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The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

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

#391

Post by polygamous_bat »

concordDance wrote: post #225
tptacek wrote: post #137

My "Effective Altruism Is Not A Cult" t-shirt is prompting a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. 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. In fact, if you read some of the commentary from EA insi…

> 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…

This whole thread is very stereotypically EA to me -- and why I see it as a sham. Starts off at the top saying how it's all about donating to reasonable charities, but soon devolved into "what about muh AGI". I am literally doing my Ph.D. in robot learning and I can tell you that every single "longtermist" effective altruist I have talked to has been more interested in getting high on their own stash of Sci Fi fantasies rather than interacting with the actual practitioners of the field and understanding what is happening, what are the very real limitations of it, and why their assumptions range from willfully ignorant to often simply maliciously stupid.

It's almost as if the wealthy, the privileged, and the powerful are interested in indulgences while doing things that tickles their fantasies, and as the invisible hand of the market works, there is a class of "philosophers" who are willing to sell it to them.

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

#392

Post by edanm »

tptacek wrote: post #137

My "Effective Altruism Is Not A Cult" t-shirt is prompting a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. 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. In fact, if you read some of the commentary from EA insi…

> This is logic straight out of the 16th century Medici papacy of Leo X. Maybe it's some kind of horrible drug interaction with Rationalism, or maybe EA is fundamentally Rationalist? Either way: when your logic has established that you can obtain moral superiority by literally buying indulgences, it has officially proven too much,

I think you're missing the point of that paragraph, or at least misrepresenting it here.

It's not saying that what SBF did was ok or that fraud is ok or any such thing. It's specifically trying to say that just because this happened with crypto, which might be a bubble, doesn't make it any different than normal everyday finance. You might or might not agree with that idea, or might or might agree that finance itself is good, but that's the point of this paragraph specifically. Here it is in full, note the first sentence:

> Even if cryptocurrency remains just a modern-day tulip bulb or Beanie Baby, though, it seems morally hard to distinguish a cryptocurrency trader from the millions who deal in options, bonds, and all manner of other speculative assets. And a traditional investor who made billions on successful gambles, or arbitrage, or creating liquidity, then gave virtually all of it away to effective charities, would seem, on net, way ahead of most of us morally.

Also, just a note on this:

> Either way: when your logic has established that you can obtain moral superiority by literally buying indulgences, it has officially proven too much,

The problem with indulgences wasn't just the idea of being able to offset moral harm with moral good. Firstly, that position itself is at odds with what most EA people say afaict.

Secondly, the problem of indulgences is also that they are not real. I think even a religious person will agree that the indulgences of the 16th century was just a con. An atheist will dismiss the whole idea entirely.

The underlying logic of someone who made and gave away billions being overall ahead of other people morally is sound, IMHO. That of course is not to say that this then "allows" them to go and do some evil or something - that's not at all what the EA movement is saying.

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

#393

Post by medstrom »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #380
jmull wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly. Researching AI safety today is like researching how to reduce the proliferation of black hole bombs.

What would it make sensible to start researching the proliferation of black hole bombs, for you?

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

#394

Post by bioemerl »

coldtea wrote: post #254
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…

> If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent. This is Pascal's wager level absurdity combined with Drake equation level accuracy...

I also hate I absurd this argument is, we already have a GI, it's you, it's me, it's the exponentially growing humanity that we all live around and contribute to every single day.

Why are we so scared of an artificial brain when we have millions of living brains doing exactly what we are scared the artificial brains are going to do.

We are growing exponentially, and it almost all certainty these AGI, if they even become a worthwhile thing compared to non-general AI, are probably going to be human, but incredibly similar and it probably won't go exponentially out of control.

This idea that a computer could infinitely improve itself while sitting inside of a boxes absurd, do you know what would happen if you put a human thinker inside of a box for say 2 billion years for them to make theories and think about stuff? They eventually go mad and come out with some of the craziest theories in the world because they don't know what they're talking about because in order to learn you have to experiment and work with the world, not just sit in a box and make up theories.

Artificial intelligence is going to have the exact same access to resources and information as humanity does, if not less because there's only going to be a couple of AGI and was going to be billions of humans, and humans are out there reproducing like mad still, well a artificial intelligence needs to build itself for relatively rare and hard to source materials.

And if it was easy to self-improve and artificial intelligence, we would have figured it out, we'd be artificially improving ourselves by now, but we haven't, because it's not that easy, and for the most part we are probably limited by the laws of physics

People worry so much about HI because they assume Moore's law is just going to continue forever, and soon we're going to have the universe on a chip, but anyone saying that I don't think realizes what exponential growth typically ends in, and that is a plateau.

I'll tell you what's going to happen with this.

We're going to create AGI, and they're going to be different from us, they're going to be different from us in radical ways, but they're still going to have their own form of emotions, goals, desires, influences, and so on.

All of this fear is only going to cause us to delay and obstruct the eventual future where we adjust our own ideals of what is moral, what is good, to create a society that can incorporate these radically new beings.

These people are shooting ourselves in the foot, delaying the creation of a better society, on the basis of a fear that has no real basis.

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

#395

Post by edanm »

froggychairs wrote: post #218
devilsbabe wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re your last sentence: why do you disapprove of funding research into AI safety

Not OP, but I do work in reducing harms of deployed AI systems at a big tech company When most EA/Rationalist folks discuss AI Safety. They’re talking about AGI, a hypothetical construct that we have no way of proving is even possible Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with funding research of that sort. The problem comes is that many EA/Rationalist folks begin downplaying legitimate tangible risks on the horizon (…

> The problem comes is that many EA/Rationalist folks begin downplaying legitimate tangible risks on the horizon (I’ve had prominent EA folks tell me that Climate Change is not an existential risk) or that many of these AI Safety researchers actively ignore how to reduce harms of the AI we have deployed today.

I'm sure some people do this, and it's bad.

But to be clear, when you say some researchers are actively ignoring how to reduce harms of AI today... I'm not sure what you mean by "actively" ignore, but don't most researchers just by default ignore this, except for the few who are active in this field?

In other words, I think it's totally legit to focus on long-term AGI risk, and totally ignore current short-term AI risk, as a personal career-choice, just like it's ok to not even work on AI at all. Unless someone is actively trying to cause less resources to go into short-term AI risk, what's the problem?

> They’re talking about AGI, a hypothetical construct that we have no way of proving is even possible

I mean, we exist as (one would hope) intelligent beings. Why wouldn't AGI be possible? Your frame makes it seem like the default is that it isn't possible, which is wrong IMO.

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

#396

Post by headsoup »

In my view it's a movement for people making excuses for themselves. You don't need movements to be altruistic, you just do it or not.

Of course they end up getting tied up in knots because they're trying to project altruism through continuously more complex justifications.

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

#397

Post by bioemerl »

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…

We are already made of nanobots, we are the nanobots, we are in intelligence, we are a general intelligence, and we are growing exponentially.

AGI is here.

AGI is you.

You are an incredibly efficient piece of carbon thinkware able to sell for replicate into more carbon thinkware and that that extra carbon think where can go out and create its own life and make its own observations and spread information through the society of you both inherit, that's society is growing exponentially and growing in its ability to modify the world and manipulate and improve itself exponentially.

If you're scared of AGI, don't be. You are the superior AGI, because these machines made of metal and circuits are never going to compare to machines made of carbon using chemical reactions that are far more efficient than transistors to do the thinking.

The future is in improving ourselves and reaching a point at which our biology is no longer a mysterious black box so that we can modify and improve ourselves and those around us.

We can already improve machines, but that's because the machines are far simpler and far more primitive than our minds are.

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

#398

Post by FeepingCreature »

endominus wrote: post #385
FeepingCreature wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't fully agree with Aaronson's take, I just think it's underappreciated. I am a sorta-rules utilitarian; in contested questions, I think the moral obligation is to behave in a fashion so that the standards by which we act, if universalized, maximize beneficial outcomes. And I think there is an argument to be made that getting rich people to donate is a thing that a moral system that tries to lead to good outcome…

>I am a sorta-rules utilitarian; in contested questions, I think the moral obligation is to behave in a fashion so that the standards by which we act, if universalized, maximize beneficial outcomes. If you'll forgive the glibness, isn't that just deontology with extra steps? Sorry, it's just been on my mind since I learned (from Resident Contrarian article[0]) that many rule-utilitarianism is a functional reskin of d…

Every moral framework is every other moral framework with extra steps. They're all "morally Turing complete". However, which one you pick may make certain moral views significantly easier or harder to express. It's less that I think rule utilitarianism is morally compelling as a way of deciding what is good, as that I think rule utilitarianism captures some of my moral intuitions particularly well, so I use it to model (some of) the reasoning that my brain goes through when evaluating goodness. In other words, it's descriptive, not prescriptive.

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

#399

Post by olalonde »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #294
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.

The question is why do programmers believe they know more than Chomsky? The AI we have now is engineering and not science. Don’t you need science to create AI? Don’t you need to understand something fundamental about the brain?

Not necessarily. Volta invented the battery almost a 100 years before the electron was discovered. Also, planes fly very differently from birds.

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

#400

Post by edanm »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #386
armchairhacker wrote: post #10

Like most things: EA as a concept is fine. Finding the "maximal" way to improve the lives of others is great, and finding better ways to contribute than charity and volunteering is honorable. The issue is when people take it to the extreme (like someone who literally argued that a person doing mere charity or volunteer work is bad , because they are wasting time and effort that they could've spent making money and re…

> like someone who literally argued that a person doing mere charity or volunteer work is bad, because they are wasting time and effort that they could've spent making money This is the part of EA that triggers a lot of red flags for me. Making money, or rather making significant money, necessitates participation in a system of exploitation that is largely responsible for the ills the charitable donations are meant t…

> This is the part of EA that triggers a lot of red flags for me. Making money, or rather making significant money, necessitates participation in a system of exploitation that is largely responsible for the ills the charitable donations are meant to alleviate in the first place.

I mean, given that you think that I understand where you're coming from. But just note that many, many people would highly disagree with that characterization.

I don't think our "system", whatever that means, is evil. I think it's pretty good, definitely better than other things people have come up with. And I don't think you need to give to charity to morality-wash greed. I think it's just the right thing to do.

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