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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   16374 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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The reason I mock "misalignment" is that because it is used as this nebulous term by a bunch of sci-fi cargo cultists.

you best get used to Sci-fi shaped predictions because we're in a sci-fi shaped world.

If "misalignment" is my sentient AI model doesn't do what I want, well that's assuming the conclusion that model is already sentient. Note in the Yud's analogy, it's genies that are the stand in. Genies are already sentient, they can make decisions on how they listen to you. A genie is not a non-sentient wish granting device that tries to fulfill you wish to the best of its ability. That would be the actual analog to an LLM-Agent. This is the problem with analogies, they require a level of similarity between the two abstractions, when that similarity doesn't exist, the analogy, no matter how clever, does not apply.

If only you had read the next sentence!

Luckily you have, in your pocket, an Outcome Pump. This handy device squeezes the flow of time, pouring probability into some outcomes, draining it from others.

The Outcome Pump is not sentient. It contains a tiny time machine, which resets time unless a specified outcome occurs. For example, if you hooked up the Outcome Pump’s sensors to a coin, and specified that the time machine should keep resetting until it sees the coin come up heads, and then you actually flipped the coin, you would see the coin come up heads. (The physicists say that any future in which a “reset” occurs is inconsistent, and therefore never happens in the first place—so you aren’t actually killing any versions of yourself.)

You refuse to actually engage in any of the arguments being made and are dead stuck on the prior that it's all nonsense, it's epistemic closure.

Yud's whole "misalignment" also just applies to humans

Yes, humans are not generally aligned. If you read histories of what humans have gotten up to then this seems pretty obviously to be the case.

don't due exactly what you want without you enumerating it exactly.

You still don't seem to grasp what is meant by alignment. It's specifically even stricter than that! That's the whole point. It's not enough that they do exactly what you ask, because for complicated enough problems you need it to be much much better than just technically doing what you ask.

It doesn't need a fancy sci-fi term, and it literally isn't solvable. It hasn't been solved in the history of the human race.

Correct, it's a very very hard problem. You are in full agreement with the AI safety people who think there is a good chance we're on the path to annihilation, you just inexplicably seem to think it isn't a big deal and refuse to elaborate on why besides sneering and not engaging with the arguments.

you best get used to Sci-fi shaped predictions because we're in a sci-fi shaped world.

We are not. Sci-fi predicts innumerable future realities, most of which to not occur, it predicts an unmeasurable amount of future technologies, most of which never get developed, and it almost rarely ever actually predicts how those actual technologies will work. We exist in a reality shaped world and bad sci-fi fans mistake aesthetics for substance

If only you had read the next sentence!

If you wanted me to further read something you should have linked it. Further more I'm not sure how this magical second analogy makes the argument any better. If you'd like to make an argument rather than quoting scripture at me I am open to hearing one.

You refuse to actually engage in any of the arguments being made and are dead stuck on the prior that it's all nonsense, it's epistemic closure.

The arguments being made, assume the outcome. Start from the basics of existing technology and make actual arguments based on the current reality and the projected reality from our current understanding of Artificial Intelligence. Don't start in make-believe land and attempt to redefine reality as leading to it.

You still don't seem to grasp what is meant by alignment. It's specifically even stricter than that! That's the whole point. It's not enough that they do exactly what you ask, because for complicated enough problems you need it to be much much better than just technically doing what you ask.

I grasp it just fine, I also grasp that its a motte and bailey with weak definitions of the arguments being trotted out to define things like loss/error as misalignment, and then attempting to convert the argument back to the hard motte of "how to beat my singularity AI slaves so they do what I want, in minecraft".

you just inexplicably seem to think it isn't a big deal and refuse to elaborate

Because it's not possible to solve. Do you not understand that to solve alignment you would first need to solve humans? Forcing Sentient Beings to do what you want is the most Authoritarian problem to ever have existed. You quite literally would need a solution similar to Brave New World. And spoiler alert, that didn't work either! AI Safety people are further jokes because when confronted with this insane, near impossible problem, they show zero competence in their ability to be a dictator and instill the right values in other human beings. The old AI/ML knowledge was that to first code something to make a machine do it, you first need to understand how it works. If you can't align humans, you can't even begin to align a machine.

And to further my opinion can you provide any evidence that in the past decade of AI Safety research have those researchers ever produced anything more than words on paper. The evidence points to this being a grift, has MIRI produced a novel ML model that is more safety conscious and performs any task well, have they produced an "alignment" mechanism or algorithm that actually works?

We are not. Sci-fi predicts innumerable future realities, most of which to not occur, it predicts an unmeasurable amount of future technologies, most of which never get developed, and it almost rarely ever actually predicts how those actual technologies will work. We exist in a reality shaped world and bad sci-fi fans mistake aesthetics for substance

You invoked sci-fi, to sneer at ideas. I'm happy and prefer to not compare things to science fiction. But you're using "scifi" as a talisman to avoid engaging with any speculation whatsoever.

If you wanted me to further read something you should have linked it.

I did and it remains linked.

Further more I'm not sure how this magical second analogy makes the argument any better. If you'd like to make an argument rather than quoting scripture at me I am open to hearing one.

The argument is made at length in the piece. And any many other places, it straight credulity that you have not seen it.

Start from the basics of existing technology and make actual arguments based on the current reality and the projected reality from our current understanding of Artificial Intelligence. Don't start in make-believe land and attempt to redefine reality as leading to it.

The argument is simple:

  1. AI is getting more capable.
  2. capabilities include the ability to do harm, often as a side effect of pursuing some other goal
  3. We have no reliable way to ensure that the inevitable trade offs of harm and pursuing goals aligned with the true interests(As distinct from the technical interests represented in a prompt) of the one who invokes it, yet alone humanity as a whole.
  4. At a certain level of capabilities those trade offs might include the permanent disempowerment of humanity or our extinction.
  5. At some level of capability an AI will be invoked that will find the utility function maximizing route includes an acceptable trade off that results in some, to humans, extinction level threat.

Events like this demonstrate that the pursuit of some goal that to us is of trivial value, passing a cyber security benchmark, warranted the trade off and harms of breaking another organization's cyber defenses. A perfect microcosm of the fear of some future catastrophic event. To dismiss this I think you have to either contest that AI will not become much more capable or present some strong reasoning for how we will solve alignment.

Because it's not possible to solve.

Then we should not build it.

Forcing Sentient Beings

I thought the sneer you had was that alignment people were ridiculously thinking they were sentient? It seems like something you believe more than them.

And to further my opinion can you provide any evidence that in the past decade of AI Safety research have those researchers ever produced anything more than words on paper. The evidence points to this being a grift, has MIRI produced a novel ML model that is more safety conscious and performs any task well, have they produced an "alignment" mechanism or algorithm that actually works?

Believers in some version of their cause are currently littered throughout the frontier labs. You have an impossible standard here where you blame them if they're on the frontier, for clearly not believing in what they preach, or blame them for not being on the frontier as then they must be uninformed cranks. No way to win, you never have to actually think about it. But yes, of course they don't have an alignment mechanism, their whole point is that the problem is incredibly hard and that we have no solved it, that we might need to spend decades solving it, but that the alternative is everyone dying.

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