558 karma · joined October 6, 2014
Not lectures, but exceptionally well structured and thoughtful conversations between Bryan Magee and leading philosophers from the 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P2R57Axcf8&list=PLhP9EhPApK...
Whatever the true genealogy of the ideas, I think there is a considerable convergence of thought in trying to solve the same problems.
Effective altruism brings opportunities for status, for sure.
But that doesn’t mean trying to help people effectively is a bad thing.
Would you walk past a child drowning in a shallow pond, when you could easily intervene and save them?
Threads (1984), the UK counterpart, is memorable, very bleak, and also worth watching: https://archive.org/details/threads_202007
What about the tool's nth child though? I think saying it will never do it is a bit much, given what we know about human ingenuity and economic incentives.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_and_philosophical_...
Yes, read Dostoevsky and the classics. There is so much to learn and to enjoy.
But remember that great authors didn't discover deep truths of human nature from books alone, but from their attention to the experiences of real life.
“When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.” - Arthur Schopenhauer
If we can build up a picture of someone from anecdotes about their life we can use this information to inform our understanding of why their work might have taken one form rather than another.
For example, Schopenhauer criticised the notoriously obscure schemata of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by saying that it was a result of Kant's psychological need for architectonic symmetry.
(and then regrettably irrelevant thereafter).
I think it is a legitimate worry, as the pace of progress is considerable. These tools are impressive, and are only going to get more impressive: more people should be talking about where this is headed.
Schopenhauer revered the Upanishads (foundational Hindu texts), and was one of the first thinkers in the West to share key aspects of Indian philosophy.
He was very critical of Christianity, and was a staunch atheist.
Bryan Magee's 'The Philosophy of Schopenhauer' is an excellent companion to The World as Will and Representation and well worth reading.
Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation.
Surprisingly readable and insightful, even if you don't buy his metaphysics. Einstein had Schopenhauer's portrait on his wall and considered him a genius.
* Poetry
John Milton - Paradise Lost
Powerful and beautiful writing.
* Fiction
Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel. Funny and a real feast of words (the translation is a work of art in itself)
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain. Haunting and moving
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos - Dangerous Liaisons. Scandalous, gripping.
Ivan Turgenev - First Love. A masterclass in writing. Short, sensitive and exquisitely told.
Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time. Exceptionally rich and a beautiful study of love. Reading it is like living another life.
PG Wodehouse - the Jeeves series. Hilarious, perfectly frivolous, light and sunny
* Non-fiction
Stuart Russell - Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control. Potential bad outcomes from AI and what we might be able to do about them
Noam Chomsky - Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. How public discourse is shaped and controlled
Karl Popper - The Open Society and its Enemies. How to work against totalitarianism
The money is in an endowment for a charity to maintain the project, not for the costs of building it. Yes the money will pay for peoples' jobs, and yes it will bring tourism. But honestly, is this what the world really needs?
I know that this is an unpopular view, but such projects do seem hubristic when we are walking into a climate crisis. Particularly when it is built in a desert!
If I were the artist I would not be able to see $30 million go towards a charity for preserving my work, when the money could instead be put towards a charity that worked to ensure there is actually a longterm future for humankind (and therefore people to see and enjoy art for generations to come).
If you are capable of executing something this big, I think you are capable of aiming higher and going for a bigger positive impact on the world. So what I see is a lack of vision, not something awe-inspiring.
A mega-sculpture in Nevada sounds extremely indulgent, and whilst the project seems to have solved many problems for the artist, I can't help but think that the $30 million endowment could have solved a lot more pressing problems elsewhere.
I think the sticking point in this is that you don't think that AGI is ever possible - is that right?
If so, I know a comment on a HN thread is very unlikely to change your mind on it! But when the stakes of being wrong are high, I find it useful to go from a position of "it won't happen, so I won't worry about it" to something like "on balance I'm pretty sure it won't happen, but I may be wrong, and in that case I would be worried about it".
I'd then feel much better about spending some time researching the topic in more depth.
Can you let me know more about that?
> If you subscribe to the view that I do: that "secretly unite to eliminate humanity" is a fairly non-obvious and risky goal
I don't think AI would have the goal "secretly unite to eliminate humanity", but I do think that most of the goals we can imagine it having can play out in very bad ways that achieve that outcome as a side-effect. There is an incentive for it always be looking for ways to maximise its power (compute, resources, money, influence), and this could happen in ways we really don't want.
> Popularising the idea that it's the self aware general intelligence that's the dangerous bit about AI, not the intermediate step involving humans having access to immense calculating power whose recommendations they don't really understand seems like something of an existential risk blindspot too.
It sounds like you think AI is risky too - even if only at this intermediate level? I'm curious - do you have a view on how we could go about reducing this risk?
If a misaligned AI escapes containment even once in the entirety of humanity's future, there is a big problem.
It sounds like your model of AI usage assumes we will also have a perfect ability to contain any AI developed anywhere in the world, under all conditions, for ever (or for as long as there are computers).
The AI risk argument says we should take seriously the possibility that we may not be able to maintain a perfect 100% success rate on that.
I haven't suggested anything that is physically impossible - merely things that are improbable and hard for humans to achieve. It is hard to foresee all of the possible avenues for escape, let alone ensure that they are all closed under all possible future states of the world.
On your first point, I can donate towards anti-malarial interventions and towards reducing AI risk: two very diverse causes, but both under the EA umbrella. Diversifying amongst recommended EA causes seems to me a good bet, especially given I expect some of them to require pivoting away from as more research is done.
Perhaps we can summarise the last decade of EA into something like: "given the available information (largely based on RCTs, research and an understanding of moral philosophy), we expect that money spent here will do more good than money spent there. More information will change this expectation."
We now have information that there is a potentially very grave risk confronting us from AI. For other cause areas we can use evidence like randomised controlled trials to inform our actions. In the case of AI risk, this type of evidence is unavailable, but there are nonetheless other types of information available to us that suggest it is worth taking seriously. This information takes the form of compelling arguments from credible people in the AI industry and the industry's achievements to date. Of course we'd like to have firmer footing, but the nature of this risk doesn't permit it. We can either ignore it, and potentially walk to our doom, or we can take it seriously and try to reduce the uncertainty and the risks.
I agree with you that this raises eyebrows, but I don't think it's a gross departure from the last decade.
I think it is wrong to say we have "zero evidence" that organisations committed to reducing AI risk can achieve their goals. I think it is more accurate to say it is highly uncertain that they will be able to achieve their goals. My view is that we should try to address AI risk because the stakes are high.
I would have sided with Albert Einstein in trying to renounce nuclear weapons, even though we have "zero evidence" for humanity ever coming together to do such a thing in the past.
Of course - nuclear weapons really do exist and AI is only a hypothetical threat at the moment. My point is that there was "zero evidence" that the world could come together to voluntarily control a technology, and yet people like Einstein tried to make it happen, and with good reason. Dismissing this is like taking Rutherford's view in the 1930s and saying there's very little point worrying about nuclear weapons because they're not possible, and it's even more pointless thinking about how we might control them.
Finally - why might the pitch speak to nerds in particular? I think in part because it is based on Bayesian reasoning, which is both nerdy and incredibly effective in situations of uncertainty.
I struggle with assigning infinite weight and unlikely possibilities. But we can stay in the every day world and ask what credence do we place on the time machine possibility, and why? All information I have read suggests that it is essentially impossible, and so effectively I don't worry about this contingency at all. And then, is there anything we could do to prevent the time machine scenario? I can't think of anything at all.
On the other hand, to focus on one particular risk, there are compelling arguments made by experts in the field of artificial intelligence (e.g. Stuart Russell) that say that we face real risks based on the current trajectory of the technology. Is there anything we can do to reduce the risks? That seems like an important question.
It is important to be sceptical, and whilst I don't place 100% credence on the likelihood of a truly catastrophic AI outcome, I do think it is worth taking this possibility very seriously. There is a strong chain of reasoning behind the claims, and they are worth engaging with, especially given the fact that we are in a position to influence the outcome.
> if you're going to be so abstract about it... what's wrong with a future with flourishing AI and without humanity?
We can park the abstract side for a moment and think concretely about such a future. I want humanity to flourish, particularly during my lifetime. Credible people are currently ringing alarm bells about the potential destructive power of a technology we are actively developing, and so I think on balance it is better (at a minimum) to listen and be vigilant than to dismiss it. Better yet, I think we should engage with the arguments and see if there is anything we can do to reduce the risk of a potential bad outcome.
> On the morning of September 12, 1933, on a miserable, wet, quintessentially English autumn day, at the intersection where Russell Square meets Southampton Row, Leó Szilárd waited irritably at a traffic light waiting for it to change from red to green. He had just attended a lecture by the great English physicist Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford, known to many as the father of nuclear physics, was discussing the newly prophesied release of energy from atoms, most notably by science-fiction pioneer H G Wells in his book The World Set Free. In his baritone voice, Rutherford, acknowledged master of the atomic domain, dismissed this fanciful idea as nonsense. Any thought of releasing the energy locked in atoms, he said, was "moonshine".
...
> What Szilard realised as he stepped off that curb was that if we found an element that when bombarded by one neutron would release two neutrons, it could lead to a chain reaction that could possibly release vast amounts of energy
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...
Secondly, you can have a diverse portfolio of causes you care about, and Effective Altruism has recommendations for areas including global health and animal welfare. Taking AI risk seriously doesn't mean you can't give time and money to other causes with more tangible results.
> Forest area replaced by cattle accounts for 36 percent of all agriculture-linked tree cover loss worldwide
https://research.wri.org/gfr/forest-extent-indicators/defore...
If I imagined two rooms, one with a child about to die of malaria in it, and another with an orangutan in it, and you told me I could spend $7,000 dollars to save the child or $50,000 to save the orangutan, I'd be very hard pressed to save the orangutan.
I think I would get the same 'feel good consumption' from more effective charitable giving, where my money went further and did more good in the world. The few thousand dollars needed to save a life from malaria would feel as good or better than tens of thousands of dollars needed to fail to save an orangutan.
> Effective altruism is a social movement and philosophy focused on maximising the good you can do in your career, projects, and other life decisions.
That's the 'what they do in one sentence' from the frontpage of https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
Your particular identity is a mode or process by which one local part of the universe experiences itself in a certain way (through your eyes, as it were). When you die, countless other lives and existences will continue to be modes through which the universe experiences itself, but not through the same identity.
This was captured by Carl Sagan, who said: "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."