This is a special post for quick takes by Sanjay. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Curated and popular this week
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Regulation cannot be written in blood alone.
There’s this fantasy of easy, free support for the AI Safety position coming from what’s commonly called a “warning shot”. The idea is that AI will cause smaller disasters before it causes a really big one, and that when people see this they will realize we’ve been right all along and easily do what we suggest. I can’t count how many times someone (ostensibly from my own side) has said something to me like “we just have to hope for warning shots”. It’s the AI Safety version of “regulation is written in blood”. But that’s not how it works.
Here’s what I think about the myth that warning shots will come to save the day:
1) Awful. I will never hope for a disaster. That’s what I’m trying to prevent. Hoping for disasters to make our job easier is callous and it takes us off track to be thinking about the silver lining of failing in our mission.
2) A disaster does not automatically a warning shot make. People have to be prepared with a world model that includes what the significance of the event would be to experience it as a warning shot that kicks them into gear.
3) The way to make warning shots effective if (God forbid) they happen is to work hard at convincing others of the risk and what to do about it based on the evidence we already have— the very thing we should be doing in the absence of warning shots.
If these smaller scale disasters happen, they will only serve as warning shots if we put a lot of work into educating the public to understand what they mean before they happen.
The default “warning shot” event outcome is confusion, misattribution, or normalizing the tragedy.
Let’s imagine what one of these macabrely hoped-for “warning shot” scenarios feels like from the inside. Say one of the commonly proposed warning shot scenario occurs: a misaligned AI causes several thousand deaths. Say the deaths are of ICU patients because the AI in charge of their machines decides that costs and suffering would be minimize
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A friend of mine who worked as a social worker in a hospital told me a story that stuck with me. She had a conversation with an in-patient having a very difficult time. It was helpful, but as she was leaving, they told her wistfully 'You get to go home'. She found it hard to hear—it felt like an admonition. It was hard not to feel guilt over indeed getting to leave the facility and try to stop thinking about it, when others didn't have that luxury.
The story really stuck with me. I resonate with the guilt of being in the fortunate position of being able to go back to my comfortable home and chill with my family while so many beings can't escape the horrible situations they're in, or whose very chance at existence depends on our work.
Hearing the story was helpful for dealing with that guilt. Thinking about my friend's situation it was clear why she felt guilty. But also clear that it was absolutely crucial that she did go home. She was only going to be able to keep showing up to work and having useful conversations with people if she allowed herself proper respite. It might be unfair for her patients that she got to take the break they didn't, but it was also very clearly in their best interests for her to do it.
Having a clear-cut example like that to think about when feeling guilt over taking time off is useful. But I also find the framing useful beyond the obvious cases.
When morality feels all-consuming
Effective altruism can sometimes feel all consuming. Any spending decision you make affects how much you can donate. Any activity you choose to do takes time away from work you could be doing to help others. Morality can feel as if it's making claims on even the things which are most important to you, and most personal.
Often the narratives with which we push back on such feelings also involve optimisation. We think through how many hours per week we can work without burning out, and how much stress we can handle before it becomes a problem.
I do find that
I'm used to seeing many expert opinions on psychotherapy converge on the view that the type of therapy doesn't make much difference (at least as far as the evidence can tell us). I.e. it doesn't seem to matter much whether you choose CBT or IPT or whatever. The therapeutic alliance, on the other hand, does matter. Therapeutic alliance means something like "How well you get on with your therapist" (plus some related things).
I had a fleeting thought that perhaps the therapeutic alliance might be neglected. E.g. maybe there's a novel intervention which involves training therapists really heavily on how to improve the therapeutic alliance, and skimping on (or entirely ignoring?) traditional therapeutic methods.
I suspect that this fleeting thought is probably not correct.
Firstly, a quick look at google scholar found loads of meta-analyses. One of them started with "The alliance continues to be one of the most investigated variables related to success in psychotherapy".
Secondly, the intervention that I imagined (training therapists to focus on the alliance) arguably already exists. Rogerian therapy (also known as person-centred therapy) is one of the main forms of therapy, and it arguably focuses heavily on the alliance (I'm glossing over a bunch of nuances about Rogerian therapy).
Thirdly, the effect size seems to be small, as far as I can tell (having not looked into this carefully). Arnow & Steidman 2014 stated that "Overall, meta-analytic findings reveal that the magnitude of the alliance-outcome relationship is modest, accounting for 5-8% of the variance in outcome."
So it actually seems that the alliance is getting loads of attention relative to its importance, I suspect. If I looked into this more carefully, it's possible I could change my mind again, but I suspect I won't look into it more carefully.
I always read therapeutic alliance as advice for the patient, where one should try many therapists before finding one that fits. I imagine therapists are already putting a lot of effort on the alliance front
Perhaps an intervention could be an information campaign to tell patients more about this? I feel it’s not well known or to obvious that you can (1) tell your therapist their approach isn’t working and (2) switch around a ton before potentially finding a fit
I haven’t looked much into it though
My intuition says that people are probably already following the heuristic "if you don't like your therapist, try to get another one". I also haven't given much thought to the patient's/client's perspective on the therapeutic alliance.
How likely is this to be a real effect vs a confound? I imagine if I feel like therapy is working, I'm much more likely to like my therapist (similarly I'm more likely to like a physical trainer if I'm getting healthier, I'm more likely to like my teacher if I feel like I'm learning more, etc)
Good question.
It's also helpful because the wording of my post was meant to convey that "expert opinions tend to believe that the therapeutic alliance matters" (and not necessarily that I'm confident that that's the case).
One of the papers that I referenced did flag that most of the studies are observational rather than experimental, which does validate your concern. (I think it was Arnow & Steidman 2014 which said this; I don't know if a more recent paper sheds more light on this).
I'm not planning to look into this topic in any depth, but perhaps someone more knowledgeable can give a more definitive answer.
Someone pinged me a message on here asking about how to donate to tackle child sexual abuse. I'm copying my thoughts here.
I haven't done a careful review on this, but here's a few quick comments:
If anyone is interested in this topic and wants to put aside a substantial sum (high 5 digits or six digits) then the next steps would involve a number of conversations to gather more evidence and check whether existing interventions are as lacking in evidence as I suspect. If so, the next step would be work on creating a new charity. It's possible that Charity Entrepreneurship might be interested in this, but I haven't spoken with them about this and I don't know their appetite. I'd be happy to support you on this, mostly because I know that CSA can be utterly horrific (at least some of the time).
You may know this already, but No Means No Worldwide works with children and adolescents. E.g., the mean age of girls in this study is 12.3 years. Founders Pledge evaluated them (see here for a summary and here for a full report) and provisionally recommended them. I don't know if the person is particularly looking into tackling sexual abuse of younger children, but this charity seems worth mentioning as an option.
Thanks very much Saulius.
In SoGive's 2023 plans document, we said
"An investigation of No Means No Worldwide was suggested to us by a member of the EA London community, who was excited to have an EA-aligned recommendation for a charity which prevents sexual violence. We have mostly completed a review of this charity, and were asked not to publish it yet because it used a study which is not yet in the public domain."
That said, part of the reason I didn't allude to NMNW is that my vague memory of the average was older (presumably my vague memory was wrong).
Will everyone code 2-3x more quickly because of AI?
To get a sense of the impact of AI on coding, I conducted a survey of around 100 coders and people working in IT.
Respondents estimated, on average, that code could be developed in around 50% as much time (i.e. twice as quickly) in light of the fact that AI tools like GPT-4 exist. This was just assuming that AI stays as good as it is now. If they incorporated the fact that AI might get better, the estimate moved to almost 3x as good.
Of respondents who said that they were coders, 56% said they had already started using Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4.
There are several reasons to think the 2-3x forecast might not be correct:
I don't know about the extent to which current forecasts of AI timelines are accounting for this effect.
You can scrutinise my work here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I3_0kiwCJKzpuRlc66ytQVSDAXLd8wj2NmYhpZ28m94/edit#gid=990899939
This is a really good piece of input for predictions of how the supply-demand curve for coding will change in the future.
50% increase in time effectively reduces cost of coding by 50%. Depending on the shape of the supply-demand curve for coding, this could lead to high unemployment, or a boom for coders that leads to even higher demand.
Note: coding productivity tools developed over the past 40 years have led to ever-increasing demand since so much value is generated :)