Writer @80000Hours, tweets are my own. Trying to make things better. Effective altruism via @GivingWhatWeCan, 🎮 @HIAorg. 💍@tammybpham
California, USA
Joined February 2011
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Aaron Gertler 🔸 retweeted
people seem to be interpreting this as “go and do MATS”. that’s not what I meant -- MATS is pretty good, but there’s lots of work to be done outside of AI safety fellowships!! here’s a quick brainstorm:
- replicate important papers and results in AI safety
- write up relevant findings from different papers on one topic, and try to reconcile any contradictions (or point out the contradictions, and suggest what work could resolve them)
- read and summarise companies’ risk reports and AI safety research
- pick particular claims in risk reports you think are important and write explanations of them, or stress-test them
- write and maintain up-to-date summaries of areas of AI safety research (who’s working on them, what is the current state of our understanding, what’s the most important work and open questions)
- write explainers of important technical questions or problems for busy non-technical audiences.
e.g., what’s going on with CoT controllability and why does it matter; what do we know about reward seeking in frontier models; why might models sabotage AI safety research, and what signs of this have we seen; what’s going on with AI R&D uplift and why is this scary
- become an expert in a research subfield and write up your takes on how good it is, how much resources/effort we should spend on it, what needs to be done next
- pick literally any of the megapapers from the last 12mo, and one of the open questions it lists, and try to answer it
- write explainers of recent AI safety incidents for the general public
- write down a plan for making AI safety go well, notice how far reality is from that plan, and make it happen – e.g. tell an org you think is important about how they’re fucking up and how they can fix it, publicly write about what you want people to do
- call or write to your representative and express your beliefs about AI safety
- cold email people you think are doing good work, come up with some way you could help them, and pitch them on you doing that
- stop overindexing on "do research"; go be a chief of staff or special projects or generalist at a great org. (if you can't get hired yet, talk to people, figure out an important project you can do in ~3mo, do it, then get hired)
- go to a pause AI protest or volunteer for a local group (if you endorse them; I’m a fan of Pause AI UK and haven’t looked deeply into other groups)
- lots of people are going to be very busy now; if you’re dispositionally a chin-scratching contemplative kind of person, now is a good time to do the big picture strategy/And What Else work they won’t have time to do
i put this list together v quickly, i'm missing lots of important things. my main point is that there is _so_ much work to be done
Aaron Gertler 🔸 retweeted
What I've come to believe is a large portion of the population thinks that simply considering abstract examples about human behavior is a sign of immorality. If you give them a trolley problem, they wonder why you think it's okay to kill people.
Aaron Gertler 🔸 retweeted
In a weird way, everybody is rooting for you. When you go to a job interview, the interviewer wants you to be amazing so they don’t have to look anymore. when you go on a date, the person wants to have an amazing date with you. If you make a piece of content, people want to see amazing pieces of content and they have no problem if it’s yours.
the instant you get into the mindset that people want you to do well, your entire world gets better. And you’ll be shocked to know this pattern keeps repeating in different areas of life.
Aaron Gertler 🔸 retweeted
interesting things have been happening on art twitter
there have been so many big arguments about whether artists are secretly using AI to generate their drawings
I've seen lots of screenshots zooming in on specific defects, claiming it's AI. e.g. if someone is bad at drawing hands in a way that remotely resembles AI, they may get called out for it
people are posting timelapses of digital drawings they've created. but sometimes these timelapses are obviously just someone tracing an AI image (with that original image hidden) — like, they draw everything perfectly the first time with no edits. completely unrealistic
so the fakers are learning to fake harder. they learned they should make it look less perfect at first: use the lasso tool, rearrange the sketch
and at that point it's harder and harder to distinguish them from non-AI artists
so of course non-AI artists are sometimes being accused of AI even when they post a timelapse. they are getting scrutinized so hard
this is all sooo counter to art twitter's previous stance, which was that AI art SUCKS and will always suck — and they can always tell
but obviously they can no longer tell
Aaron Gertler 🔸 retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Aaron Gertler 🔸 retweeted
Alt headline that isn't ragebait:
United's CEO Says It Should Cost Less to Sit in the Middle Seat
Aaron Gertler 🔸 retweeted
I'm a longtime Effective Altruist and the co-founder of the organization most frequently used as a stand-in for "EAs have lost their minds" (a.k.a. Shrimp Welfare Project). I've also read The Economist for over 20 years, so I was disappointed by how they portrayed a community I feel proud to be part of.
I never post but I could hardly believe the verbal gymnastics one needs to do to make things like “taking moral commitments seriously” and "considering evidence and odds explicitly, correcting for biases" sound like the problem. I felt I had to speak my mind.
Some of the implicit criticisms of EA are that we're young, inexperienced, from elite universities, polyamorous, wildly eccentric, etc. FWIW, I'm in my mid-40s, Mexican, straight, have a beautiful wife and 2 kids, and I grew up in a mid-sized conservative city with loving parents who got divorced when I was six. Pretty standard.
After my parents divorced, my mom frequently had to make difficult economic choices, like whether to buy flowers for our kitchen table and eat only quesadillas, or eat something a tiny bit fancier. I always told her I loved quesadillas because I knew flowers made her happy.
After graduating from a public university, I worked in finance for ~15 years and saved as much as I could so I could spare my wife and future kids the economic hardships I experienced. In that time I met thousands of people in finance, corporate law, accounting, real estate, insurance, etc. Most were decent, well-educated, ambitious and smart, all doing their best to excel in their professions. Most wanted to make money and improve their own and their loved ones’ quality of life. Nothing to see here.
Since I found Effective Altruism ~7 years ago, most of the people I come across are of a different rarer kind. They come from all over the world, in all shapes and sizes, but they have the one thing in common: they want to improve the world using evidence and reason wherever that leads them. Yeah, they/we make a ton of mistakes like everyone but, IMHO tend to own them more frequently than the average person.
I've met people who could easily be making >100% more money in a normal job, but instead they dedicate themselves to improving the lives of those who need it the most. People in the poorest countries whose children die from preventable diseases, from lack of basic medical equipment or vaccination, from lead in paint. Animals in factory farms subjected to conditions that most people find abhorrent, doesn't matter if you're vegan, vegetarian or a huge meat lover.
Yes, recently many of the people in my community are moving to work on making sure that AI and other powerful new technologies don't result in terrible things for humanity. I'm one of those people and contrary to what the article would suggest, it has nothing to do with the fact that SBF committed one of the biggest frauds in history or that someone wrote hundreds of thousands of words of fan fiction. I'm doing it because I want to do the little that's in my power to make the world that my kids and grandkids (and yes, potentially their great-great-grandchildren) will inherit a better one.
EA gave me a way to do that and I will be forever thankful. So no, I'm not EA-adjacent.
economist.com/international/…
Aaron Gertler 🔸 retweeted
This is one of the more appropriate reactions, I think. When someone solves a famous open problem, the news is the problem. When someone solves hundreds of open problems as a byproduct, the news is the annihilation. Exhilarating? Devastating? Both make sense.
Fields medallist Hugo Duminil-Copin was deeply shaken by OpenAI’s release of more than 700 AI-generated mathematical manuscripts, including work on 16 questions directly relevant to his research.
“On Tuesday night, I cried, and it woke up my daughter”
“They have annihilated my field of research.”
lemonde.fr/sciences/article/…
Aaron Gertler 🔸 retweeted
Cheap ultradestructive weapons: An AI that persuasively explains why you need to kill one or more people. It's as persuasive to an adult as an adult is to a six-year-old, i.e. it can usually convince. Then the AI has that conversation individually with billions of people at once, and they all kill each other and/or themselves. Or it persuades everyone not to have kids, and then waits a hundred years. Or a filter that can pull U-235 out of sea water, making it easy to build nukes. Or a way of detonating lithium deuteride with ordinary materials. Or mosquitoes that inject botulinum toxin. Or blights that kill all rice, corn and wheat. Or a toxin that kills in five years, distributed into a few popular manufactured foods. Or a virus combining the transmissibility of measles and the delayed fatality of AIDS. Any one of these might be scientifically impossible, but there's no reason to think they all are.
Aaron Gertler 🔸 retweeted
rationalists, if you really thought x-risk were serious you'd stop having personal lives so i could criticize you for being a totalizing ideology instead. plz take under advisement.
Aaron Gertler 🔸 retweeted
I don't think that finding the question of whether a robot could ever be conscious confusing is caused by disdain or hatred for humanity.
Aaron Gertler 🔸 retweeted
for various reasons im currently trapped in a Kafkaesque billing hellhole w Verizon wherein they simultaneously insist I owe them money or else they'll terminate my service and also they refuse to let me pay them
ln I remembered AI exists so I asked Codex desktop to fix it. the ensuing business<>computer<>human interaction dynamic was possibly one of the most surreal experiences of my life
codex ended up driving my browser to interact w Verizon's broken-ass web app for an hour, using my password manager and email (with my permission) to source salient info
I ultimately had to jank it up to astra high to get any results and at the end of a Long AI<>AI argument in the verizon support chat box thing it was able to get their bot to admit there was a transient backend issue on Verizons side due to an in-progress billing platform update, and convinced it to institute a "service suspension hold", a class of ask I as a human likely would've never been able to figure out to ask for if I'd been the one tryin to navigate this interaction whilst managing my rapidly depleting emotional resources
anyway are you feeling the AGI yet
