There are two types of people in this world.
There are people who treat the lock on a public bathroom as a tool for communicating occupancy and a safeguard against accidental attempts to enter when the room is unavailable. For these people the standard protocol is to discern the likely state of engagement of the inner room and then tentatively proceed inside if they detect no signs of human activity.
And there are people who view the lock on a public bathroom as a physical barricade with which to temporarily defend possessed territory. They start by giving the door a hearty push to test the tensile strength of the barrier. On meeting resistance they engage with full force, wringing the handle up and down and slamming into the door with their full body weight. Only once their attempts are thwarted do they reluctantly retreat to find another stall.
Tarbell Fellowship at PPF
I think you've massively underrated this. My impression is that Tarbell has had significant effect on the general AI discourse, by allowing a number of articles to be written in mainstream outlets.
karma should also transfer automatically
Unconferences are a thing for this reason
This is fantastic technical writing. It would have taken me hours to understand these papers this deeply, but you convey the core insights quickly in an entertaining and understandable way.
If there are ‘subshards’ which achieve this desirable behavior because they, from their own perspective, ‘intrinsically’ desire power (whatever that sort of distinction makes when you’ve broken things down that far), and it is these subshards which implement the instrumental drive... so what? After all, there has to be some level of analysis at which an agent stops thinking about whether or not it should do some thing and just starts doing the thing. Your muscles “intrinsically desire” to fire when told to fire, but the motor actions are still ultimately instrumental, to accomplish something other than individual muscles twitching. You can’t have ‘instrumental desire’ homunculuses all the way down to the individual transistor or ReLU neuron.
I sent this paragraph to TurnTrout as I was curious to get his reaction. Paraphrasing his response below:
No, that's not the point. That's actually the opposite of what i'm trying to say. The subshards implement the algorithmic pieces and the broader agent has an "intrinsic desire" for power. The subshards themselves are not agentic, and that's why (in context) I substitute them in for "circuits".
It's explained in this post that I linked to. Though I guess in context I do say "prioritize" in a way that might be confusing. Shard Theory argues against homonculist accounts of cognition by considering the mechanistic effects of reinforcement processes. Also the subshards are not implementing an instrumental drive in the sense of "implementing the power-seeking behavior demanded by some broader consequentialist plan" they're just seeking power, just 'cuz.
From my early post: Inner and Outer Alignment Decompose One Hard Problem Into Two Extremely Hard Problems
I literally do not understand what the internal cognition is supposed to look like for an inner-aligned agent. Most of what I’ve read has been vague, on the level of “an inner-aligned agent cares about optimizing the outer objective.”
Charles Foster comments:
- "We are attempting to mechanistically explain how an agent makes decisions. One proposed reduction is that inside the agent, there is an even smaller inner agent that interacts with a non-agential evaluative submodule to make decisions for the outer agent. But that raises the immediate questions of “How does the inner agent make its decisions about how to interact with the evaluative submodule?” and then “At some point, there’s gotta be some non-agential causal structure that is responsible for actually implementing decision-making, right?” and then “Can we just explain the original agent’s behavior in those terms? What is positing an externalized evaluative submodule buying us?"
Perhaps my emphasis on mechanistic reasoning and my unusual level of precision in my speculation about AI internals, perhaps these make people realize how complicated realistic cognition is in the shard picture. Perhaps people realize how much might have to go right, how many algorithmic details may need to be etched into a network so that it does what we want and generalizes well.
But perhaps people don’t realize that a network which is inner-aligned on an objective will also require a precise and conforming internal structure, and they don’t realize this because no one has written detailed plausible stabs at inner-aligned cognition.
I would recommend reading the original reddit post that motivated it: https://www.reddit.com/r/biology/comments/16y81ct/the_case_for_whales_actually_matching_or_even/.
It is meant seriously, but the author is rightly acknowledging how far-fetched it sounds.
[00:31:25] Timothy:... This is going to be like, they didn't talk about any content, like there's no specific evidence,
[00:31:48] Elizabeth: I wrote down my evidence ahead of time.
[00:31:49] Timothy: Yeah, you already wrote down your evidence
I feel pretty uncertain to what extent I agree with your views on EA. But this podcast didn't really help me decide because there wasn't much discussion of specific evidence. Where is all of it written down? I'm aware of your post on vegan advocacy but unclear if there are lots more examples. I also heard a similar line of despair about EA epistemics from other long-time rationalists when hanging around Lighthaven this summer. But basically no one brought up specific examples.
It seems difficult to characterize the EA movement as a monolith in the way you're trying to do. The case of vegan advocacy is mostly irrelevant to my experience of EA. I have little contact with vegan advocates and most of the people I hang around in EA circles seem to have quite good epistemics.
However I can relate to your other example, because I'm one of the "baby EAs" who was vegetarian and was in the Lightcone offices in summer 2022. But my experience provides something of a counter-example. In fact, I became vegetarian before encountering EA and mostly found out about the potential nutritional problems from other EAs. When you wrote your post, I got myself tested for iron deficiency and started taking supplements (although not for iron deficiency). I eventually stopped being vegetarian, instead offsetting my impact with donations to animal charities, even though this isn't very popular in EA circles.
My model is that people exist on a spectrum of weirdness to normy-ness. The weird people are often willing to pay social costs to be more truthful. While the more normy people will refrain from saying and thinking the difficult truths. But most people are mostly fixed at a certain point on the spectrum. The truth-seeking weirdos probably made up a larger proportion of the early EA movement, but I'd guess in absolute terms the number of those sorts of people hanging around EA spaces has not declined, and their epistemics have not degraded - there just aren't very many of them in the world. But these days there is a greater number of the more normy people in EA circles too.
And yes, it dilutes the density of high epistemics in EA. But that doesn't seem like a reason to abandon the movement. It is a sign that more people are being influenced by good ideas and that creates opportunities for the movement to do bigger things.
When you want to have interesting discussions with epistemic peers, you can still find your own circles within the movement to spend time with, and you can still come to the (relative) haven of LessWrong. If LessWrong culture also faced a similar decline in epistemic standards I would be much more concerned, but it has always felt like EA is the applied, consumer facing product of the rationalist movement, that targets real-world impact over absolute truth-seeking. For example, I think most EAs (and also some rationalists) are hopelessly confused about moral philosophy, but I'm still happy there's more people trying to live by utilitarian principles, who might otherwise not be trying to maximize value at all.
I started working on PhD applications about 12 days ago. I expect to have fairly polished applications for the first deadline on December 1, despite not working on this full time. So I think it's quite possible to do applications for the December 15 deadlines. You would need to contact your referees (and potential supervisors for UK universities) in the next couple of days.