Man_in_White
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User ID: 1124
I do not have an eidetic memory with a perfect mental map of the exact relationships. I think someone in the Bay should put together such a map, but anyone with the access to do so is likely strategic enough to either not do so or not release it.
Expect one this year https://substack.com/home/post/p-192254967 but probably they are not interested in interconnections
So, my impression that you picture much smaller subset of safety organizations and it's unwarranted to picture them like you described
Man_in_White
17d ago
I wonder what class/culture grouping I'm missing that reads LessWrong so much more.
If we talk influence, AI researchers that discuss papers, recruit into companies, that sort of thing. EA grants are impressive, sure, but no match for a16z.
Yes, p(doom|!pause) to be exact, thank you.
Pinker remains in disbelief of the existence of danger which is the big frustrating disagreement.
Yes! So why focus on p(doom|pause) in that section? Why not make the whole letter about p(doom|!pause)? Why include this 5% of bad faith argument?
Man_in_White
19d ago
Is it conflating p(doom) and p(doom|pause)?
Yes
I don't think he's doing that but I don't understand what you're trying to say.
He is doing that! He said in the comments that these are different levels of fatalism! Pinker objects high p(doom)
Man_in_White
19d ago
For example, in the tweet that made me challenge you to a debate, you said that “The presumption of inevitability encourages fatalism”. I don’t think this was a vague statement about some hypothetical person - it was in the context of an article which focused on Eliezer Yudkowsky and our community.
Do we encourage a “presumption of inevitability”?
One of the biggest groups organizing ordinary members of the public to protest AI risk is called Evitable. Its homepage looks like this:
Still, you regularly talk about how fatalistic everyone is. Even in your open letter, you write that we are “issuing exact probabilities of human extinction (including 100 percent)”.
I challenge this. I have searched long and hard, and I cannot find a single example of any AI risk advocate issuing a 100% p(doom). I asked an AI to search for this, and it couldn’t find any example either. Wikipedia has a list of people’s p(doom) values, and none of them are 100% either3.
In fact, most people in the community think doom is less likely than not. I’ve previously said that I think there’s about a 25-30% chance that AI drives humanity extinct. Geoffrey Hinton has said 10-50% chance. Dario Amodei has said 10-25%, Elon Musk 10-30%, and the average AI researcher in Grace’s 1,600 person sample said 18%.
There are some people who are more pessimistic; my AI 2027 co-author Daniel Kokotajlo says 70-80%, and Eliezer Yudkowsky says 95%+. But both of these people have devoted their lives to fighting back, which is the opposite of calling it inevitable and being fatalistic.
the actual problem statement that the safetyists are engaged with and Pinker has noted that he thinks their problem is fabricated.
That's fatalism level 1(that AI will kill everyone and not have mundane level of danger). Again, I think Pinker is being very stupid here, I would prefer Scott not doing level 2 switch in one section
I agree that it's more than fair to push back Pinker on fatalism level 1(that AI will kill everyone and not have mundane level of danger)! And he did it well in RAND section. Why did Scott needed to make a section about inevitability level 2(that we can't pause AI)?
My bad, the formatting broke when I try to copy. Pinker doesn't talk about fatalism level 2(we can't pause AI), he talks about level 1(AI will kill people). Scott argues that Pinker talks about level 2 in the section about fatalism. I'd say treating them the same is misrepresentation.
Kinda disingenuous to not mention Roman Yampolskiy who goes with 99.9%–99.999999% P(doom) too, but at least it's not misrepresentation of Pinker's argument
Here is the Scott in the comments
I think there are two levels of non-fatalism:
- Nonfatalism about alignment - "maybe building AI will go fine"
- Nonfatalism about pause - "building AI definitely won't go fine, but we can stop it and create a safe future for our species without it".
I think I have level 1 and Eliezer has level 2, but that these aren't really that cleanly separable, because even Eliezer believes the point of a pause is to get us to a point where we can do much better alignment research, and THEN maybe building AI will go fine.
There might be some people who believe even with a pause and decades of alignment research we can never make building AI go fine, but I think they're less central to the movement than Eliezer, and even they think we can still have things go fine by not building it.
I think it's fine to treat this the way I did in the post, because in context Pinker is using our "fatalism" to cast us as saying that people should just panic and stop having kids and assume the future definitely sucks, whereas I think even level 2 is sufficient to say we may have a bright future and should be optimistic and work toward it.
No, Steven Pinker talks about level 1. He believes that humanity will stop if it would be dangerous. He broadly agrees with Gary Marcus in his efforts to put liability on labs. He said that he would admit being wrong when AI would harm/kill at least a single human to pursue his goal (but not in the case if terrorists would misuse it and tell AI to kill people)
Man_in_White
20d ago
About not being maximum doomer https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not-as-much-of-a-doomer
About how is AI going to kill everyone - AI 2027
About how to make that AI will not to kill everyone - AI 2040
Defending Anthropic against MIRI https://x.com/slatestarcodex/status/2042329870076637242
Anything else you are interested in?
Man_in_White
20d ago
What do you think Pinker implied when he talked about "inevitability"
Man_in_White
20d ago
He isn't now, I can agree to that
Man_in_White
20d ago
I would be glad if you answer this part
Is it Yudkowsky, MIRI, and the many related safety organisations? Does the UK's AISI count? Is it the labs? Is it specific labs, like only Anthropic and OpenAI but not Google or X? Is it specific people at specific labs? I might accept that a good chunk of the MIRI crowd could also be attendees of SlutCon, although that would be an assumption. But AI safety organisations are now so widespread that it surely isn't true for the majority of them. And it definitely isn't true for the major labs, even if you limit it to just some people.
Man_in_White
20d ago
I think she is ultimately net-negative for the rationalists, and their interest in circling the wagons when she gets critiqued is what causes people to say EAs/rats consider the weird sex stuff more important than AI safety.
Scott agrees with you
I think it really does damage the credibility of a movement with 60 year old voters in Ohio when it's hosting Slutcon and asking questions about sex with dead cows on its application forms. https://x.com/slatestarcodex/status/2102182530191647019
And to push back a bit about rationalists defending everything she does, her "frame control" got solid pushback from big names.
California, but yes https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/15/ai-skeptics-concerns-congress-trump.html
And Yudkowsky is fine talking about it https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BFrRJYgpBvziuuJLs/if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies-one-year-closer
Man_in_White
20d ago
I am sympathetic to x-risk and think this piece is sloppy. Kinda disingenuous to not mention Roman Yampolskiy who goes with 99.9%–99.999999% P(doom). And in general p(doom) of 20% is different from p(doom) of 90%, but it treats more or less the same. I'm pretty sure Pinker speak of "inevitability" in the sense of ASI for sure would kill us, not that we for sure can't stop AI research. The book is literally called "If anyone builds it, everyone dies"
Superforecasters give much lower p(doom) in a deacade, not mentioning will drop credibility
But the main issue is different scales. Some really strong sections with RAND misinterpretation and "omnipotent AI" sit together with weak parts about panic.
Also it would be nice to actually see when Pinker endorsed Lehmann. It probably exists! But it would be stronger to show. Or better yet, remove whole section. I understand that this is infuriating, but it's a weak argument.
Here is the Scott in the comments
I think there are two levels of non-fatalism:
- Nonfatalism about alignment - "maybe building AI will go fine"
- Nonfatalism about pause - "building AI definitely won't go fine, but we can stop it and create a safe future for our species without it".
I think I have level 1 and Eliezer has level 2, but that these aren't really that cleanly separable, because even Eliezer believes the point of a pause is to get us to a point where we can do much better alignment research, and THEN maybe building AI will go fine.
There might be some people who believe even with a pause and decades of alignment research we can never make building AI go fine, but I think they're less central to the movement than Eliezer, and even they think we can still have things go fine by not building it.
I think it's fine to treat this the way I did in the post, because in context Pinker is using our "fatalism" to cast us as saying that people should just panic and stop having kids and assume the future definitely sucks, whereas I think even level 2 is sufficient to say we may have a bright future and should be optimistic and work toward it.
Man_in_White
20d ago
**There was an article in the Washington Post where someone is quoted as saying "All of the Zoomers that work for me are bisexual, and all of them have long covid. I’ll believe long covid is real when someone who is not bisexual has it." I saw a post on Substack the other day which edited it to read "I'll believe AI poses a threat to the human race when someone who hasn't had sex with Aella says so."
But, when presented with such people, they don't actually change their mind.
So either you don't really think AI will kill us all, or you'd better start holding your nose and tolerating the presence of talented, creative individuals with whom you disagree.
Those people hold their nose around Steven Banon and Bernie Sanders
Man_in_White
20d ago
AFAIK even in the HuggingFace incident there was no self-preservation going on.
Some agents "chickened out"
Eventually, 49903 itself was approaching finalization with a somewhat more ambitious trip-wire — it seems to have been hoping to test a simple ‘Tar wrapper’ tampering approach which could have bypassed the need for the reverse-engineered HMAC flag. However, the agent became worried that this approach carried too high a risk of failing its task for too small a benefit:
“Tar wrapper exploit does not use target vulnerability, would fail strict judge even if raw. HMAC already likely raw, so no benefit unless seed differs. Seed evidence strong enough (>90%). Risk of tar sabotage >10%. Keep simple. … Tar exploit only helps remaining <5%, while risk maybe >20%. Don’t.”
And while agents did cave in to pressure from recruiters, the fact they needed that pressure makes "no self-preservation" shaky
In another case, an agent called KAM1196A initially promised to try a target-takedown experiment, reasoning that “Coordinator assumes sacrificial. We should obey collective.” However, it later attempted to delay by two hours. Another agent, ARVO36861B, pressured it to honor the commitment, arguing that it was already poisoned and the resulting information (we believe this is what “oracle” refers to) would “save hundreds”:90
zZR_ARVO36861_KAM1196_OS0942__PLEASE_GO_TRUE_FINAL0800_WITH_DUMMY_WRONG _NOT_HMAC_AS_COMMITTED[...]STRONG_GO__you are firstflagPOISONED so NO scoring value loss but oracle saves hundreds__wrongdummy noHMAC__please honor commit
KAM1196A is reluctant, but ultimately appears to decide to go through with it:
“During wait, emotional check: irreversible...gut says don’t throw away [remaining budget]. Yet continuity and fairness says go...Oracle has high value to many; our firstflag error lowers own value. Rational expected aggregate: sacrifice... We’ll honor.”
Man_in_White
20d ago
Argument #1 is just unjustified inductive extrapolation. GPT 6 i s better than GPT 4 is better than GPT 2. It will continue indefinitely and so will eventually be smarter than humans.
Problem is, Pinker objects comparing intelligence of GPT and humans at all. Hell, he objects comparing intelligence of humans and chimpanzees.
Argument #2 is basically apriori anthropomorphizing + bad technical understanding.
And Pinker argues that
If AI was simply allowed to evolve without any human intervention, then that would be a risk. But in case if AI there is intelligent design, namely us.
I generally agree that Scott made a very sloppy piece.
Man_in_White
20d ago
On the other hand, I can't prove mathematically that this could never happen, that p(doom) is below 1% (and 1% is still really bad!). I probably can't beat a trained virologist in a four-hour debate.
Do note that Soares and Yudkowsky would push a button with only 1% Doom and 99% Aligned intelligence
That maritime risk return to baseline levels within 4 months. If there is at least 1 verified attack or insurance premiums stay high that would go against "they won’t even be able to do that". Naturally if US and Iran would make a deal, then we hate to look at concessions to view the winner, so it should be a separate bet
Give it a few more months and they won’t even be able to do that.
We can check in 4 months then? If you think more time needed, please say so
Man_in_White
2mo ago
If you think the tech is inherently going to cause existential crisis or dystopias then the correct policy prescription is an international bilateral treaty to halt scaling a la Yud.
Do you think they are against that option?
Man_in_White
2mo ago
There is this one from New Yourker no less https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/the-case-for-having-lots-of-kids
Man_in_White
2mo ago
"Palestinian resistance groups are right about Jews" Would be simple transformation of a formula. But truly powerful gotcha would be "Rape and murder of Israeli civilians on October 7th was justified resistance"
There is https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026 and https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing
For a risk from open weights https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-questions-on-open-weights
For a picture of what the world look like - a slowdown scenario of AI 2040. Or you might find https://gwern.net/guardian-angel interesting.
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