Meteuphoric

A post written a few years ago, posting now during a time of irrelevance (as far as I know with my limited attention on politics or social media) so as not to be accidentally taking a side in any specific political debates.

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Alexandra What has happened is shocking and everyone should oppose it.

Beatrice I’m eating a sandwich. It is better than I expected.

Alexandra I can’t believe you would write about a sandwich at a time like this. Don’t you oppose what happened?

(Claire is excited by the breakfast bread discussion but guesses that contributing a picture of her bagel is pretty inappropriate and looks at SMBC instead.)

People break up their time into work and leisure. You might think of work vs. leisure as roughly ‘doing stuff because other people pay for it’ vs. ‘doing stuff because you want to’. You can also think of it as roughly ‘effortful’ vs. ‘relaxing’. Often these categories align—other people pay you to do effortful things, and the things you want to do are more relaxing. They don’t always align. Helping your aged relative go to the doctor might be effortful but a thing you do because you want to, or your job might be so easy that you come home with a bunch of energy for challenging tasks.

I’m going to call these ‘resting-‘ vs. ‘challenged-‘ and ‘-boss’ vs. ‘-employee’. So entirely free time is mostly resting-boss and paid work is usually challenged-employee. But you can also get resting-employee and challenged-boss activities. This all maybe relies on some models of rest and attention and effort and such that don’t work out, but they seem at least close the models that most people practically rely on. For whatever reason, most people prefer to spend a decent fraction of their time doing non-effortful things, unless something terrible will happen soon if they don’t.

People mostly use social media as leisure, both in the sense that nobody would intentionally pay them for it, and in the sense that it is not effortful. When important political things are happening, social media naturally turns to discussion of them. Which, if you are lucky, might be thoughtful analysis of world affairs, with a bunch of statistics and rethinking your assumptions and learning new facts about the world. Which is all great, but it is not leisure in the ‘not effort’ sense. When I need a break from researching the likely social consequences of artificial intelligence, moving to researching the likely social consequences of changing identity politics in America does not hit the spot as well as you might hope. I assume something similar is true of many people.

When there are opportunities to move a lot of leisure time from resting-boss idle chat to challenged-boss political discussions, people can be appalled when others do not redirect their use of social media to talking about the problem. They are thinking, ‘when you are doing what you want, you should be wanting this! If you would really spend your limited time on pictures of animals that look like pastry when you can help to stop this travesty, you are terrible!’

However this means moving time that was in ‘relaxing’ to ‘effortful’, which as far as I can tell is not super sustainable. In the sense that people usually need to spend some amount of time relaxing to be happy and able to do effortful things at other times. Redistributing all of the relaxing time to effortful time makes sense when there is a very immediate threat—for instance, your house is on fire, or you have a deadline this week that will cause you to lose your job if you don’t dedicate all of your time to it. However if you have a problem on the scale of months’ or years’ worth of effort, I think most people would favor making that effort as a sustainable trek, with breaks and lunch and jokes. For instance, if you are trying to get tenure in a few years, many would predict that you are less likely to succeed if you now attempt to ban all leisure from your life and work all of the time.

When there are political events that seem to some people to warrant talking about all of the time, and some people who really don’t want to, I think this less implies a difference in concern about the problem than you might think. The disagreeing parties could also be framing work and leisure differently, or disagreeing over how short-lived the important problem is, or when the high leverage times for responding to it are.

Sometimes I hear people say ‘how can make a big difference to the world, when I can’t make a big difference to that pile of dishes in my sock drawer?’ or ‘How can I improve the sustainability of world energy usage when I can’t improve the sustainability of my own Minecraft usage?’ The basic thought is that if you can’t do ‘easy’ things that humans are meant to be able to do, on the scale of your own life, you probably lack general stuff-doing ability, and are not at the level where you can do something a million times more important. 

I think this is a generally wrong model, for two reasons. One is that the difficulty of actions is not that clearly well ordered—if you have a hard time keeping your room tidy, this just doesn’t say that much about whether you can write well or design rockets or play the piano.

The second reason is that the difficulty of actions doesn’t generally scale with their consequences. I think this is more unintuitive.

Some examples:

1. Applying for funding for a promising new anti-cancer drug is probably about as hard as applying for funding for an investigation into medieval references to toilet paper (and success is probably easier), but the former is much more valuable.  
2. Having a good relationship with your ex Bob might be about as hard and take about the same skills as having a good relationship with your more recent ex Trevor, but if you have children with Trevor, the upside of that effort may be a lot higher.
3. If you have a hard time making a speech at your brother’s birthday, you will probably also have a hard time making a speech to the UN. But, supposing it is fifty thousand times more important, it isn’t going to be fifty thousand times harder. It’s not even clear that it is going to be harder at all—it probably depends on the topic and your relationship with your family and the UN.
4. Writing a good book about x-risk is not obviously much harder than writing a good book about the role of leprechauns through the ages, but is vastly more consequential in expectation.

My basic model is that you can have skills that let you do particular physical transformations (an empty file into a book, some ingredients into a cake), and there are different places you can do those tricks, and some of the places are just much higher leveraged than others. Yet the difficulty is mostly related to the skill or trick. If you are trying to start a fire, holding the burning match against the newspapers under the logs is so much better than holding it in the air nearby or on the ground or at the top of the logs, and this doesn’t involve the match being better or worse in any way.

In sum, there isn’t a clear ladder of actions a person can progress through, with easy unimportant ones at the bottom, and hard important ones at the top. There will be hard-for-you unimportant actions, and easy-for-you important actions. The last thing you should do if you come across a hard-for-you unimportant action is stop looking for other things to do. If you are bad at keeping your room clean and room cleanliness isn’t crucial to your wellbeing, then maybe look for the minimum version of cleanliness that that lets you live happily, and as quickly as possible get to finding things that are easier for you, and places to deploy them that are worthwhile.

This is a post about my own confusions. It seems likely that other people have discussed these issues at length somewhere, and that I am not up with current thoughts on them, because I don’t keep good track of even everything great that everyone writes. I welcome anyone kindly directing me to the most relevant things, or if such things are sufficiently well thought through that people can at this point just correct me in a small number of sentences, I’d appreciate that even more.

~

The traditional argument for AI alignment being hard is that human value is ‘complex’ and ‘fragile’. That is, it is hard to write down what kind of future we want, and if we get it even a little bit wrong, most futures that fit our description will be worthless. 

The illustrations I have seen of this involve a person trying to write a description of value conceptual analysis style, and failing to put in things like ‘boredom’ or ‘consciousness’, and so getting a universe that is highly repetitive, or unconscious. 

I’m not yet convinced that this is world-destroyingly hard. 

Firstly, it seems like you could do better than imagined in these hypotheticals:

1. These thoughts are from a while ago. If instead you used ML to learn what ‘human flourishing’ looked like in a bunch of scenarios, I expect you would get something much closer than if you try to specify it manually. Compare manually specifying what a face looks like, then generating examples from your description to using modern ML to learn it and generate them.
2. Even in the manually describing it case, if you had like a hundred people spend a hundred years writing a very detailed description of what went wrong, instead of a writer spending an hour imagining ways that a more ignorant person may mess up if they spent no time on it, I could imagine it actually being pretty close. I don’t have a good sense of how far away it is.

I agree that neither of these would likely get you to exactly human values.

But secondly, I’m not sure about the fragility argument: that if there is basically any distance between your description and what is truly good, you will lose everything. 

This seems to be a) based on a few examples of discrepancies between written-down values and real values where the written down values entirely exclude something, and b) assuming that there is a fast takeoff so that the relevant AI has its values forever, and takes over the world.

My guess is that values that are got using ML but still somewhat off from human values are much closer in terms of not destroying all value of the universe, than ones that a person tries to write down. Like, the kinds of errors people have used to illustrate this problem (forget to put in, ‘consciousness is good’) are like forgetting to say faces have nostrils in trying to specify what a face is like, whereas a modern ML system’s imperfect impression of a face seems more likely to meet my standards for ‘very facelike’ (most of the time).

Perhaps a bigger thing for me though is the issue of whether an AI takes over the world suddenly. I agree that if that happens, lack of perfect alignment is a big problem, though not obviously an all value nullifying one (see above). But if it doesn’t abruptly take over the world, and merely becomes a large part of the world’s systems, with ongoing ability for us to modify it and modify its roles in things and make new AI systems, then the question seems to be how forcefully the non-alignment is pushing us away from good futures relative to how forcefully we can correct this. And in the longer run, how well we can correct it in a deep way before AI does come to be in control of most decisions. So something like the speed of correction vs. the speed of AI influence growing.

These are empirical questions about the scales of different effects, rather than questions about whether a thing is analytically perfect. And I haven’t seen much analysis of them. To my own quick judgment, it’s not obvious to me that they look bad.

For one thing, these dynamics are already in place: the world is full of agents and more basic optimizing processes that are not aligned with broad human values—most individuals to a small degree, some strange individuals to a large degree, corporations, competitions, the dynamics of political processes. It is also full of forces for aligning them individually and stopping the whole show from running off the rails: law, social pressures, adjustment processes for the implicit rules of both of these, individual crusades. The adjustment processes themselves are not necessarily perfectly aligned, they are just overall forces for redirecting toward alignment. And in fairness, this is already pretty alarming. It’s not obvious to me that imperfectly aligned AI is likely to be worse than the currently misaligned processes, and even that it won’t be a net boon for the side of alignment.

So then the largest remaining worry is that it will still gain power fast and correction processes will be slow enough that its somewhat misaligned values will be set in forever. But it isn’t obvious to me that by that point it isn’t sufficiently well aligned that we would recognize its future as a wondrous utopia, just not the very best wondrous utopia that we would have imagined if we had really carefully sat down and imagined utopias for thousands of years. This again seems like an empirical question of the scale of different effects, unless there is a an argument that some effect will be totally overwhelming. 

The world has lots of people and things in it. And they are organized in such a mishmash that changing a thing will often make large numbers of people better off or worse off. And for a big thing—even a very good big thing—the number who are worse off is very unlikely to be zero.

This means that if you want to do big things, you will either have to make some people worse off, or rearrange the gains to make everyone better off.

If there are only a small number of people involved, you might be able to make everyone better off with a careful choice of things to change. But if the group is large, you will probably need some sort of generic value fluid, that can flow between the parties and fill in the holes such as to make everyone a bit better off, instead of some people much better off and some people worse off. Money and social respect both fill this role, assuming that there aren’t other impediments to using them, but a giant barrel of compensatory apricots might also work.

This suggests that whether big changes are made depends on the availability of workable value fluid, along with the propensity of the powerful to make the less powerful worse off without compensation. The availability of workable value fluid might for instance change according to social or technical technology for maintaining it, as well as impediments to using that technology.

For instance, if a large group of people were already headed to restaurant A, but the group would on net prefer restaurant B, they might not make this switch, because someone who prefers B would have to raise the issue, and it would feel a bit too much like conflict (and annoyance of extra negotiation for everyone). However if a couple of the people who prefer B actually own B and can offer drinks on the house to the group—and that is enough for everyone to prefer B, including the B owners—the switch can happen more easily. (I’m really thinking of things like shifts in legislation or giant infrastructure projects, but much more of my own experience is with groups going to restaurants.)

Is this right? Is it a big factor? (Theoretically salient mechanisms can be pretty minor in the real world.)

Leonard Cohen on his poetic voice:

“As I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.”

This is apparently exactly the opposite of how most people in the American world feel at this time of year. The great inevitable defeat should be expressed with electronically jeering plastic skeletons, humorous fake corpses, faux-threatening gravestones, and—let’s not forget the violence and disease responsible for so many deaths—generous fake blood, vomit, and slime. The celebration should be not only frivolous and ugly to the max, but really go hard on minimizing dignity! Don’t just dress as a fun ugly corpse, make it a sexually depraved fun ugly corpse!

Isn’t this just a bit weird? For instance, how is this good? 

I’ve heard a couple of times something like: “Halloween is nice because it is rebellious, and a relief from all that seriousness. People usually treat these things with sacredness and somberness, and it’s a lot to deal with.”

If that’s what it is, would it also be cool if we incorporated more second-rate stand up comedy routines and pranks into funerals? Or had more fun smallpox themed parties?

I don’t think people do actually contend with death or horror in a more comfortable way via Halloween, for the most part. My guess is that they basically don’t think about the content of what they are doing, and just get used to hunting for bargain plastic corpse babies to put on their lawns, and laughing with each other about how realistic and gruesome they are. Which seems more like desensitization than coming to terms with a thing. Which I doubt is a good kind of relief from seriousness. 

Also, if we are going to have a change of mood break around the potential horrors of life, the alternate feelings and purposes Halloween suggests just don’t seem very good. ‘Trick or treat?’ Cheap malice or cheap hedonism? Quick, find a huge mound of junk food, I forgot because I’m very competitive about drunkenly parading my buttocks in a way that makes me seem clever..

I’m obviously missing something, and I don’t actually blame anyone much within reason for getting into the holidays of their culture, but come on culture, what is this?