Soapspud

Thank you!

I clicked on the application link and got a message that said "Sorry, the page you were looking for was not found." Did the application-window close early, or is that a glitch?

Not sure how this study on AI risks came to be. But to address your point about whether there is anything going on in Canada: AI Governance and Safety Canada (AIGS) has been coordinating advocacy and offering policy recommendations around AI safety for a few years now. Two of the witnesses, Andrea Miotti and Wyatt Tessari L'Allié, mentioned in Steven McCulloch's comment are from AIGS. One of the witnesses from the ETHI proceedings is Wyatt Tessari L'Allié of AIGS.

(Correction: Andrea Miotti is from Control AI, not AIGS.)

Bodybuilders have a competition season where they want to have a very low body fat percentage, often pushing down below sustainable levels. (I’ve seen numbers around 4%.)

This number is much higher for women (more like 10%), even at competition time.

it might not work as explicitly as people knowingly paying attention to it. It could be implicitly present in something else ("culture fit")

Yes, that sounds plausible to me as well. I did not mention those because I found it much harder to think of ways to tell when those dynamics are actually in play.

If I understand this correctly:

FWIW, I think this concern is important, but we need to be very cautious about it. Since one could always go "yeah, your results say nothing like this is going on, but the real mechanism is even more indirect".

I think you... (read more)

But I would be curious to know what are the dynamics that actually take place, which of them matter how much, and what is the overall effect.

I would be interested to know more about those too! However, I don't have any direct experience with the insides of AI companies, and I don't have any friends who do either, so I'm hoping that other readers of this post might have insights that they are willing to share.

For those who have worked for AI companies or have reliable info from others who have worked for an AI company, these are a few things I am especially... (read more)

I'm a new-ish runner, and I think I had a similar problem when I started. I couldn't jog slowly enough to not be immediately winded. I say immediately, but I could go for a few tens of seconds, I think? Less than a minute, and I would be surprised if it was even 30 seconds.

So, I started jogging for just long enough that I was touching the edge of being out of breath, but nothing really hurt, and then I would walk until I caught my breath and felt like I could do another short jog.

I still can't jog for that long, but it's way longer than before; and now I c... (read more)

We understand that we may be discounted or uninvited in the short term, but meanwhile our reputation as straight shooters with a clear and uncomplicated agenda remains intact.

I don't have any substantive comments, but I do want to express a great deal of joy about this approach.

I am really happy to see people choosing to engage with the policy, communications, and technical governance space with this attitude. 

We only have people who cry wolf all the time. I love that for them, and thank them for their service, which is very helpful. Someone needs to be in that role, if no one is going to be the calibrated version. Much better than nothing. Often their critiques point to very real issues, as people are indeed constantly proposing terrible laws.

The lack of something better calibrated is still super frustrating.

This mental (or emotional) move here, where you manage to be grateful for people doing a highly imperfect job while also being super frustrated that no one... (read more)

It's definitely intuition gained from a few years of doing those kinds of problems.

Also, there's an important point that makes my intuition a bit less impressive, and it's the fact that the problem-statement sounded like an intro-physics problem, so I assumed away many ambiguities that would make the solution particularly complicated to think through.

For example, thought it's not specified, it matters whether your gas is in a fixed volume or not, but if you assume the gas can expand, you're getting into solutions where you might need to know the boundary c... (read more)

My thought after reading the first sentence of your post, and before reading any of the comments, was that gases become less compressible at higher temperatures, which should make it more responsive to a pressure-wave, raising the speed of sound in that medium.

The less-misleading user interface seems good to me, but I have strong reservations about the other four interventions.

To use the shoggoth-with-smiley-face-mask analogy, the way the other strategies are phrased sounds like a request to create new, creepier masks for the shoggoth so people will stop being reassured by the smiley-face.

From the conversation with 1a3orn, I understand that the creepier masks are meant to depict how LLMs / future AIs might sometimes behave.

But I would prefer that the interventions removed the mask altogether, that seems more tru... (read more)

drawn black balls that I do not have adequate defenses for the informational content of directly.

I don't know what drawing black balls means in this context. Would someone be able to clarify?

Do you believe the MIRI view is Orwellian? If so, could you elaborate?

I would love to see research that collects data on metrics like cost of censorship and effectiveness of propaganda, and plots them over time to see if there is any general trend and how much it has varied over the course of human history, and whether the latest AI techniques are changing these metrics significantly.

If you have not already seen it, this report from CSET discusses the extent to which something as capable as GPT-3 changes the cost and effectiveness of disinformation and propaganda.

There was also a recorded discussion/seminar of the same to... (read more)