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The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

economist.com

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Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#341

Post by FeepingCreature »

imgabe wrote: post #338
FeepingCreature wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if when jumping off a roof, I spontaneously developed the ability to fly? And yet I will not attempt it, and worse, strongly evangelize that roofhopping should be avoided by everyone. How arrogant of me, how presumptuous! Though we cannot tell in every case what the outcome will be, that is no excuse to not consider the odds.

But lots of people did jump off of things with various contraptions and we did eventually develop the ability to fly that way.

Almost like we should try to make advance predictions about outcomes given particular circumstances and continuously test them against reality :)

These people after all pursued theoretical means by which the risk of death could be reduced, and then put them into practice in order to improve their understanding.

You can die in the air. You can die on the ground! Sometimes jumping off a cliff is safer than staying there. There is no safe path, no guarantee of survival; you have to speculate, to make theories, to test them, to choose the path that seems best to you. There is nothing arrogant about this.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#342

Post by olalonde »

llamaimperative wrote: post #291
marginalia_nu wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's honestly kinda unsettling how many bizarre sci-fi takes on AGI have gained popular plausibility since the new AI marketing boom. Potent kool-aid.

Not weird at all. When (probably when , not if ) we create it, we will quickly be interacting with an entity with a similar power imbalance as we have to ants. No one knows exactly what the outcome will be, even less so what to do about it, but surely the kool-aid is watching accelerating progress toward this state and believing either it won’t happen or it won’t be interesting/surprising. Disclaimer: I don’t think t…

> I don’t think this is coming soon

Personally, I feel it might become a risk one day, but how soon is an important detail. If the threat is still far away, its nature is very blurry and there is no use to worry too much about it today (or advocate for a ban on AI research).

There are still many safe intermediary steps we have to go through before the threat concretizes and becomes worth worrying about.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#343

Post by notahacker »

ethanbond wrote: post #319
coldtea wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not weird at all. When (probably when, not if) we create it, we will quickly be interacting with an entity with a similar power imbalance as we have to ants. That's the sci-fi idea, which handwaves away several very big assumptions and improbabilities, such as that intelligence can be grown to absurd levels (or even just majorly) just by adding hardware to allow for it, that intelligence can just be expanded by its…

1) Why do we have a reason to believe there’s a cap to intelligence? 2) No, you don’t need to assume it happens via adding hardware 3) No, you don’t need to assume it can expand by itself 4) We’ve already seen people connecting AI systems to open internet and open internet to command and control of physical systems (cars, utilities, soon weapons systems) - turns out there was no convincing necessary 5) Nanobots also…

> Also, incentives, not charisma, are what steer human behavior.

The number of people with incentives to work towards destroying the whole of humanity is rather small, and I'd rather we deal with them first since they need not wait for unfriendly AI to be dangerous...

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#344

Post by Devasta »

As an Effective Altruist I want to cure cancer, so I maximize my income by selling cigarettes to children outside playgrounds. The money will eventually be donated to the cause in my will, and in the meantime the prevalence of lung cancer in teens will incentivise the Free Market™ to find a cure.

No need to thank me, really.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#345

Post by navane »

Their quality-of-life points combined with long-term-ism reminds me of that simcity build that maximized the population to absurd levels. If you get 'points' for each life, past and future, than maximizing the number of future life is the easiest way to maximize your high score.

> Bostrom calculates that 10E29 potential lives are lost for every second that we fail to colonise the supercluster of galaxies containing the Milky Way.

I think an easy solution would be to normalize the score, as I think the sum of human hapiness would be "better" if there was only ever one human who gave his life a 10/10, than two humans who gave their life a 9/10.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#346

Post by imgabe »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #341
imgabe wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But lots of people did jump off of things with various contraptions and we did eventually develop the ability to fly that way.

Almost like we should try to make advance predictions about outcomes given particular circumstances and continuously test them against reality :) These people after all pursued theoretical means by which the risk of death could be reduced, and then put them into practice in order to improve their understanding. You can die in the air. You can die on the ground! Sometimes jumping off a cliff is safer than staying ther…

By all means speculate all you like about your own actions and act accordingly. The original comment was about how effective altruism is intentionally looking down on others (as they are implicitly ineffective) and holding themselves up as the ideal that everyone should follow.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#347

Post by FeepingCreature »

imgabe wrote: post #346
FeepingCreature wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost like we should try to make advance predictions about outcomes given particular circumstances and continuously test them against reality :) These people after all pursued theoretical means by which the risk of death could be reduced, and then put them into practice in order to improve their understanding. You can die in the air. You can die on the ground! Sometimes jumping off a cliff is safer than staying ther…

By all means speculate all you like about your own actions and act accordingly. The original comment was about how effective altruism is intentionally looking down on others (as they are implicitly ineffective) and holding themselves up as the ideal that everyone should follow.

Aren't you making a general point here against public arguments that certain things lead to better outcomes than others? Do you reserve the same rancor for these little warning labels printed on packs of cigarettes about cancer risk? (Look at these non-smokers looking down on others...)

Public debate is, to a first approximation, nothing but arguing about which actions lead to better outcomes.

I could see an argument that the claim is that EA is insulting because it's akin to calling a chocolate brand "asbestos-free!"; you're implicitly suggesting that competitors contain asbestos. But note that this depends on whether the other brands do, in fact, contain asbestos, and EA is not shy about its claims that many charities do not effectively pursue good outcomes. It's hard to accuse EA of trying to sneak in this point when it's a central part of its rhetoric. And of course, such debate is an entirely ordinary part of discourse.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#348

Post by medstrom »

jmull wrote: post #340
concordDance wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've dug into this stuff over the last couple days, because I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be something akin to like a pledge drive for Charity Navigator's best-reviewed charities or something, and it turns out it's nothing of the sort. As someone with multiple EA friends: this is precisely what it is. > they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate und…

Both those 1%s are very unlikely to be anywhere close to being true. The sci-fi version of AGI that people are imaging now will never exist. No one has any idea how to create AGI now, and therefore, no one knows what it might actually look like if it ever does. Any “solutions” people come up with now will have nothing to do with the problems a real AGI might pose. If people want to get together and talk about this st…

There's nothing substantive in this post, just unexplained opinions...

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#349

Post by Devasta »

throwboi123 wrote: post #43

EA is basically Judas Iscariot's method.

Judas got 30 pieces of silver, and with Jesus being crucified he lived a life free of sin on humanities behalf, opening the gates of heaven for us all.

Who knew Judas was the good guy this whole time?

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#350

Post by ethanbond »

notahacker wrote: post #343
ethanbond wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Why do we have a reason to believe there’s a cap to intelligence? 2) No, you don’t need to assume it happens via adding hardware 3) No, you don’t need to assume it can expand by itself 4) We’ve already seen people connecting AI systems to open internet and open internet to command and control of physical systems (cars, utilities, soon weapons systems) - turns out there was no convincing necessary 5) Nanobots also…

> Also, incentives, not charisma, are what steer human behavior. The number of people with incentives to work towards destroying the whole of humanity is rather small, and I'd rather we deal with them first since they need not wait for unfriendly AI to be dangerous...

And yet here we all are consuming and pumping oil because… incentives.
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