[-] scruiser@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago

Those are some neat links! I don't think Eliezer mentions the Godel Machines or the metaheuristic literature anywhere in the sequences, and given his fixation on recursive self improvement he really ought to have. It could be a simple failure to do a proper literature review, or it could be deliberate neglect given that the examples you link show all of these approaches max out (and thus illustrate a major problem with the concept of strong AGI trying to bootstrap to godhood, it is likely to hit diminishing returns).

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 15 points 3 days ago

You need to translate them into lesswrongese before you try interpreting them together.

probability: he made up a number to go with his feelings about a topic

subjective: the number is even more made up and feelings based than is normal for lesswrong

noticeable: the number is really tiny, but big enough for Eliezer to fearmonger about!

No, you don't get to actually know what the number is, then you could penalize Eliezer for predicting it wrongly or question why that number specifically. Just trust that the bayesianified language shows Eliezer thought really hard about it.

17
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by scruiser@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

I found a neat essay discussing the history of Doug Lenat, Eurisko, and cyc here. The essay is pretty cool, Doug Lenat made one of the largest and most systematic efforts to make Good Old Fashioned Symbolic AI reach AGI through sheer volume and detail of expert system entries. It didn't work (obviously), but what's interesting (especially in contrast to LLMs), is that Doug made his business, Cycorp actually profitable and actually produce useful products in the form of custom built expert systems to various customers over the decades with a steady level of employees and effort spent (as opposed to LLM companies sucking up massive VC capital to generate crappy products that will probably go bust).

This sparked memories of lesswrong discussion of Eurisko... which leads to some choice sneerable classic lines.

In a sequence classic, Eliezer discusses Eurisko. Having read an essay explaining Eurisko more clearly, a lot of Eliezer's discussion seems a lot emptier now.

To the best of my inexhaustive knowledge, EURISKO may still be the most sophisticated self-improving AI ever built - in the 1980s, by Douglas Lenat before he started wasting his life on Cyc. EURISKO was applied in domains ranging from the Traveller war game (EURISKO became champion without having ever before fought a human) to VLSI circuit design.

This line is classic Eliezer dunning-kruger arrogance. The lesson from Cyc were used in useful expert systems and effort building the expert systems was used to continue to advance Cyc, so I would call Doug really successful actually, much more successful than many AGI efforts (including Eliezer's). And it didn't depend on endless VC funding or hype cycles.

EURISKO used "heuristics" to, for example, design potential space fleets. It also had heuristics for suggesting new heuristics, and metaheuristics could apply to any heuristic, including metaheuristics. E.g. EURISKO started with the heuristic "investigate extreme cases" but moved on to "investigate cases close to extremes". The heuristics were written in RLL, which stands for Representation Language Language. According to Lenat, it was figuring out how to represent the heuristics in such fashion that they could usefully modify themselves without always just breaking, that consumed most of the conceptual effort in creating EURISKO.

...

EURISKO lacked what I called "insight" - that is, the type of abstract knowledge that lets humans fly through the search space. And so its recursive access to its own heuristics proved to be for nought. Unless, y'know, you're counting becoming world champion at Traveller without ever previously playing a human, as some sort of accomplishment.

Eliezer simultaneously mocks Doug's big achievements but exaggerates this one. The detailed essay I linked at the beginning actually explains this properly. Traveller's rules inadvertently encouraged a narrow degenerate (in the mathematical sense) strategy. The second place person actually found the same broken strategy Doug (using Eurisko) did, Doug just did it slightly better because he had gamed it out more and included a few ship designs that countered the opponent doing the same broken strategy. It was a nice feat of a human leveraging a computer to mathematically explore a game, it wasn't an AI independently exploring a game.

Another lesswronger brings up Eurisko here. Eliezer is of course worried:

This is a road that does not lead to Friendly AI, only to AGI. I doubt this has anything to do with Lenat's motives - but I'm glad the source code isn't published and I don't think you'd be doing a service to the human species by trying to reimplement it.

And yes, Eliezer actually is worried a 1970s dead end in AI might lead to FOOM and AGI doom. To a comment here:

Are you really afraid that AI is so easy that it's a very short distance between "ooh, cool" and "oh, shit"?

Eliezer responds:

Depends how cool. I don't know the space of self-modifying programs very well. Anything cooler than anything that's been tried before, even marginally cooler, has a noticeable subjective probability of going to shit. I mean, if you kept on making it marginally cooler and cooler, it'd go to "oh, shit" one day after a sequence of "ooh, cools" and I don't know how long that sequence is.

Fearmongering back in 2008 even before he had given up and gone full doomer.

And this reminds me, Eliezer did not actually predict which paths lead to better AI. In 2008 he was pretty convinced Neural Networks were not a path to AGI.

Not to mention that neural networks have also been "failing" (i.e., not yet succeeding) to produce real AI for 30 years now. I don't think this particular raw fact licenses any conclusions in particular. But at least don't tell me it's still the new revolutionary idea in AI.

Apparently it took all the way until AlphaGo (sometime 2015 to 2017) for Eliezer to start to realize he was wrong. (He never made a major post about changing his mind, I had to reconstruct this process and estimate this date from other lesswronger's discussing it and noticing small comments from him here and there.) Of course, even as late as 2017, MIRI was still neglecting neural networks to focus on abstract frameworks like "Highly Reliable Agent Design".

So yeah. Puts things into context, doesn't it.

Bonus: One of Doug's last papers, which lists out a lot of lessons LLMs could take from cyc and expert systems. You might recognize the co-author, Gary Marcus, from one of the LLM critical blogs: https://garymarcus.substack.com/

19
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by scruiser@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

So, lesswrong Yudkowskian orthodoxy is that any AGI without "alignment" will bootstrap to omnipotence, destroy all mankind, blah, blah, etc. However, there has been the large splinter heresy of accelerationists that want AGI as soon as possible and aren't worried about this at all (we still make fun of them because what they want would result in some cyberpunk dystopian shit in the process of trying to reach it). However, even the accelerationist don't want Chinese AGI, because insert standard sinophobic rhetoric about how they hate freedom and democracy or have world conquering ambitions or they simply lack the creativity, technical ability, or background knowledge (i.e. lesswrong screeds on alignment) to create an aligned AGI.

This is a long running trend in lesswrong writing I've recently noticed while hate-binging and catching up on the sneering I've missed (I had paid less attention to lesswrong over the past year up until Trump started making techno-fascist moves), so I've selected some illustrative posts and quotes for your sneering.

  • Good news, China actually has no chance at competing at AI (this was posted before deepseek was released). Well. they are technically right that China doesn't have the resources to compete in scaling LLMs to AGI because it isn't possible in the first place

China has neither the resources nor any interest in competing with the US in developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) primarily via scaling Large Language Models (LLMs).

  • The Situational Awareness Essays make sure to get their Yellow Peril fearmongering on! Because clearly China is the threat to freedom and the authoritarian power (pay no attention to the techbro techno-fascist)

In the race to AGI, the free world’s very survival will be at stake. Can we maintain our preeminence over the authoritarian powers?

  • More crap from the same author
  • There are some posts pushing back on having an AGI race with China, but not because they are correcting the sinophobia or the delusions LLMs are a path to AGI, but because it will potentially lead to an unaligned or improperly aligned AGI
  • And of course, AI 2027 features a race with China that either the US can win with a AGI slowdown (and an evil AGI puppeting China) or both lose to the AGI menance. Featuring "legions of CCP spies"

Given the “dangers” of the new model, OpenBrain “responsibly” elects not to release it publicly yet (in fact, they want to focus on internal AI R&D). Knowledge of Agent-2’s full capabilities is limited to an elite silo containing the immediate team, OpenBrain leadership and security, a few dozen US government officials, and the legions of CCP spies who have infiltrated OpenBrain for years.

  • Someone asks the question directly Why Should I Assume CCP AGI is Worse Than USG AGI?. Judging by upvoted comments, lesswrong orthodoxy of all AGI leads to doom is the most common opinion, and a few comments even point out the hypocrisy of promoting fear of Chinese AGI while saying the US should race for AGI to achieve global dominance, but there are still plenty of Red Scare/Yellow Peril comments

Systemic opacity, state-driven censorship, and state control of the media means AGI development under direct or indirect CCP control would probably be less transparent than in the US, and the world may be less likely to learn about warning shots, wrongheaded decisions, reckless behaviour, etc. True, there was the Manhattan Project, but that was quite long ago; recent examples like the CCP's suppression of information related to the origins of COVID feel more salient and relevant.

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 18 points 2 weeks ago

Keep in mind the author isn't just (or even primarily) counting ultra wealth and establishment politicians as "elites", they are also including scientists trying to educate the public on their area of expertise (i.e. COVID, Global Warming, Environmentalism, etc.), and sociologists/psychologists explaining problems the author wants to ignore or are outright in favor of (racism/transphobia/homophobia).

22

I am still subscribed to slatestarcodex on reddit, and this piece of garbage popped up on my feed. I didn't actually read the whole thing, but basically the author correctly realizes Trump is ruining everything in the process of getting at "DEI" and "wokism", but instead of accepting the blame that rightfully falls on Scott Alexander and the author, deflects and blames the "left" elitists. (I put left in quote marks because the author apparently thinks establishment democrats are actually leftist, I fucking wish).

An illustrative quote (of Scott's that the author agrees with)

We wanted to be able to hold a job without reciting DEI shibboleths or filling in multiple-choice exams about how white people cause earthquakes. Instead we got a thousand scientific studies cancelled because they used the string “trans-” in a sentence on transmembrane proteins.

I don't really follow their subsequent points, they fail to clarify what they mean... In sofar as "left elites" actually refers to centrist democrats, I actually think the establishment Democrats do have a major piece of blame in that their status quo neoliberalism has been rejected by the public but the Democrat establishment refuse to consider genuinely leftist ideas, but that isn't the point this author is actually going for... the author is actually upset about Democrats "virtue signaling" and "canceling" and DEI, so they don't actually have a valid point, if anything the opposite of one.

In case my angry disjointed summary leaves you any doubt the author is a piece of shit:

it feels like Scott has been reading a lot of Richard Hanania, whom I agree with on a lot of points

For reference the ssc discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1jyjc9z/the_edgelords_were_right_a_response_to_scott/

tldr; author trying to blameshift on Trump fucking everything up while keeping up the exact anti-progressive rhetoric that helped propel Trump to victory.

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 15 points 3 weeks ago

No, he's in favor of human slavery, so he still wants to keep naming schemes evocative of it.

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

My favorite comment in the lesswrong discussion: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-make-superbabies?commentId=oyDCbGtkvXtqMnNbK

It's not that eugenics is a magnet for white supremacists, or that rich people might give their children an even more artificially inflated sense of self-worth. No, the risk is that the superbabies might be Khan and kick start the eugenics wars. Of course, this isn't a reason not to make superbabies, it just means the idea needs some more workshopping via Red Teaming (hacker lingo is applicable to everything).

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Soyweiser has likely accurately identified that you're JAQing in bad faith, but on the slim off chance you actually want to educate yourself, the rationalwiki page on Biological Determinism and Eugenics is a decent place to start to see the standard flaws and fallacies used to argue for pro-eugenic positions. Rationalwiki has a scathing and sarcastic tone, but that tone is well deserved in this case.

To provide a brief summary, in general, the pro-eugenicists misunderstand correlation and causation, misunderstand the direction of causation, overestimate what little correlation there actually is, fail to understand environmental factors (especially systemic inequalities that might require leftist solutions to actually have any chance at fixing), and refuse to acknowledge the context of genetics research (i.e. all the Neo-Nazis and alt righters that will jump on anything they can get).

The lesswrongers and SSCs sometimes whine they don't get fair consideration, but considering they take Charles Murray the slightest bit seriously they can keep whining.

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 14 points 10 months ago

Nice effort post! It feels like the LLM is pattern matching to common logic tests even when that is the totally incorrect thing to do. Which is pretty strong evidence against LLM's properly doing reasoning as opposed to getting logic test and puzzles and benchmarks right through sheer memorization and pattern matching.

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 23 points 10 months ago

Which, to recap for everyone, involved underpaying and manipulating employees into working as full time general purpose servants. Which is pretty up there on the scale of cult-like activity out of everything EA has done. So it makes sense she would be trying to pull a switcheroo as to who is responsible for EA being culty...

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 31 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

They are more defensive of the racists in the other blog post on this topic: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MHenxzydsNgRzSMHY/my-experience-at-the-controversial-manifest-2024

Maybe its because the HBDers managed to control the framing with the other thread? Or because the other thread systematically refuses to name names, but this thread actually did name them and the conversation shifted out of a framing that could be controlled with tone-policing and freeze peach appeals into actual concrete discussion of specific blatantly racists statements (its hard to argue someone isn't racist and transphobic when they have articles with titles like "Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?").

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 16 points 10 months ago

Did you misread or are you making a joke (sorry the situation is so absurd its hard to tell)? Curtis Yarvin is Moldbug, and he was the one hosting the afterparty (he didn't attend the Manifest conference himself). So apparently there were racists too cringy even for Moldbug-hosted parties!

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 25 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

There's more shit gems in the comments, but I think my summary captures most of the major points. One more comment that stuck out:

Being a republican is equally as compatible with EA as being a Democrat. Lots of people on both sides have incompatible views. I honestly think you just haven't met enough Republicans!

Yes, this is actually true, and it is a bad thing and an indictment of EA.

Edit 1: There is another post clarifying that it wasn't mostly racists (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/34pz6ni3muwPnenLS/why-so-many-racists-at-manifest ) but 1) this is sneerclub, not careful count of the exact percentage of racists and racist talks to avoid hurting feelings club 2) if you sit down at a table with 3 Neo-Nazis, there are 4 Neo-Nazis sitting down. 3) "Full" is a subjective description, so yes its valid. two major racists would be more than my quota 4) see sidebar on debate

68

So despite the nitpicking they did of the Guardian Article, it seems blatantly clear now that Manifest 2024 was infested by racists. The post article doesn't even count Scott Alexander as "racist" (although they do at least note his HBD sympathies) and identify a count of full 8 racists. They mention a talk discussing the Holocaust as a Eugenics event (and added an edit apologizing for their simplistic framing). The post author is painfully careful and apologetic to distinguish what they personally experienced, what was "inaccurate" about the Guardian article, how they are using terminology, etc. Despite the author's caution, the comments are full of the classic SSC strategy of trying to reframe the issue (complaining the post uses the word controversial in the title, complaining about the usage of the term racist, complaining about the threat to their freeze peach and open discourse of ideas by banning racists, etc.).

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

ghost of 2007!Yud

This part gets me the most. The current day Yud isn't transphobic (enough? idk) so Zack has to piece together his older writings on semantics and epistemology to get a more transphobic gender essentialist version of past Yud.

11

This is a classic sequence post: (mis)appropriated Japanese phrases and cultural concepts, references to the AI box experiment, and links to other sequence posts. It is also especially ironic given Eliezer's recent switch to doomerism with his new phrases of "shut it all down" and "AI alignment is too hard" and "we're all going to die".

Indeed, with developments in NN interpretability and a use case of making LLM not racist or otherwise horrible, it seems to me like their is finally actually tractable work to be done (that is at least vaguely related to AI alignment)... which is probably why Eliezer is declaring defeat and switching to the podcast circuit.

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scruiser

joined 2 years ago