LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

"Humans provide an untapped wealth of evidence about alignment" by TurnTrout & Quintin Pope

08 Aug 2022

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https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CjFZeDD6iCnNubDoS/humans-provide-an-untapped-wealth-of-evidence-about#fnref7a5ti4623qb Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. TL;DR: To even consciously consider an alignment research direction, you should have evidence to locate it as a promising lead. As best I can tell, many directions seem interesting but do not have strong evidence of being “entangled” with the alignment problem such that I expect them to yield significant insights. For example, “we can solve an easier version of the alignment problem by first figuring out how to build an AI which maximizes the number of real-world diamonds” has intuitive appeal and plausibility, but this claim doesn’t have to be true and this problem does not necessarily have a natural, compact solution. In contrast, there do in fact exist humans who care about diamonds. Therefore, there are guaranteed-to-exist alignment insights concerning the way people come to care about e.g. real-world diamonds. “Consider how humans navigate the alignment subproblem you’re worried about” is a habit which I (TurnTrout) picked up from Quintin Pope. I wrote the post, he originated the tactic.

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

"Humans provide an untapped wealth of evidence about alignment" by TurnTrout & Quintin Pope

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

Other episodes from LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

"Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance" by Martin Sustrik

"The inaugural Redwood Research podcast" by Buck, ryan_greenblatt

"Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status Because We Don’t Have Enough Nurses Who Speak Low German" by jenn

[Linkpost] "“The first two weeks are the hardest”: my first digital declutter" by mingyuan

"Why we are excited about confession!" by boazbarak, Gabriel Wu, Manas Joglekar

"Backyard cat fight shows Schelling points preexist language" by jchan

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