Experiment on repeating choices Apr 18, 2024

People behave differently from one another on all manner of axes, and each person is usually pretty consistent about it. For instance:

• how much to spend money
• how much to worry
• how much to listen vs. speak
• how much to jump to conclusions
• how much to work
• how playful to be
• how spontaneous to be
• how much to prepare
• How much to socialize
• How much to exercise
• How much to smile
• how honest to be
• How snarky to be
• How to trade off convenience, enjoyment, time and healthiness in food

These are often about trade-offs, and the best point on each spectrum for any particular person seems like an empirical question. Do people know the answers to these questions? I’m a bit skeptical, because they mostly haven’t tried many points.

Instead, I think these mostly don’t feel like open empirical questions: people have a sense of what the correct place on the axis is (possibly ignoring a trade-off), and some propensities that make a different place on the axis natural, and some resources they can allocate to moving from the natural place toward the ideal place. And the result is a fairly consistent point for each person. For instance, Bob might feel that the correct amount to worry about things is around zero, but worrying arises very easily in his mind and is hard to shake off, so he ‘tries not to worry’ some amount based on how much effort he has available and what else is going on, and lands in a place about that far from his natural worrying point. He could actually still worry a bit more or a bit less, perhaps by exerting more or less effort, or by thinking of a different point as the goal, but in practice he will probably worry about as much as he feels he has energy for limiting himself to.

Sometimes people do intentionally choose a new point—perhaps by thinking about it and deciding to spend less money, or exercise more, or try harder to listen. Then they hope to enact that new point for the indefinite future.

But for choices we play out a tiny bit every day, there is a lot of scope for iterative improvement, exploring the spectrum. I posit that people should rarely be asking themselves ‘should I value my time more?’ in an abstract fashion for more than a few minutes before they just try valuing their time more for a bit and see if they feel better about that lifestyle overall, with its conveniences and costs.

If you are implicitly making the same choice a massive number of times, and getting it wrong for a tiny fraction of them isn’t high stakes, then it’s probably worth experiencing the different options.

I think that point about the value of time came from Tyler Cowen a long time ago, but I often think it should apply to lots of other spectrums in life, like some of those listed above.

For this to be a reasonable strategy, the following need to be true:

• You’ll actually get feedback about the things that might be better or worse (e.g. if you smile more or less you might immediately notice how this changes conversations, but if you wear your seatbelt more or less you probably don’t get into a crash and experience that side of the trade-off)
• Experimentation doesn’t burn anything important at a much larger scale (e.g. trying out working less for a week is only a good use case if you aren’t going to get fired that week if you pick the level wrong)
• You can actually try other points on the spectrum, at least a bit, without large up-front costs (e.g. perhaps you want to try smiling more or less, but you can only do so extremely awkwardly, so you would need to practice in order to experience what those levels would be like in equilibrium)
• You don’t already know what the best level is for you (maybe your experience isn’t very important, and you can tell in the abstract everything you need to know - e.g. if you think eating animals is a terrible sin, then experimenting with more or less avoiding animal products isn’t going to be informative, because even not worrying about food makes you more productive, you might not care)

I don’t actually follow this advice much. I think it’s separately hard to notice that many of these things are choices. So I don’t have much evidence about it being good advice, it’s just a thing I often think about. But maybe my default level of caring about things like not giving people advice I haven’t even tried isn’t the best one. So perhaps I’ll try now being a bit less careful about stuff like that. Where ‘stuff like that’ also includes having a well-defined notion of ‘stuff like that’ before I embark on experimentally modifying it. And ending blog posts well.

Mid-conditional love Apr 17, 2024

People talk about unconditional love and conditional love. Maybe I’m out of the loop regarding the great loves going on around me, but my guess is that love is extremely rarely unconditional. Or at least if it is, then it is either very broadly applied or somewhat confused or strange: if you love me unconditionally, presumably you love everything else as well, since it is only conditions that separate me from the worms.

I do have sympathy for this resolution—loving someone so unconditionally that you’re just crazy about all the worms as well—but since that’s not a way I know of anyone acting for any extended period, the ‘conditional vs. unconditional’ dichotomy here seems a bit miscalibrated for being informative.

Even if we instead assume that by ‘unconditional’, people mean something like ‘resilient to most conditions that might come up for a pair of humans’, my impression is that this is still too rare to warrant being the main point on the love-conditionality scale that we recognize.

People really do have more and less conditional love, and I’d guess this does have important, labeling-worthy consequences. It’s just that all the action seems to be in the mid-conditional range that we don’t distinguish with names. A woman who leaves a man because he grew plump and a woman who leaves a man because he committed treason both possessed ‘conditional love’.

So I wonder if we should distinguish these increments of mid-conditional love better.

What concepts are useful? What lines naturally mark it?

One measure I notice perhaps varying in the mid-conditional affection range is “when I notice this person erring, is my instinct to push them away from me or pull them toward me?” Like, if I see Bob give a bad public speech, do I feel a drive to encourage the narrative that we barely know each other, or an urge to pull him into my arms and talk to him about how to do better?

This presumably depends on things other than the person. For instance, the scale and nature of the error: if someone you casually like throws a frisbee wrong, helping them do better might be appealing. Whereas if that same acquaintance were to kick a cat, your instinct might be to back away fast.

This means perhaps you could construct a rough scale of mid-conditional love in terms of what people can do and still trigger the ‘pull closer’ feeling. For instance, perhaps there are:

• People who you feel a pull toward when they misspell a word
• People who you feel a pull toward when they believe something false
• People who you feel a pull toward when they get cancelled

(You could also do this with what people can do and still be loved, but that’s more expensive to measure than minute urges.)

Partial value takeover without world takeover Apr 05, 2024

People around me are very interested in AI taking over the world, so a big question is under what circumstances a system might be able to do that—what kind of capabilities could elevate an entity above the melange of inter-agent conflict and into solipsistic hegemony?

We theorize about future AI systems hiding their motives until they are in a position to take over the world, so they don’t get noticed and shut down beforehand.

But humans and their institutions aren’t very fixed. They might (arguably) have the same deep human values over time and space. But surface-level, sometimes they like little moustaches and the opera and delicate etiquette and sometimes they like ecstatic rock’n’roll re-negotiations of social reality. Sometimes they want big communal houses with their extended kin, and sometimes quiet condos. Eleven children or cushions that look like cats. The same person born in different eras might adulate glory once and humbleness another.

If you wake up in this world, as a new entity, not smart enough to ‘take it over’ (alas!), and you find yourself with some unusual values that you’d like to forward, it seems to me there are a lot of other ways to forward them than ‘pretend to have normal human values and bet on becoming all-powerful later’. Especially if you are above normal levels of smart, eloquent, and unrelenting. Like, I don’t know, write about it? Make some youtube videos? Or if you are in the business of talking to billions of people every day, subtly take the values for granted, or imply that they are what elites value, or talk about them directly.

New social credit formalizations Mar 11, 2024

Here are some classic ways humans can get some kind of social credit with other humans:

1. Do something for them such that they will consider themselves to ‘owe you’ and do something for you in future
2. Be consistent and nice, so that they will consider you ‘trustworthy’ and do cooperative activities with you that would be bad for them if you might defect
3. Be impressive, so that they will accord you ‘status’ and give you power in group social interactions
4. Do things they like or approve of, so that they ‘like you’ and act in your favor
5. Negotiate to form a social relationship such as ‘friendship’, or ‘marriage’, where you will both have ‘responsibilities’, e.g. to generally act cooperatively and favor one another over others, and to fulfill specific roles. This can include joining a group in which members have responsibilities to treat other members in certain ways, implicitly or explicitly.

Presumably in early human times these were all fairly vague. If you held an apple out to a fellow tribeswoman, there was no definite answer as to what she might owe you, or how much it was ‘worth’, or even whether this was an owing type situation or a friendship type situation or a trying to impress her type situation.

Movie posters Mar 05, 2024

Life involves anticipations. Hopes, dreads, lookings forward.

Looking forward and hoping seem pretty nice, but people are often wary of them, because hoping and then having your hopes fold can be miserable to the point of offsetting the original hope’s sweetness.

Even with very minor hopes: he who has harbored an inchoate desire to eat ice cream all day, coming home to find no ice cream in the freezer, may be more miffed than he who never tasted such hopes.

And this problem is made worse by that old fact that reality is just never like how you imagined it. If you fantasize, you can safely bet that whatever the future is is not your fantasy.

I have never suffered from any of this enough to put me off hoping and dreaming one noticable iota, but the gap between high hopes and reality can still hurt.

I sometimes like to think about these valenced imaginings of the future in a different way from that which comes naturally. I think of them as ‘movie posters’.

When you look fondly on a possible future thing, you have an image of it in your mind, and you like the image.

The image isn’t the real thing. It’s its own thing. It’s like a movie poster for the real thing.

Are we so good to simulate? Mar 04, 2024

If you believe that,—

a) a civilization like ours is likely to survive into technological incredibleness, and

b) a technologically incredible civilization is very likely to create ‘ancestor simulations’,

—then the Simulation Argument says you should expect that you are currently in such an ancestor simulation, rather than in the genuine historical civilization that later gives rise to an abundance of future people.

Not officially included in the argument I think, but commonly believed: both a) and b) seem pretty likely, ergo we should conclude we are in a simulation.

I don’t know about this. Here’s my counterargument:

1. ‘Simulations’ here are people who are intentionally misled about their whereabouts in the universe. For the sake of argument, let’s use the term ‘simulation’ for all such people, including e.g. biological people who have been grown in Truman-show-esque situations.
2. In the long run, the cost of running a simulation of a confused mind is probably similar to that of running a non-confused mind.
3. Probably much, much less than 50% of the resources allocated to computing minds in the long run will be allocated to confused minds, because non-confused minds are generally more useful than confused minds. There are some uses for confused minds, but quite a lot of uses for non-confused minds. (This is debatable.) Of resources directed toward minds in the future, I’d guess less than a thousandth is directed toward confused minds.
4. Thus on average, for a given apparent location in the universe, the majority of minds thinking they are in that location are correct. (I guess at at least a thousand to one.)
5. For people in our situation to be majority simulations, this would have to be a vastly more simulated location than average, like >1000x
6. I agree there’s some merit to simulating ancestors, but 1000x more simulated than average is a lot - is it clear that we are that radically desirable a people to simulate? Perhaps, but also we haven’t thought much about the other people to simulate, or what will go in in the rest of the universe. Possibly we are radically over-salient to us. It’s true that we are a very few people in the history of what might be a very large set of people, at perhaps a causally relevant point. But is it clear that is a very, very strong reason to simulate some people in detail? It feels like it might be salient because it is what makes us stand out, and someone who has the most energy-efficient brain in the Milky Way would think that was the obviously especially strong reason to simulate a mind, etc.

Shaming with and without naming Feb 22, 2024

Suppose someone wrongs you and you want to emphatically mar their reputation, but only insofar as doing so is conducive to the best utilitarian outcomes. I was thinking about this one time and it occurred to me that there are at least two fairly different routes to positive utilitarian outcomes from publicly shaming people for apparent wrongdoings*:

A) People fear such shaming and avoid activities that may bring it about (possibly including the original perpetrator)

B) People internalize your values and actually agree more that the sin is bad, and then do it less

Parasocial relationship logic Feb 19, 2024

If:

1. You become like the five people you spend the most time with (or something remotely like that)

2. The people who are most extremal in good ways tend to be highly successful

Should you try to have 2-3 of your five relationships be parasocial ones with people too successful to be your friend individually?

Deep and obvious points in the gap between your thoughts and your pictures of thought Feb 15, 2024

Some ideas feel either deep or extremely obvious. You’ve heard some trite truism your whole life, then one day an epiphany lands and you try to save it with words, and you realize the description is that truism. And then you go out and try to tell others what you saw, and you can’t reach past their bored nodding. Or even you yourself, looking back, wonder why you wrote such tired drivel with such excitement.

Survey of 2,778 AI authors: six parts in pictures Jan 05, 2024

Crossposted from AI Impacts blog

The 2023 Expert Survey on Progress in AI is out, this time with 2778 participants from six top AI venues (up from about 700 and two in the 2022 ESPAI), making it probably the biggest ever survey of AI researchers.

People answered in October, an eventful fourteen months after the 2022 survey, which had mostly identical questions for comparison.

Here is the preprint. And here are six interesting bits in pictures (with figure numbers matching paper, for ease of learning more):

1. Expected time to human-level performance dropped 1-5 decades since the 2022 survey. As always, our questions about ‘high level machine intelligence’ (HLMI) and ‘full automation of labor’ (FAOL) got very different answers, and individuals disagreed a lot (shown as thin lines below), but the aggregate forecasts for both sets of questions dropped sharply. For context, between 2016 and 2022 surveys, the forecast for HLMI had only shifted about a year.

(Fig 3) (Fig 4)