I suppose that sociologists, historians, philosophers, and (especially) futurologists do tackle the questions you describe, though maybe there is a sense in which they aren't doing so in a zoomed-out enough way.

I have just read the story, the post, and several comments, now amalgamating them in this reading:

The citizens of Omelas torture the child because they know that they themselves wouldn't believe in their own utopia (just like the reader).

and that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children [...] depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

It depends on it precisely because of this human flaw of not being capable of believing in such a perfect world without any tradeoffs. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts - they need to torture the child because they believe they need to torture the child.

The ones who walk away, therefore, are those who are able to recognize and discard that flaw, and build a new utopia without tradeoffs.

he called rescuers, thereby advancing the Pareto frontier and avoiding pesky utilitarian calculations (which are mostly incomputable for humans anyway).

Hand out cookies on the street

Well, I would refrain from taking free cookies from a stranger.

I think that "bring treats to the party for everyone" is a better replacement.
 

People sometimes just say stuff.

Sometimes, the amount of optimization power that was put into the words is less than you expect, or less than the gravity of the words would imply.

Some examples:

"You are not funny." (Did they evaluate your funniness across many domains and in diverse contexts in order to justify a claim like that?)

"Don't use this drug, it doesn't help." (Did they do the double-blind studies on a diverse enough population to justify a claim like that?)

"That's the best restaurant in town." (Did they really go to every restaurant in town? Did they consider that different people have different food preferences?)

That doesn't mean you should disregard those words. You should use them as evidence. But instead of updating on the event "I'm not funny," you should update on the event "This person, having some intent, not putting a lot of effort into evaluating this thing and mostly going off the vibes and shortness of the sentence, said to me 'You are not funny.'"

Do we have an AI Safety scientific journal?

If we do not, we should (probably) create it.

Wake up babe, new superintelligence company just dropped

And they show some impressive results.

The Math Inc. team is excited to introduce Gauss, a first-of-its-kind autoformalization agent for assisting human expert mathematicians at formal verification. Using Gauss, we have completed a challenge set by Fields Medallist Terence Tao and Alex Kontorovich in January 2024 to formalize the strong Prime Number Theorem (PNT) in Lean (GitHub).

Gauss took 3 weeks to do so, which seems way out of METR task length horizon prediction. Though I'm not sure if that's fair comparison, both because we do not have baseline human time for this task, and because formalizing is a domain where it is very hard to get off track, the criterion of success is very crisp.

I think alignment researchers have to learn to use it (or any other powerful math prover assistant) in order to exploit every leverage we can get.

I would like at some point to develop a theory of an agent who has “other stuff to do” besides the decision problem presented to them. Maybe this agent has some macro-scale quantities, like the (current) amount of compute, the (current) speed of self-improvement, or the (current) rate of gaining utility (analogous to macro-scale variables like “temperature” and “pressure” in thermodynamics). So when you present this agent with a decision problem, it can decide that it’s not even worth its time, or it can spend years of time and gazillions of flops of compute if the query is actually worth it (though I expect the first version of the theory to only deal with queries much smaller than the overall stuff the agent deals with). Continuing the analogy with thermodynamics, I would like the macro-scale properties of the whole agent to somehow emerge from micro-scale properties of the decision problems it faces plus some uniformity assumptions.

I hope that this would help develop a scale-free theory of agency, in the same sense that thermodynamics is scale-free.

Your definition seems sensible to me. Humans are not bayesians, they are not built as probabilistic machines with all of their probability being put explicitly in the memory. So I usually think of Bayesian approximation, which is basically what you’ve said. It’s unconscious when you don’t try to model those beliefs as Bayesian and unconscious otherwise.