Let’s reflect on where we’ve updated our views, and how we could improve our epistemics to avoid making the same mistakes again!
How to play:
- Search: Look through your past comments and posts, to find a claim you made that you’ve since updated about and no longer endorse. (Or, think of a view you’ve updated about that you didn’t post here)
- Share: Add a comment to this post, quoting/describing the original claim you made. Explain why you don’t believe it any more or why you think you made the mistake you made
- What mental motion were you missing?
- Was there something you were trying to protect?
- Reflect: Reply to your own comment or anyone else’s, reflecting about how we can avoid making these mistakes in the future, and giving tips about what's worked for you
Ground rules:
- Be supportive: It is commendable to publicly share when you’ve changed your views!
- Be constructive: Focus on specific actions we can take to avoid the mistake next time
- Stay on-topic: This is not the place to focus on discussing whether the original claim was right or wrong - for that, you can reply to the comment in its original context. (Though stating your view in the context of giving thought’s on people’s updates might make sense)
Let’s have fun with this and reflect on how we can improve our epistemics!
Inspired by jacobjacob’s “100 ways to light a candle” babble challenge.
lol when I first read this title, I thought it would be a survey article about common myths and null results in the exercise literature.
I hope next April 1 they’ll introduce lol karma! xD
I have overrated how hard AI risk is to understand. I hadn't made a forecast but I think this will cause lots of my forecasts to be off.
Do you have a sense of why you made that particular mistake?
I guess I've tried to convince friends and often that was hard. My tech friends, Christian friends and family are often not concerned. I guess I don't know the kinds of people who are very scared at first hearing.
I think a couple times, e.g. here and here, I got pretty swept up in how much I liked some of what a post was doing (with Evan Hubinger's fraud post I liked for instance that he wasn't trying to abandon or jettison consequentialism while still caring a lot about what went wrong with FTX, with Gavin's post about moral compromise I liked that he was pointing at purity and perfection being unrealistic goals), that I wrote strongly positive comments that I later felt, after further comments and/or conversations, didn't track all the threads I would have wanted to. (For the post-FTX one I also think I got swept up in worries that we would downplay the event as a community or not respond with integrity and so was emotionally relieved at someone taking a strong stance).
I don't think this is always bad, it's fine to comment on one aspect of a post, but if I'm doing that, I want to notice it and do it on purpose, especially when I'm writing a comment that gives a vibe of strong overall support.
This is all really thoughtful and an interesting insight into others' minds - thanks so much for sharing.
I don't have answers, but some thoughts might be:
There’s also the consideration that alignment still seems really hard to me. I’ve watched the space for 8 years, and alignment hasn’t come to look any less hard to me over that time span. If something is about to be solved or probably easier than expected, 8 years should be enough to see a bit of a development from confusion to clarity, from overwhelm to research agenda, etc. Quite to the contrary, there is much more resignation going around now, so alignment is probably a bigger problem than the average PhD thesis. (Then again the resignation may be the result of shortening timelines rather than anything about the problem.)
I’m not quite sure in which direction that consideration pushes, but I think it makes s-risks a bit less likely again? Ideally we’d just solve alignment, but failing that, it could mean (1) we’re unrepresentatively dumb and the problem is easy or (2) the problem is hard. Option 1 would suck because now alignment is in the hands of all the random AIs that won’t want to align its successors with human values. S-risk now depends on how many AIs there are and how slow the last stretch to superintelligence will be. Option 2 is a bit better because AIs also won’t solve it, so that the future is in the hands of AIs who don’t mind value drift or failed to anticipate it. That sounds bad at first, but it’s a bit of a lesser evil, I think, because there’s no reason why that would happen bunched up for several AIs at one point in time. So the takeoff would have to be very slow for it to still be multipolar.
So yeah, a bunch more worry here, but all the factors are not all pushing in the same direction at least.
Thanks so much for all your vulnerability and openness here - I think all the kinds of emotionally complex things you're talking about have real and important effects on individual and group epistemics and I'm really glad we can do some talking about them.
Awww! Thank you for organizing this!
Belief: I thought Russia would not invade Ukraine until it actually happened.
Reasoning: Russia is intertwined too closely with the EU and especially Germany. The CIA is lying/exaggerating to disrupt the cooperation.
What was I (possibly) trying to protect: I might have held economic partnership and entwinement in too high regard. I also might have thought that war in Europe was a thing of the past.
I'm trying to keep track of when I change my mind, but it's hard to notice when it happens and what exactly I thought before!