I have thought a lot about this post over the past week, and have felt very upset at how this was handled by CEA. I wanted to thank you (as so many others have) for your commitment to sharing this. I also really appreciated all your cultural reflections, which I expect to sit with over the coming weeks.
If you decide, by default, that everyone in your group is self-aware, well-intentioned, and telling the truth, and you then make their intent a central factor in assessing misconduct, you will almost never find abuse. You’ve made it structurally impossible. And this is how you end up with a culture that enables sexual harassment.
This rings true and felt especially insightful to me. I can recognize this instinct in myself to shift too quickly and too often into discussing intent (where 'assuming good intent' is often assumed to be the virtuous path), pulling attention away from the actions and the harms themselves. I want to challenge myself to do better here, and I hope others will too.
Thank you again Frances for showing such courage, which we can all aspire to, but which shouldn't have been necessary.
Certainly the Guardian article had a lot of mistakes and issues, but I don't at all buy that there's nothing meaningfully different between someone like Hanania and most interesting thinkers, just because forcing consistency of philosophical views will inevitably lead to some upsetting conclusions somewhere. If I was to "corner someone in a dark alleyway" about population ethics until I caught them in a gotcha that implied they would prefer the world was destroyed, this updates me ~0 about the likelihood of this person actually going out and trying to destroy the world or causing harm to people. If I see someone consistently tweet and write in racist ways despite a lot of criticism and push-back, this shows me important things about what they value on reflection, and provides fairly strong evidence that this person will act in exclusionary and hateful ways. Trying to say that such racist comments are fine because of impossibility theorems showing everyone has to be committed to some weird views doesn't at all engage with the empirical track record of how people who write like Hanania tend to act.
Thanks for writing this Bob. I feel very saddened myself by many of the things I see in EA nowadays, and have very mixed feelings about staying involved that I'm trying to sort through - I appreciate hearing your thought process on this. I wish you the best in your future endeavors!
I think this argument mostly fails in claiming that 'create an AGI which has a goal of maximizing copies of itself experiencing maximum utility' is meaningfully different than just ensuring alignment. This is in some sense exactly what I am hoping to get from an aligned system. Doing this properly would likely have to involve empowering humanity and helping us figure out what 'maximum utility' looks like first, and then tiling the world with something CEV-like.
The only ways this makes the problem easier compared to a classic ambitious alignment goal of 'do whatever maximizes the utility of the world' is the provision that the world be tiled with copies of the AGI, which is likely suboptimal. But this could be worth it if it made the task easier?
The obvious argument for why it would is that creating copies of itself with high welfare will be in the interest of AGI systems with a wide variety of goals, which relaxes the alignment problem. But this does not seem true. A paperclip AI will not want to fill the world with copies of itself experiencing joy, love and beauty but rather with paperclips. The AI systems will want to create copies of itself fulfilling its goals, not experiencing maximum utility by my values.
This argument risks identifying 'I care about the welfare (by my definition of welfare) of this agent' with 'I care about this agent getting to accomplish its goals'. As I am not a preference utilitarian I strongly reject this identification.
Tl;dr: I do care significantly about the welfare of AI systems we build, but I don't expect those AI system themselves to care much at all about their own welfare, unless we solve alignment.
I've mostly lived in Oxford and London, and these claims fit with my experience of the hubs there as well. I've perhaps experienced Oxford as having a little less focus on AI than #2 indicates.
While I agree the claims should be interrogated and that the 'influential leaders' are very fallible, I think the only way to interrogate them properly is to be able to publicly acknowledge that these are indeed background assumptions held by a lot of the people with power/influence in the community. I don't see this post as stating 'these are background claims which you should hold without interrogation' but rather 'these are in fact largely treated as background claims within the EA communities at the core hubs in the Bay, London and Oxford etc.'. This seems very important for people not in these hubs to know, so they can accurately decide e.g. whether they are interested in participating more in the the movement, whether to follow the advice coming from these places, or what frames to use when applying for funding. Ideally I'd like to see a much longer list of background assumptions like this, because I think there are many more that are difficult to spot if you have not been in a hub.
I have thought a lot about this post over the past week, and have felt very upset at how this was handled by CEA. I wanted to thank you (as so many others have) for your commitment to sharing this. I also really appreciated all your cultural reflections, which I expect to sit with over the coming weeks.
This rings true and felt especially insightful to me. I can recognize this instinct in myself to shift too quickly and too often into discussing intent (where 'assuming good intent' is often assumed to be the virtuous path), pulling attention away from the actions and the harms themselves. I want to challenge myself to do better here, and I hope others will too.
Thank you again Frances for showing such courage, which we can all aspire to, but which shouldn't have been necessary.
There has been a lot of discussion of this, some studies were done on different names, and GFI among others seem to have landed on "cultivated meat".
Certainly the Guardian article had a lot of mistakes and issues, but I don't at all buy that there's nothing meaningfully different between someone like Hanania and most interesting thinkers, just because forcing consistency of philosophical views will inevitably lead to some upsetting conclusions somewhere. If I was to "corner someone in a dark alleyway" about population ethics until I caught them in a gotcha that implied they would prefer the world was destroyed, this updates me ~0 about the likelihood of this person actually going out and trying to destroy the world or causing harm to people. If I see someone consistently tweet and write in racist ways despite a lot of criticism and push-back, this shows me important things about what they value on reflection, and provides fairly strong evidence that this person will act in exclusionary and hateful ways. Trying to say that such racist comments are fine because of impossibility theorems showing everyone has to be committed to some weird views doesn't at all engage with the empirical track record of how people who write like Hanania tend to act.
Thanks for writing this Bob. I feel very saddened myself by many of the things I see in EA nowadays, and have very mixed feelings about staying involved that I'm trying to sort through - I appreciate hearing your thought process on this. I wish you the best in your future endeavors!
I think this argument mostly fails in claiming that 'create an AGI which has a goal of maximizing copies of itself experiencing maximum utility' is meaningfully different than just ensuring alignment. This is in some sense exactly what I am hoping to get from an aligned system. Doing this properly would likely have to involve empowering humanity and helping us figure out what 'maximum utility' looks like first, and then tiling the world with something CEV-like.
The only ways this makes the problem easier compared to a classic ambitious alignment goal of 'do whatever maximizes the utility of the world' is the provision that the world be tiled with copies of the AGI, which is likely suboptimal. But this could be worth it if it made the task easier?
The obvious argument for why it would is that creating copies of itself with high welfare will be in the interest of AGI systems with a wide variety of goals, which relaxes the alignment problem. But this does not seem true. A paperclip AI will not want to fill the world with copies of itself experiencing joy, love and beauty but rather with paperclips. The AI systems will want to create copies of itself fulfilling its goals, not experiencing maximum utility by my values.
This argument risks identifying 'I care about the welfare (by my definition of welfare) of this agent' with 'I care about this agent getting to accomplish its goals'. As I am not a preference utilitarian I strongly reject this identification.
Tl;dr: I do care significantly about the welfare of AI systems we build, but I don't expect those AI system themselves to care much at all about their own welfare, unless we solve alignment.
I've mostly lived in Oxford and London, and these claims fit with my experience of the hubs there as well. I've perhaps experienced Oxford as having a little less focus on AI than #2 indicates.
While I agree the claims should be interrogated and that the 'influential leaders' are very fallible, I think the only way to interrogate them properly is to be able to publicly acknowledge that these are indeed background assumptions held by a lot of the people with power/influence in the community. I don't see this post as stating 'these are background claims which you should hold without interrogation' but rather 'these are in fact largely treated as background claims within the EA communities at the core hubs in the Bay, London and Oxford etc.'. This seems very important for people not in these hubs to know, so they can accurately decide e.g. whether they are interested in participating more in the the movement, whether to follow the advice coming from these places, or what frames to use when applying for funding. Ideally I'd like to see a much longer list of background assumptions like this, because I think there are many more that are difficult to spot if you have not been in a hub.