Hi, Anna. The post was very interesting, and I'd be happy to do some 'kibitzing' (had to check the word's meaning, actually), even if I give low credence that anything I'll say might be of use.
I am a relatively late arriver to the world of Rationalism (from about 3 years ago or so), having gone through some of the usual suspects (Julia Galef's Scout Mindset and her podcasts; Chivers' book on Rationalism; HPMOR and some online posts from Scott Alexander; some CFAR materials online, and some youtube videos; not much Less Wrong or The Sequences though, until now). What attracted me to it was my quasi-religious attachment for truth-seeking and for avoiding... (read more)
Question: wouldn't how we dealt with Acid Rain and the Ozone layer be counterexamples? In these cases one didn't have a clear deadline, but we did manage to muster the resources and effort to overcome the issues. I would think the issue is not so much just status quo, but actual, generalized understanding of the magnitude of the risk + degree of certainty + actionability. AI risks seem to have big problems with each of those three.
That sounds very reasonable. In the review, I wasn’t consciously trying to play a blame game with Yudkowsky and Soares (I generally think blame is ineffective at producing good outcomes anyway) but rather to articulate a reader’s uncertainty about what their reference class for relevant expertise actually is.
My own naïve take would be something like what you say: people with substantial hands-on technical experience in contemporary AI systems, combined with people who have thought deeply about the theoretical aspects of alignment. My impression is that even within this relatively restrictive class there remains a wide diversity of views, and that these do not, on average, converge on the positions defended in the... (read more)
I mean... if there's one thing I learned by studying literature and literary criticism at uni (spoiler: I didn't learn much, and most of what I did was not very valuable), it is that texts are very seldom completely self-consistent. Still, I think what you say is fair: the authors haven't just given up (if they had, they wouldn't have written the book in the first place), but it feels to me that the solutions they propose are wildly impractical, and perceived as such by the authors, and that this perception likely plays a big role in their P(doom). If the bar for “meaningful risk reduction” is set so high that only globally coordinated, near-wartime restrictions count, then the conclusion of extreme doom follows almost automatically from the premises. I’m not convinced the argument sufficiently explores whether there are intermediate, messy, politically imperfect interventions that could still substantially lower risk without meeting that idealized threshold.
Hello there! This is my first post in Less Wrong, so I will be asking for your indulgence for any overall silliness or breaking of norms that I may inadvertently have fallen into. All feedback will be warmly taken and (ideally) interiorized.
A couple of months ago, dvd published a semi-outsider review of IABIED which I found rather interesting and gave me the idea of sharing my own. I also took notes of every chapter, which I keep in my blog.
My priors
I am a 40-ish year old Spaniard from the rural, northwest corner of the country, so I've never had any sort of face-to-face with the Rationalist community (with the partial exception of... (read 2189 more words →)
This was a nice and relatively short post as well. I started reading it from what I assume is an anti-realist position (ethics as something constructed, a framework of agreements between rational agents to enable cooperation and mutual benefit, and therefore something mostly procedural and contractual. Probably aligned with Hobbes and Gauthier, once I find the time to read them). I was unsurprised that, having chosen your 5 as the most similar to my views, you described it as 'moral anti-realist'. I have the impression that EAs and perhaps a lot of Rationalists seem to resonate a lot with Utilitarianism. I appreciate any suggestions of older posts to read in this regard (I am new to all this).
Hello there! My name is Manuel and I am a TEFL teacher from Spain. I discovered Rationalism and the Rationality community a few years ago (late 2022) and found myself sharing a lot of what seem to be its core principles, i.e., I think I am quite enthusiastic about all of these, from the User's Guide:
I liked your post, and I’m probably the sort of person predisposed to like it (for context: history has been my favorite subject since I was 11; it was my first degree at university; I’ve read widely both in historical scholarship and in the meta-justifications for studying it). I’ve also been deeply steeped in the broader humanities, and that background has shaped how I see the world and what my preferences and the things I care about are. Still, statements like “the humanities exist to improve our minds” and “history improves us” strike me as mostly normative aspirations rather than accurate descriptions of how interaction with those fields typically functions.
The core difficulty... (read more)