Chris Olah
speaker
254 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Chris Olah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
like good enough that we can like iterate and like continue to improve things because that's all you need if you can make things go well enough that you can continue to make them better that's kind of like sufficient and so my goal isn't like this kind of like perfect let's solve social choice theory and make models that i don't know are like perfectly aligned with every human being and aggregate somehow um it's much more like let's make things like work well enough that we can improve them
I think it's one of those things where you should always just kind of question yourself or something. Cause maybe it's the, like, I mean, in defense of it, I am like, if you try, it's the whole, like, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good thing. But it's maybe even more than that, where there's a lot of things that are perfect systems that are very brittle.
And I'm like, with AI, it feels much more important to me that it is robust and secure, as in you know that even though it might not be perfect, everything, and even though there are... problems, it's not disastrous and nothing terrible is happening. It sort of feels like that to me where I'm like, I want to like raise the floor.
I'm like, I want to achieve the ceiling, but ultimately I care much more about just like raising the floor. Um, and so maybe that's like, uh, this, this degree of like empiricism and practicality comes from that perhaps.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's a hard one because it's like, what is the cost of failure is a big part of it. Yeah, so the idea here is... I think in a lot of domains, people are very punitive about failure. And I'm like, there are some domains where, especially cases, you know, I've thought about this with like social issues.
I'm like, it feels like you should probably be experimenting a lot because I'm like, we don't know how to solve a lot of social issues. But if you have an experimental mindset about these things, you should expect a lot of social programs to like fail and for you to be like, well, we tried that. It didn't quite work, but we got a lot of information that was really useful.
and yet people are like if a social program doesn't work I feel like there's a lot of like this is just something must have gone wrong and I'm like or correct decisions were made like maybe someone just decided like it's worth a try it's worth trying this out and so seeing failure in a given instance doesn't actually mean that any bad decisions were made and in fact if you don't see enough failure sometimes that's more concerning and so like in life you know I'm like if I
don't fail occasionally I'm like am I trying hard enough like like surely there's harder things that I could try or bigger things that I could take on if I'm literally never failing and so in and of itself I think like not failing is often actually kind of a failure um
Now, this varies because I'm like, well, you know, if this is easy to see when, especially as failure is like less costly, you know, so at the same time, I'm not going to go to someone who is like, I don't know, like living month to month and then be like, why don't you just try to do a startup? I'm not going to say that to that person because I'm like, well, that's a huge risk.
You maybe have a family depending on you. You might lose your house. Then I'm like, actually, your optimal rate of failure is quite low and you should probably play it safe because right now you're just not in a circumstance where you can afford to just fail and it not be costly. Yeah.
And yeah, in cases with AI, I guess I think similarly where I'm like, if the failures are small and the costs are kind of like low, then I'm like, then, you know, you're just going to see that. Like when you do the system prompt, you can't iterate on it forever, but the failures are probably hopefully going to be kind of small and you can like fix them.
Really big failures, like things that you can't recover from. I'm like, those are the things that actually I think we tend to underestimate the badness of. I've thought about this strangely in my own life where I'm like, I just think I don't think enough about things like car accidents. I've thought this before about how much I depend on my hands for my work.
And I'm like things that just injure my hands. I'm like, you know, I don't know. It's like there's these are like there's lots of areas where I'm like the cost of failure there is really high. And in that case, it should be like close to zero. Like I probably just wouldn't do a sport if they were like, by the way, lots of people just like break their fingers a whole bunch doing this.
I'd be like, that's not for me.
I don't know. Sometimes I think it's like, am I under failing is like a question that I'll also ask myself. So maybe that's the thing that I think people don't like ask enough. Because if the optimal rate of failure is often greater than zero, then sometimes it does feel like you should look at parts of your life and be like, are there places here where I'm just under failing?
Yeah. It also makes failure much less of a sting, I have to say. You're just like, okay, great. Then when I go and I think about this, I'll be like, maybe I'm not under-failing in this area because that one just didn't work out.
Someone tried a thing.
Well, not everyone listens.
The people who are failing too much, you should fail less.
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