probably too simple. I intentionally tried to keep it an MVP in its first iteration. I also should, as mentioned earlier, complete a more thorough and rigorous analysis of the apparent results. I'm also keenly aware that it seems like this is a "neglected" path towards alignment, and I'm uncertain whether this is because the idea is a bad one that's already been discarded by others who are more competent. I know that there are related ideas around Decision Theory, Acausal Trade, and Superrationality, but I've never seen this particular kind of effort, which confuses me, because it seems obvious and trivial to try.

My main question to ask is simply, does this seem like something worth pursuing and expanding further, or am I wasting my time on a foolish endeavour?

Yeah, getting something to be both meaningful and fun at the same time is hard. I took a quick look at your prototype. It could have some potential, but at the same time, it's not the only game out there with a similar idea. I recently came across The Choice Before Us, which is in a similar vein.

Given how fast things are moving in terms of AI developments, I'm not sure it's realistic to try to make a game that's polished enough to go viral before things change enough that the game is essentially obsolete.

Also, games are hard. Creative work seems very lottery-like in terms of success. Maybe you can argue from a risk neutral EV perspective that it's worth it, but that doesn't pay the bills.

Interesting.

What if there was a way to conceal your RKV or invasion fleet, like some kind of cloaking device or camouflage technique?

And what about spamming an overwhelming number of RKVs or invasion fleets? In theory, you might be able to saturate defences and win a war of attrition if you have a significantly stronger industrial base? If one civilization is already a billion years ahead of another, wouldn't that one be likely to have such an insurmountable lead in control of energy resources that they could simply use sheer numbers?

Also, it's a big assumption to make that there's no wormholes/FTL/time travel shenanigans possible.

With wormholes, it would be possible to, for instance, send an invasion probe with one end of a wormhole, and when it arrives, send forces through from the other end of the wormhole. However, defenders could also have a vast network of wormholes that would allow near instant transfer of forces. If the defenders have good sensor networks, they could also destroy the incoming wormhole probes. Still, if even one wormhole probe gets into the galaxy, the supply lines suddenly don't look so one-sided, and you could, again, spam lots of these probes in the hopes that one makes it there, and then you flood into the galaxy through the wormhole bridgehead.

With FTL, in theory, you could send an RKV with it that their sensors might not be able to detect in time, unless there are FTL sensors, which would negate this. But, if FTL is possible, it's probably equivalent to time travel...

A civilization with time travel is likely to at least know in advance when an attack is coming. This would benefit defence by making the element of surprise even more impossible. And taken to its logical extreme, time travel would likely be used to ensure that no other threatening civilizations come into existence in our lightcone in the first place. This would, in practice, create a universe where every civilization exists in its own otherwise empty bubble, not unlike your predicted universe, but for different reasons than defence dominance.

At least, those are my initial thoughts.

Edit: Also, being able to see the acceleration and deceleration plumes assumes we never develop something more efficient, like say, a light sail, or some kind of beam thruster with almost no beam divergence. These, I imagine, would be harder to detect?

I will take a much stronger stand and also say that I'm very sympathetic to the argument by creatives that using generative AI is inherently unethical for a wide variety of reasons, ranging from the nature of how the data is collected without permission, to the environmental and societal impacts, to the way it degrades our culture through slop.

I'll also throw in from a more doomer perspective that by using these models, we are supporting the AI industry, giving them data and (if you are subscribing) money to rush toward building ever more dangerous systems (even if LLMs don't pan out, the sheer amount of research effort now going into AI makes things likely to reach critical mass) that can already cause things like AI psychosis, are nearing the point of mass replacement of labour with capital, and could one day kill us all.

I do not subscribe to any chatbot services, and have only experimented with free versions to a extent, and have never used them for my coding or writing.

I personally, am seriously considering joining PauseAI and possibly, additionally, boycotting AI products. This from someone who used to be an ML researcher before it was cool.

I'm very much aggrieved to see my life's work used for such tremendous evil as it is now.

I think EA should take a much stronger stand against AI. The public backlash is already starting, and for once, we should pick a side. If the most recent METR trendlines are right, we don't have much time left.

How much of a post are you comfortable for AI to write?

I have a particular writing style that I consider my "voice", and I fundamentally take pride in my writing skill and see writing as a craft and art form, so I refuse to use AI to write a single word of what I would publish to the world.

To me, using AI for writing is equivalent to having someone else write it for you.

Not quite a draft amnesty thing, but I have been playing with the idea of writing short stories or perhaps even novels that use time travellers as a vehicle for Longtermism. The idea is that time travellers from the far distant future are our descendents, the very people that Longtermism cares about, so their perspective could be something worth exploring in fiction.

Given, I'm more of a soft Longtermist, and creative writing is notoriously hard to make any kind of living out of, so I'm not sure to what extent this is worth doing/trying/exploring, even as just a side project.

I've been on this forum since 2014 and I -still- feel this way sometimes. Although, I will say Less Wrong is notably worse for this.

It does get better after you make a few comments/posts and notice people aren't jumping all over you. I used to be much more terrified, but now, I'm only kinda apprehensive whenever I post.

I've explored very similar ideas before in things like this simulation based on the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma but with Death, Asymmetric Power, and Aggressor Reputation. Long story short, the cooperative strategies do generally outlast the aggressive ones in the long run. It's also an idea I've tried to discuss (albeit less rigorously) before as The Alpha Omega Theorem and Superrational Signalling. The first of those was from 2017 and got downvoted to oblivion, while the second was probably too long-winded and got mostly ignored.

There are a bunch of random people like James Miller and A.V. Turchin and Ryo who have had similar ideas that can broadly be categorized under Bostrom's concept of Anthropic Capture, or Game Theoretic Alignment, or possibly a subset of Agent Foundations. The ideas are mostly not taken very seriously by the greater LW and EA communities, so I'd be prepared for a similar reception.