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When most people use the term "utilitarianism", they're talking about the Benthamian or Springer notion. This is a mistake I've made myself, having argued with some poor guy on the old Motte where I claimed that since I have a utility function, I'm therefore utilitarian. I've learned from that error.
My understanding is that most humans aren't VNM rational! They violate one or more of the different requirements, in the sense that their preferences can be contradictory. An example is the Allais Paradox. I don't know if any human is actually VNM rational, but I don't think that's necessarily impossible for someone who is good at meta-cognition and math.
Note that I'm not disagreeing with Yudkowsky here, I was aiming to demonstrate that @Primaprimaprima 's (implicit, by my understanding) claim that not being a utilitarian disqualified him from being a "Yudkowskian Rationalist".
I disagree with Yud on this myself. My p(doom) has gone down from a max of 70% to a far less concerning 20% these days. Our alignment techniques, while imperfect, produce LLMs which are remarkably in-sync with the goals and desires of their creators (and to a lesser extent, their users). Anthropic is doing excellent mechanical interpretability work, such as recent studies into how Claude actually thinks (it's not just predicting the next token, it backtracks and "thinks ahead). They're not entirely black boxes, as was feared to be the case before modern LLMs arrived.
It's also remarkable that RLHF works, and I'm confident that Yudkowsky was surprised by this, even if his priors didn't update that much (I recall a Twitter post along these lines). I was surprised, I remember thinking, holy shit, this works??
Note that just because a model is aligned with its creators/users, that doesn't mean that it's aligned with me. Consider the possibility that a Chinese AGI follows orders exactly understanding the CCP's intent, but said orders are to permanently disempower all non-Chinese and wrest control of the light cone (casualties are acceptable).
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