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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?

#521

Post by coldtea »

naasking wrote: post #509
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…

> such as that intelligence can be grown to absurd levels (or even just majorly) just by adding hardware to allow for it This has been the empirically validated trend. The more hardware, the more parallel lines of thought can be explored at once (like in chess). > that intelligence can just be expanded by itself (thinking itself into being more intelligent) Of course it can, because humans have already done this. Wha…

>Of course it can, because humans have already done this. What do you think language, writing, books, school, science and computers are?

Language, writing, books, school, science and computers never raised anybody's IQ. Genetics and nutrition, on the other hand, did.

>However, money is a power too, and all of our money is digitized these days, and a digital superintelligence might arguably have an advantage in this domain. A superintelligence with lots of money can arguably convince a whole lot of people to do what it wants and get the physical access it needs.

Who would let superintelligence have a wallet and budget? Or would we just sit and have it steal money? And why would it be any more effective, and any less visible or trackable and able to be shut down than a rich person using his money?

Handwavy recursive argument: "but because its superintelligent"

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

#522

Post by FeepingCreature »

yifanl wrote: post #503
FeepingCreature wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your description of the AGI/ASI position. My take on it is the other way around: every step of the argument seems plainly obvious.

Plainly, that is not the case, as you are choosing to not spend your every waking moment to stop the antichrist AI coming into existence. So either it's less obvious than you're claiming, or you are taking the threat of creating an evil AGI not seriously enough according to your own beliefs.

I don't spend every waking moment stopping lots of things that could kill us all. Nuclear war, climate change, gain-of-function research.

I just don't care that much about things that kill everyone. I don't think almost anyone does. In the Cold War, the vast majority of the population was not doing absolutely everything to achieve bilateral disarmament. This would lead you to believe that they didn't really expect nuclear war. But maybe they were just apathetic and helpless.

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

#523

Post by shswkna »

At its root lies our desire to make our lives maximally meaningful, to the point where the existence of billions of people in the future can be traced back to one maximally effective decision or act.

At once the lyrics from Taylor Swift’s new song makes so much more sense:

“Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism”

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

#524

Post by coldtea »

concordDance wrote: post #430
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…

Intelligence lets a guy with a moustache convince millions of people to invade Poland and kill all the Jews. Its not his liver or his kidneys, its his brain. Feel free to call this type of thing "charisma" but for the purposes of thinking about AI it still comes from the but doing the thinking. And there's actually a pretty good correlation between being good at the various types of mental things, including charisma…

>Intelligence lets a guy with a moustache convince millions of people to invade Poland and kill all the Jews. Its not his liver or his kidneys, its his brain. Feel free to call this type of thing "charisma" but for the purposes of thinking about AI it still comes from the but doing the thinking.

Try to get people to do what you want as an intelligent aspie without charisma, and see how far this goes... even if you have 60+ IQ points over Hitler.

Also, Hitler was mostly redundant. He convinced people because they were ready to convinced - Germans would have gone to that one way or another... (they wouldn't have had killed the Jews - that was his obsession and "contribution", but the revenge for the WWI defeat and expansionism and WWII were brewing and inevitable in Germany, and the brand of fascism was also on the rise in places that felt they got the short end of the stick during colonialism, which is why similar movements rose in Japan and Italy and Spain and elsewhere, even before Hitler became a thing. Hitler just rode the currents to sell his particular brand of snake-oil).

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

#525

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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…

You say "justify almost anything" but I've always been surprised by the lack of distribution of wealth as an answer to helping people.

Maybe I've just missed it, but EA feels a lot like Communism if it was invented by Any Rand to me, so governments, democracy and regulation have always seemed notable by their absence.

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

#526

Post by naasking »

tptacek wrote: post #516
naasking wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's a strawman. The severity of human extinction is not infinite. For instance, it would be preferable for humanity to go extinct than for every human to be tortured for every minute of their life, and since there is no number larger than infinity, the severity of human extinction must be finite. This tells me that you haven't seriously engaged with the arguments over AGI. I'm sure there's plenty of nonsense a…

You can replace "infinity" with any suitably huge number; I don't need to quibble over tenths, hundredths, and thousandths of a percentile risk that something is going to happen.

You absolutely do have to quibble over those numbers. Or do you not think we should be tracking asteroids either because they only kill 95% of all life once every few hundred million years?

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

#527

Post by naasking »

coldtea wrote: post #521
naasking wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> such as that intelligence can be grown to absurd levels (or even just majorly) just by adding hardware to allow for it This has been the empirically validated trend. The more hardware, the more parallel lines of thought can be explored at once (like in chess). > that intelligence can just be expanded by itself (thinking itself into being more intelligent) Of course it can, because humans have already done this. Wha…

> Of course it can, because humans have already done this. What do you think language, writing, books, school, science and computers are? Language, writing, books, school, science and computers never raised anybody's IQ. Genetics and nutrition, on the other hand, did. > However, money is a power too, and all of our money is digitized these days, and a digital superintelligence might arguably have an advantage in this…

> Language, writing, books, school, science and computers never raised anybody's IQ.

Whether IQ took us to the moon is still a topic of debate, as is whether IQ is equal to or only part of intelligence. But it's clear that language, books, school, science and computers absolutely did take us to the moon. Clearly all of these things improved our intellectual effectiveness, and that's what matters, regardless of whether it fits into your personal definition of "intelligence".

> Who would let superintelligence have a wallet and budget? Or would we just sit and have it steal money?

Cryptocurrency makes this trivial. All computer systems likely also have vulnerabilities, including financial systems. An AI can probe these systems around the clock, or can subtly introduce vulnerabilities into our vulnerable software supply chains. These are only two among many options that are entirely within the realm of plausibility.

> And why would it be any more effective, and any less visible or trackable and able to be shut down than a rich person using his money?

An AI wouldn't necessarily have a physical location that can be tracked as easily as humans. Where is the AI jail?

Honestly, it's like you're not even trying to consider how vulnerable we might be to manipulation by a non-human intelligence. All of our protections are fairly effective against human actors. Some of them might provide partial protection from non-human actors, but you should doubt your confidence that they would be effective against such threats.

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

#528

Post by kethinov »

endominus wrote: post #379
kethinov wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are principled reasons to be against charity, namely that charity redistributes money to causes arbitrarily and undemocratically rather than to causes decided by a majority of people voting on what causes to support. When the government runs these programs, we get to vote on how they're administered. When billionaires run them, who gets help and who doesn't is entirely at the mercy of King Tech Bro the First. A…

There's also principled reasons to be against this. Namely, that government tends to be woefully bad at optimizing for moral good (cf. the American prison industry or California's attempts to end homelessness) and is just as likely to put that money towards things the majority of the population disagree with. The same logic would say that Russia is right to strip its billionaires of wealth to pursue foreign wars.

Democracy is the worst way to decide things, except for all the others.

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

#529

Post by kethinov »

AlexandrB wrote: post #453
endominus wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also principled reasons to be against this. Namely, that government tends to be woefully bad at optimizing for moral good (cf. the American prison industry or California's attempts to end homelessness) and is just as likely to put that money towards things the majority of the population disagree with. The same logic would say that Russia is right to strip its billionaires of wealth to pursue foreign wars.

Yes, government is bad at optimizing for moral good. Which is why billionaires should give their wealth to their own workers . If Tim Cook paid the people building iPhones more it would do far more good than him donating the money that comes from increased margins to some charity. The workers could decide what they need for themselves! Instead, the idea seems to be that people are not properly qualified to identify t…

Turns out that billionaires tend to not want to do that, so it also turns out that using government power to compel them to do so using the power of taxation is the system that scales best.

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

#530

Post by moistly »

hderms wrote: post #374
concordDance wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does the effectiveness of various forms of altruism actually form a total order? Given a moral compass, yes. EA is about not just looking at the immediate and the definite, the relative value of animals and humans is out of scope (though of course many individuals there will have opinions on it).

Maybe you can totally rank order goals or principles of morality within the confines of a single person, but how could you hope to do that for large groups of people without forcing everyone to assume the same things as you? Long-termism being a great example, because I personally, think the amount we should care about future people decays rapidly as we move into the future. It's not as if their lives don't have valu…

> the amount we should care about future people decays rapidly as we move into the future

Better to save a life today, than a billion lives a century from now, because the unstoppable planet-killer asteroid is going to hit us in 99 years.

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