Behavioral Designer, Author & Keynote Speaker. Applying behavioral science to solve important problems. Founder of https://xitter.cf/t.co/2fvmWsVFAb 📬
Stockholm, Sweden
Joined June 2009
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Samuel Salzer 🇺🇦 retweeted
Political scientists and economists: we're looking for researchers with deep expertise to come work with us for a unique 4-month fellowship at @AnthropicAI. You'll work closely with us to evaluate, improve, and apply Claude's capabilities in your field. It's going to be extremely fun and interesting work, and definitely worth taking a short leave from your university for if you need to!
More info here:
job-boards.greenhouse.io/ant…
Samuel Salzer 🇺🇦 retweeted
Wake up babe, the Pope is subtweeting Anthropic again
Intelligence must draw on memory. The mind must not simply compile data — as an algorithm now does more quickly than we can — but recall lived experiences, which contain depths of meaning that only the human soul can recognize, and connect more deeply with the goodness of these experiences. Everything that is good begins “with the Spirit” and thus possesses a breath, a dynamism and a sense of communion that, once experienced, are engraved upon the heart. vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/e…
Samuel Salzer 🇺🇦 retweeted
It is ironic that the thing that is now most annoying about long-running agentic tasks with Large Language Models isn't coding or errors or hallucinations, but the fact that their language gets worse due to drift as a task goes on
Its in your the name! Just write better already!
Samuel Salzer 🇺🇦 retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
"Confirmed, and it's worse than I guessed. Zero."
Claude when running verification on wether it followed my skill and execution protocol.
Annoying that it fails to follow direction... But infuriating that it says stuff like "worse than I guessed" - what does that even mean???
Samuel Salzer 🇺🇦 retweeted
We're organising a competition for AI-generated philosophy with $11,000 in prizes.
Consider entering!
Samuel Salzer 🇺🇦 retweeted
This is interesting because it shows that using Pangram scores to criticise authors likely catches some who used AI to help with their writing after doing the conceptual work themselves.
Incidentally, this is likely to hit non-native English speakers harder.
Samuel Salzer 🇺🇦 retweeted
New paper in Nature Human Behaviour makes two important points:
First, LLMs reduce the linguistic diversity of how people express themselves.
This is perhaps not super surprising at this stage. But the authors also show something deeper.
Since the words we use carry information about who we are, LLMs are also erasing the identity signals that we embed in our writing.
LLMs strip out the soul of our writing.
*
Full paper in the first reply
Samuel Salzer 🇺🇦 retweeted
I🦆am🦆going🦆to🦆start🦆watermarking🦆all🦆my🦆tweets🦆using🦆an🦆experimental🦆extra-semantic🦆token🦆that🦆does🦆not🦆impact🦆meaning🦆or🦆quality🦆of🦆writing
Samuel Salzer 🇺🇦 retweeted
I started joining meetings a minute early
I get in, admit the AI summarizer, then say as much as possible about how birds and Wyoming aren't real
After each meeting, everyone gets an email about how birds are camera robots for the CIA, and Wyoming doesn't exist
I've been doing this for 3 weeks straight
Samuel Salzer 🇺🇦 retweeted
Our lab just released our AI Behavioral Observatory open source. It lets you run statistically valid tests on how AI behavior changes under various types of prompts. We have been using it for our own studies & I think it could help others do similar work. gail.wharton.upenn.edu/resea…
Samuel Salzer 🇺🇦 retweeted
As a joke I prompted Codex "Build and run BenchBench, a benchmark of now good ai is at creating benchmarks. then figure out what benchbenchbench is and run that. and then write benchbenchbench up as a good arXiv paper." I got a PDF.
But the paper is actually kind of interesting?
Samuel Salzer 🇺🇦 retweeted
This is a good reaction to AI in academia. If we play it right, along with the inevitable chaos that is already hitting the journals, it will also be a golden age of exploring new insights with the help of AI, rather than playing it safe because of the big cost of writing a paper
Samuel Salzer 🇺🇦 retweeted
Fable: "Pitch Odysseus as a management consultant, arguing that he has found product-market fit, and he should just stick with Trojan Horse making as opposed to going home to Ithaca in a powerpoint"
I like the 1 star review from Cassandra "0 of 10,000 readers found this helpful
