I just assumed this works without even questioning it. ^^ Can you explain more concretely what you did? When I simulate this in my mind, I'm able to pull the rope sideways as long as there are less than three people pulling the rope at each side. They are also not allowed to counteract my pulling more than they would by default without my pulling, right?

Thanks for you work on this! I eat vegan since ~9 years now and also am probably not investing as much time into checking my health as would be optimal, but at least my recent shotgun blood test didn't turn up any issues except being low on HDL cholesterol and I don't have the impression that I'm less healthy than non-vegan peers (but certainly always could feel fitter and more energized than I normally am). Happy to share the test results privately if that'd be useful for you, have one from ~7 years ago and one from this year.

The report mentioned "harm to the global financial system [and to global supply chains]" somewhere as examples, which I found noteworthy for being very large scale harms and therefore plausibly requiring AI systems that the AI x-risk community is most worried about.

I also stumbled over this sentence.

1) I think even non-obvious issues can get much more research traction than AI safety does today. And I don't even think that catastrophic risks from AI are particularly non-obvious?

2) Not sure how broadly "cause the majority of research" is defined here, but I have some hope we can find ways to turn money into relevant research

Some ideas take many decades to become widely (let alone universally) accepted—famous examples include evolution and plate tectonics.

One example that an AI policy person mentioned in a recent Q&A is "bias in ML" already being fairly much a consensus issue in ML and AI policy. I guess this happened in 5ish years?

What do you think about encouraging writers to add TLDRs on top of their posts? TLDRs make the purpose and content immediately clear so readers can decide whether to read on, and it plausibly also helps the writers to be more focused on their key points. (Advice that’s emphasized a lot at Rethink Priorities.)

Thanks, this was a really useful overview for me. 

I find the idea of the AI Objectives Institute really interesting. I've read their website and watched their kick-off call and would be interested how promising people in the AI Safety space think the general approach is, how much we might be able to learn from it, and how much solutions to the AI alignment problem will resemble a competently regulated competitive market between increasingly extremely competent companies.

I'd really appreciate pointers to previous discussions and papers on this topic, too. 

Sounds really cool! Regarding the 1st and 3rd person models, this reminded my of self-perception theory (from the man Daryl Bem), which states that humans model themselves in the same way we model others, just by observing (our) behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-perception_theory

I feel like in the end our theories of how we model ourselves must involve input and feedback from “internal decision process information“, but this seems very tricky to think about. I‘m soo sure I observe my own thoughts and feelings and use that to understand myself. 

Thanks for elaborating!

I guess I would say, any given desire has some range of how strong it can be in different situations, and if you tell me that the very strongest possible air-hunger-related desire is stronger than the very strongest possible social-instinct-related desire, I would say "OK sure, that's plausible." But it doesn't seem particularly relevant to me. The relevant thing to me is how strong the desires are at the particular time that you're making a decision or thinking a thought.

I think that almost captures what I was thinking, only that I expect the average intensity within these ranges to differ, e.g. for some individuals the desire for social interaction is usually very strong or for others rather weak (which I expect you to agree with). And this should explain which desires more often supply the default plan and for which additional "secondary" desires the neocortex has to work for to find an overall better compromise.

For example, you come home and your body feels tired and the desire that is strongest at this moment is the desire for rest, and the plan that suits this desire most is lying in bed and watching TV. But then another desire for feeling productive pushes for more plan suggestions and the neocortex comes up with lying on the coach and reading a book. And then the desire for being social pushes a bit and the revised plan is for reading the book your mum got you as a present.