All of Raymond D's Comments + Replies

A slightly sideways argument for interpretability: It's a really good way to introduce the importance and tractability of alignment research

In my experience it's very easy to explain to someone with no technical background that

• Image classifiers have got much much better (like in 10 years they went from being impossible to being something you can do on your laptop)
• We actually don't really understand why they do what they do (like we don't know why the classifier says this is an image of a cat, even if it's right)
• But, thanks to dedicated research, we have be

My main takeaway from this post is that it's important to distinguish between sending signals and trying to send signals, because the latter often leads to goodharting.

It's tricky, though, because obviously you want to be paying attention to what signals you're giving off, and how they differ from the signals you'd like to be giving off, and sometimes you do just have to try to change them. 

For instance, I make more of an effort now than I used to, to notice when I appreciate what people are doing, and tell them, so that they know I care. And I think ... (read more)

The belief that people can only be morally harmed by things that causally affect them is not universally accepted. Personally I intuitively would like my grave to not be desecrated, for instance.

I think we have lots of moral intuitions that have become less coherent as science has progressed. But if my identical twin started licensing his genetic code to make human burgers for people who wanted to see what cannibalism was like, I would feel wronged.

I'm using pretty charged examples here, but the point I'm trying to convey is that there are a lot of moral l... (read more)

You ask a number of good questions here, but the crucial point to me is that they are still questions. I agree it seems, based on my intuitions of the answers, like this isn't the best path. But 'how much would it cost' and 'what's the chance a clone works on something counterproductive' are, to me, not an argument against cloning, but rather arguments for working out how to answer those questions.

Also very ironic if we can't even align clones and that's what gets us.

I think there are extra considerations to do with what the clone's relation to von Neumann. Plausibly, it might be wrong to clone him without his consent, which we can now no longer get. And the whole idea that you might have a right to your likeness, identity, image, and so on, becomes much trickier as soon as you have actually been cloned.

Also there's a bit of a gulf between a parent deciding to raise a child they think might do good and a (presumably fairly large) organisation funding the creation of a child.

I don't have strongly held convictions on these points, but I do think that they're important and that you'd need to have good answers before you cloned somebody.

Well, I basically agree with everything you just said. I think we have quite different opinions about what politics is, though, and what it's for. But perhaps this isn't the best place to resolve those differences.

Ok I think this is partly fair, but also clearly our moral standards are informed by our society, and in no small part those standards emerge from discussions about what we collectively would like those standards to be, and not just a genetically hardwired disloyalty sensor.

Put another way: yes, in pressured environments we act on instinct, but those instincts don't exist in a vacuum, and the societal project of working out what they ought to be is quite important and pretty hard, precisely because in the moment where you need to refer to it, you will be acting on System 1.

I'm not sure I'm entirely persuaded. Are you saying that the goal of ethics is to accurately predict what people's moral impulse will be in arbitrary situations?

I think moral impulses have changed with times, and it's notable that some people (Bentham, for example) managed to think hard about ethics and arrive at conclusions which massively preempted later shifts in moral values.

Like, Newton's theories give you a good way to predict what you'll see when you throw a ball in the air, but it feels incorrect to me to say that Newton's goal was to find order in... (read more)

Migration - they have a team that will just do it for you if you're on the annual plan, plus there's an exporting plugin (https://ghost.org/docs/migration/wordpress/)

Setup - yeah there are a bunch of people who can help with this and I am one of them

I'll message you

Massive conflict of interest: I blog on ghost, know and like the people at ghost, and work at a company that moved from substack to ghost, get paid to help people use ghost, and a couple more COIs in this vein. 

But if you're soliciting takes from somebody from wordpress I think you might also appreciate the case for ghost, which I simply do think is better than substack for most bloggers above a certain size.

Re your cons, ghost:

1 - has a migration team and the ability to do custom routing, so you would be able to migrate your content

3 - supports total... (read more)

I'd like to throw out some more bad ideas, with fewer disclaimers about how terrible they are because I have less reputation to hedge against.

Inline Commenting

I very strongly endorse the point that it seems bad that someone can make bad claims in a post, which are then refuted in comments which only get read by people who get all the way to the bottom and read comments. To me the obvious (wrong) solution is to let people make inline comments. If nothing else, having a good way within comments to point to what part of the post you want to address feels like... (read more)

I'm really enjoying the difference between the number of people who claimed they opted out and the number of people who explicitly wrote the phrase

ah whoops thanks!

What's the procedure?