I think that strictly speaking this post (or at least the main thrust) is true, and proven in the first section. The title is arguably less true: I think of 'coherence arguments' as including things like 'it's not possible for you to agree to give me a limitless number of dollars in return for nothing', which does imply some degree of 'goal-direction'.
I think the post is important, because it constrains the types of valid arguments that can be given for 'freaking out about goal-directedness', for lack of a better term. In my mind, it provokes various follo
...In this essay, ricraz argues that we shouldn't expect a clean mathematical theory of rationality and intelligence to exist. I have debated em about this, and I continue to endorse more or less everything I said in that debate. Here I want to restate some of my (critical) position by building it from the ground up, instead of responding to ricraz point by point.
When should we expect a domain to be "clean" or "messy"? Let's look at everything we know about science. The "cleanest" domains are mathematics and fundamental physics. There, we have crisply defined
...In this essay, Rohin sets out to debunk what ey perceive as a prevalent but erroneous idea in the AI alignment community, namely: "VNM and similar theorems imply goal-directed behavior". This is placed in the context of Rohin's thesis that solving AI alignment is best achieved by designing AI which is not goal-directed. The main argument is: "coherence arguments" imply expected utility maximization, but expected utility maximization does not imply goal-directed behavior. Instead, it is a vacuous constraint, since any agent policy can be regarded as maximiz
...In this essay Paul Christiano proposes a definition of "AI alignment" which is more narrow than other definitions that are often employed. Specifically, Paul suggests defining alignment in terms of the motivation of the agent (which should be, helping the user), rather than what the agent actually does. That is, as long as the agent "means well", it is aligned, even if errors in its assumptions about the user's preferences or about the world at large lead it to actions that are bad for the user.
Rohin Shah's comment on the essay (which I believe is endorsed
...A year later, I continue to agree with this post; I still think its primary argument is sound and important. I'm somewhat sad that I still think it is important; I thought this was an obvious-once-pointed-out point, but I do not think the community actually believes it yet.
I particularly agree with this sentence of Daniel's review:
I think the post is important, because it constrains the types of valid arguments that can be given for 'freaking out about goal-directedness', for lack of a better term."
"Constraining the types of valid arguments" is exactly the...
I've been pleasantly surprised by how much this resource has caught on in terms of people using it and referring to it (definitely more than I expected when I made it). There were 30 examples on the list when was posted in April 2018, and 20 new examples have been contributed through the form since then. I think the list has several properties that contributed to wide adoption: it's fun, standardized, up-to-date, comprehensive, and collaborative.
Some of the appeal is that it's fun to read about AI cheating at tasks in unexpected ways (I&apo...
This is my post.
I've spent much of the last year thinking about the pedagogical mistakes I made here, and am writing the Reframing Impact sequence to fix them. While this post recorded my 2018-thinking on impact measurement, I don't think it communicated the key insights well. Of course, I'm glad it seems to have nonetheless proven useful and exciting to some people!
If I were to update this post, it would probably turn into a rehash of Reframing Impact. Instead, I'll just briefly state the argument as I would present it today.
...I hadn't realized this post was nominated, partially because of my comment, so here's a late review. I basically continue to agree with everything I wrote then, and I continue to like this post for those reasons, and so I support including it in the LW Review.
Since writing the comment, I've come across another argument for thinking about intent alignment -- it seems like a "generalization" of assistance games / CIRL, which itself seems like a formalization of an aligned agent in a toy setting. In assistance games, the agent explici...
Review by the author:
I continue to endorse the contents of this post.
I don't really think about the post that much, but the post expresses a worldview that shapes how I do my research - that agency is a mechanical fact about the workings of a system.
To me, the main contribution of the post is setting up a question: what's a good definition of optimisation that avoids the counterexamples of the post? Ideally, this definition would refer or correspond to the mechanistic properties of the system, so that people could somehow statically determine whether a giv
...Insofar as the AI Alignment Forum is part of the Best-of-2018 Review, this post deserves to be included. It's the friendliest explanation to MIRI's research agenda (as of 2018) that currently exists.
I think it was important to have something like this post exist. However, I now think it's not fit for purpose. In this discussion thread, rohinmshah, abramdemski and I end up spilling a lot of ink about a disagreement that ended up being at least partially because we took 'realism about rationality' to mean different things. rohinmshah thought that irrealism would mean that the theory of rationality was about as real as the theory of liberalism, abramdemski thought that irrealism would mean that the theory of rationality would be about as real as the theo
...Note: this is on balance a negative review of the post, at least least regarding the question of whether it should be included in a "Best of LessWrong 2018" compilation. I feel somewhat bad about writing it given that the author has already written a review that I regard as negative. That being said, I think that reviews of posts by people other than the author are important for readers looking to judge posts, since authors may well have distorted views of their own works.
This post is close in my mind to Alex Zhu's post Paul's research agenda FAQ. They each helped to give me many new and interesting thoughts about alignment.
This post was maybe the first time I'd seen a an actual conversation about Paul's work between two people who had deep disagreements in this area - where Paul wrote things, someone wrote an effort-post response, and Paul responded once again. Eliezer did it again in the comments of Alex's FAQ, which also was a big deal for me in terms of learning.
This essay makes a valuable contribution to the vocabulary we use to discuss and think about AI risk. Building a common vocabulary like this is very important for productive knowledge transmission and debate, and makes it easier to think clearly about the subject.
I didn't like this post. At the time, I didn't engage with it very much. I wrote a mildly critical comment (which is currently the top-voted comment, somewhat to my surprise) but I didn't actually engage with the idea very much. So it seems like a good idea to say something now.
The main argument that this is valuable seems to be: this captures a common crux in AI safety. I don't think it's my crux, and I think other people who think it is their crux are probably mistaken. So from my perspective it's a straw-man of the view it&... (read more)