What do you think antidepressants would be useful for?
In my experience I've gone months through a depressive episode while remaining externally functional and convincing myself (and the people around me) that I'm not going through a depressive episode. Another thing I've noticed is that with medication (whether anxiolytics, antidepressants or ADHD medication), I regularly underestimate the level at which I was 'blocked' by some mental issue that, after taking the medication, would not exist, and I would only realize it previously existed due to the (positive) changes in my behavior and cognition.
Essentially, I'm positing that you may be in a similar situation.
Have you considered antidepressants? I recommend trying them out to see if they help. In my experience, antidepressants can have non-trivial positive effects that can be hard-to-put-into-words, except you can notice the shift in how you think and behave and relate to things, and this shift is one that you might find beneficial.
I also think that slowing down and taking care of yourself can be good -- it can help build a generalized skill of noticing the things you didn't notice before that led to the breaking point you describe.
Here's an anecdote that might be interesting to you: There's a core mental shift I made over the past few months that I haven't tried to elicit and describe to others until now, but in essence it involves a sort of understanding that the sort of self-sacrifice that usually is involved in working as hard as possible leads to globally unwanted outcomes, not just locally unwanted outcomes. (Of course, we can talk about hypothetical isolated thought experiments and my feelings might change, but I'm talking about a holistic relating to the world here.)
Here's one argument for this, although I don't think this captures the entire source of my feelings about this: When parts of someone is in conflict, and they regularly are rejecting a part of them that wants something (creature comforts) to privilege the desires of another part of them that wants another thing (work more), I expect that their effectiveness in navigating and affecting reality is lowered in comparison to one where they take the time to integrate the desires and beliefs of the parts of them that are in conflict. In extreme circumstances, it makes sense for someone to 'override' other parts (which is how I model the flight-fight-fawn-freeze response, for example), but this seems unsustainable and potentially detrimental when it comes to navigating a reality where sense-making is extremely important.
This is a very interesting paper, thanks.
What was the requirement? Seems like this was a deliberate effect instead of a side effect.
which I know you object to
Buck, could you (or habryka) elaborate on this? What does Buck call the set of things that ARC theory and METR (formerly known as ARC evals) does, "AI control research"?
My understanding is that while Redwood clearly does control research, METR evals seem more of an attempt to demonstrate dangerous capabilities than help with control. I haven't wrapped my head around ARC's research philosophy and output to confidently state anything.
If you haven't read CEV, I strongly recommend doing so. It resolved some of my confusions about utopia that were unresolved even after reading the Fun Theory sequence.
Specifically, I had an aversion to the idea of being in a utopia because "what's the point, you'll have everything you want". The concrete pictures that Eliezer gestures at in the CEV document do engage with this confusion, and gesture at the idea that we can have a utopia where the AI does not simply make things easy for us, but perhaps just puts guardrails onto our reality, such that we don't die, for example, but we do have the option to struggle to do things by ourselves.
Yes, the Fun Theory sequence tries to communicate this point, but it didn't make sense to me until I could conceive of an ASI singleton that could actually simply not help us.
I dropped the book within the first chapter. For one, I found the way Bostrom opened the chapter as very defensive and self-conscious. I imagine that even Yudkowsky wouldn't start a hypothetical 2025 book with fictional characters caricaturing him. Next, I felt like I didn't really know what the book was covering in terms of subject matter, and I didn't feel convinced it was interesting enough to continue the meandering path Nick Bostrom seem to have laid out before me.
Eliezer's CEV document and the Fun Theory sequence were significantly more pleasant experiences, based on my memory.
we don’t give a shit about morality. Instead, we care about social norms that we can use to shame other people, masquerading under the banner of morality.
I think that basically all of moral cognition, actually.
Caring about others to me seems to be entirely separate from moral cognition. (Note that this may be a controversial statement and it is on my to-do list to make a detailed argument for this claim.)
If you are willing to share, can you say more about what got you into this line of investigation, and what you were hoping to get out of it?
Burnt out after almost an year of focusing on alignment research. I wanted to take a break from alignment-ey stuff and also desired to systematically fix the root causes behind the fact that I hit what I considered burn-out.
I don’t feel like I have many issues/baggage/trauma
I felt similar when I began this, and my motivation was not to 'fix issues' in myself but more "hey I have explicitly decided to take a break and have fun and TYCS seems interesting let's experiment with it for a while, I can afford to do so".
Yes, I believe that one can learn to entirely stop even considering certain potential actions as actions available to us. I don't really have a systematic solution for this right now aside from some form of Noticing practice (I believe a more refined version of this practice is called Naturalism but I don't have much experience with this form of practice).