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Many years ago I met Eliezer Yudkowsky. He handed me a pamphlet extolling the virtues of rationality. The whole thing came across as a joke, as a parody of evangelizing. We both laughed. I glanced at it once or twice and shoved it into a bookshelf. I wish I kept it, because I never thought so much would happen around him.
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Replace AGI with Climate Change and you've got an entirely reasonable set of beliefs.
You can believe climate change is a serious problem without believing it is necessarily an extinction-level event. It is entirely possible that in the worst case, the human race will just continue into a world which sucks more than it necessarily has to, with less quality of life and maybe lifespan.
Many years ago I met Eliezer Yudkowsky. He handed me a pamphlet extolling the virtues of rationality. The whole thing came across as a joke, as a parody of evangelizing. We both laughed. I glanced at it once or twice and shoved it into a bookshelf. I wish I kept it, because I never thought so much would happen around him.
I only know Eliezer Yudkowsky from his Harry Potter fanfiction, most notably Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality . Is he known publicly for some other reason?
His book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies comes out in a month: https://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Builds-Everyone-Dies-Superhuma...
You can find more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky
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> The biggest nonsense axiom I see in the AI-cult rationalist world is recursive self-improvement. This is also the weirdest thing and I don't think they even know the assumption they are making. It makes the assumption that there is infinite knowledge to be had. It also ignores the reality that in reality we have exceptionally strong indications that accuracy (truth, knowledge, whatever you want to call it) has expo…
soo many things make no sense in this comment that I feel like 20% chance this a mid quality gpt. and so much interpolation effort, but starting from hearsay instead of primary sources. then the threads stop just before seeing the contradiction with the other threads. I imagine this is how we all reason most of the time, just based on vibes :(
I'm also not exactly sure what you mean because the only claim I've made is that they've made assumptions where there are other possible, and likely, alternatives. It's much easier to prove something wrong than prove it right (or in our case, evidence, since no one is proving anything).
So the first part I'm saying we have to consider two scenarios. Either intelligence is bounded or unbounded. I think this is a fair assumption, do you disagree?
In an unbounded case, their scenario can happen. So I don't address that. But if you want me to, sure. It's because I have no reason to believe information is bounded when everything around me suggests that it is. Maybe start with the Bekenstein bound. Sure, it doesn't prove information is bounded but you'd then need to convince me that an entity not subject to our universe and our laws of physics is going to care about us and be malicious. Hell, that entity wouldn't even subject to time and we're still living.
In a bounded case it can happen but we need to understand what conditions that requires. There's a lot of functions but I went with S-curve for simplicity and familiarity. It'll serve fine (we're on HN man...) for any monotonically increasing case (or even non-monotonic, it just needs to tends that way).
So think about it. Change the function if you want, I don't care. But if intelligence is bounded, then if we're x more intelligent then ants, where on the graph do we need to be for another thing to be x more intelligent than us? There's not a lot of opportunities for that even to happen. It requires our intelligence (on that hypothetical scale) to be pretty similar than an ant. What cannot happen is that ant be in the tail of that function and us be further than the inflection point (half way). There just isn't enough space on that y-axis for anything to be x more intelligent. This doesn't completely reject that crazy superintelligence, but it does place some additional constraints that we can use to reason about things. For the "AI will be [human to ant difference] more intelligent than us" argument to follow it would require us to be pretty fucking dumb, and in that case we're pretty fucking dumb and it'd be silly to think we can make these types of predictions with reasonable accuracy (also true in the unbounded case!).
Yeah, I'll admit that this is a very naïve model but again, we're not trying to say what's right but instead just say there's good reason to believe their assumption is false. Adding more complexity to this model doesn't make their case stronger, it makes it weaker.
The second part I can make much easier to understand.
Yes, there's bad smart people, but look at the smartest people in history. Did they seek power or wish to harm? Most of the great scientists did not. A lot of them were actually quite poor and many even died fighting persecution.
So we can't conclude that greater intelligence results in greater malice. This isn't hearsay, I'm just saying Newton wasn't a homicidal maniac. I know, bold claim...
> starting from hearsay
This article is beautifully written, and it's full of proper original research. I'm sad that most comments so far are knee-jerk "lol rationalists" type responses. I haven't seen any comment yet that isn't already addressed in much more colour and nuance in the article itself.
Many years ago I met Eliezer Yudkowsky. He handed me a pamphlet extolling the virtues of rationality. The whole thing came across as a joke, as a parody of evangelizing. We both laughed. I glanced at it once or twice and shoved it into a bookshelf. I wish I kept it, because I never thought so much would happen around him.
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I don’t think it’s just (or even particularly) bad axioms, I think it’s that people tend to build up “logical” conclusions where they think each step is a watertight necessity that follows inevitably from its antecedents, but actually each step is a little bit leaky, leading to runaway growth in false confidence. Not that non-rationalists are any better at reasoning, but non-rationalists do at least benefit from some…
> I don’t think it’s just (or even particularly) bad axioms IME most people aren't very good at building axioms. I hear a lot of people say "from first principles" and it is a pretty good indication that they will not be. First principles require a lot of effort to create. They require iteration. They require a lot of nuance, care, and precision. And of course they do! They are the foundation of everything else that…
It seems you implying that some people are good building good axiom systems for the real world. I disagree. There are a few situations in the world where you have generalities so close to complete that you can use simple logic on them. But for the messy parts of the real world, there simply is not set of logical claims which can provide anything like certainty no matter how "good" someone is at "axiom creation".
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The reason why people can't be bothered to get formal training is that modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful. It was a while ago, but take the infamous story of the 2006 rape case in Duke University. If you check out coverage of that case, you get the impression every member of faculty that joined in the hysteria was from some humanities department, including philosophy. And quite a few of them refused to change…
Modern philosophy isn't useful because some philosophy faculty at Duke were wrong about a rape case? Is that the argument being made here?
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> The whole game of Rationalism is that you should ignore gut intuitions and cultural norms that you can't justify with rational arguments. Specifically, rationalism spends a lot of time about priors, but a sneaky thing happens that I call the 'double update'. Bayesian updating works when you update your genuine prior believe with new evidence. No one disagrees with this, and sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's di…
> Consider the pre-tipped scale. You suspect the scale reads a little low, so before weighing you tilt it slightly to "correct" for that bias. Then you pour in flour until the dial says you've hit the target weight. You’ve followed the numbers exactly, but because you started from a tipped scale, you've ended up with twice the flour the recipe called for. I'm not following this example at all. If you've zero'd out th…
I played around with various metaphors but most of them felt various degrees of worse. The idea of relaxing priors and then doing an evidence-based update while thinking it's genuinely a single update is a difficult thing to capture metaphorically.
Happy to hear better suggestions.
EDIT: Maybe something more like this:
Picture your belief as a shotgun aimed at the truth:
Aim direction = your best current guess.
Spread = your precision.
Evidence = the pull that says "turn this much" and "widen/narrow this much."
Hold your aim where it is. Evidence arrives. Rotate and resize the spread in one simultaneous posterior jump determined by the actual likelihood ratio in front of you.
The stupid move? The move that Rationalists love to disguise as humility? It's to first relax your spread "to be open-minded," and then apply the update. You've just secretly told the math, "Give this evidence more weight than it deserves." And then you wonder why you keep overshooting, drifting into confident nonsense.
If you think your prior is overconfident, that is itself evidence. Evidence about your meta-level epistemic reliability. Feed it into the update properly. Do not amputate it ahead of time because "priors are bias." Bias is bad, yes, but closing your eyes and spinning around with shotgun in hand ie: double updating is not an effective method at removing bias.
One of a few issues I have with groups like these, is that they often confidently and aggressively spew a set of beliefs that on their face logically follow from one another, until you realize they are built on a set of axioms that are either entirely untested or outright nonsense. This is common everywhere, but I feel especially pronounced in communities like this. It also involves quite a bit of navel gazing that m…
It's crazy to read this, because by writing what you wrote you basically show that you don't understand what an axiom is. You need to review the definition of the word. > The smartest people I have ever known have been profoundly unsure of their beliefs and what they know. The smartest people are unsure about their higher level beliefs, but I can assure you that they almost certainly don't re-evaluate "axioms" as you…
Oh, do enlighten then.
> The smartest people are unsure about their higher level beliefs, but I can assure you that they almost certainly don't re-evaluate "axioms" as you put it on a daily or weekly basis. Not that it matters, as we almost certainly can't verify who these people are based on an internet comment.
I'm not sure you are responding to the right comment, or are severely misinterpreting what I said. Clearly a nerve was struck though, and I do apologize for any undue distress. I promise you'll recover from it.