And it was surprisingly good

1. Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky did not exactly suggest that you should eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes.

What he actually said was that an alien, looking from the outside at evolution, would predict that you would want to eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes.

Eliezer Yudkowsky recently published If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, about why we urgently need to prevent superintelligent AI from being built, or else we die. It’s a pretty descriptive title. The point about bear fat in the book (and in this previous tweet) was to argue that we don’t know what an AI would want, even if we know how an AI was trained.

Consider ice cream. The aliens could know that human taste buds were trained to crave nutrients that give us chemical energy in forms that our kind of biology can digest, like fat and sugar. Since they’ve studied evolution very closely, they might even realize that we’d crave salt to keep our bodies at the salinity we’re used to from our evolutionary environment.

But, Yudkowsky argues, the aliens wouldn’t predict that humans like ice cream. They’d just predict that we’d like something fatty, sweet, and salty. This description fits bear fat with honey and salt flakes even better than ice cream. So similarly, even if we knew a lot of detail about how AIs are trained, as much detail as the aliens knowing our appetite for salt, we wouldn’t know exactly what an AI would do in practice, if it got the chance to control the future of the world.

Top of page 60 of the hardcover first edition, in chapter 4

I agree that even if the aliens knew what kinds of nutrients we’d crave, the aliens would be missing major information about the craziness that humans can create (e.g. that it’s easier for us to domesticate dairy cattle and harder for us to domesticate bears). I also agree that this applies to our knowledge about AIs, too. But there’s a big unstated assumption in this section: is bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes actually bad? Maybe it’s super tasty, and it’s only unpopular for purely practical reasons.

Bear fat initially sounded really unappetizing, but as I read more it seemed potentially okay. According to Gastro Obscura,¹ black bears usually gorge themselves on berries and nuts during the fall hunting season, making for good-tasting fat. If they’ve been eating fish (or worse, people’s trash) it can smell pretty terrible, but at least there was a shot that this might taste good.

So I worked up my courage and bought a jar of bear fat.

2. Buying bear fat

Yudkowsky’s literal words were “raw bear fat”, as in straight from a bear carcass. I don’t know any bear hunters and don’t want to get parasites, so I went for rendered bear fat. I hope the aliens forgive me.

I pretty easily found a company that sells rendered bear fat. They originally did tree trimming, but expanded into side businesses selling garlic, maple syrup, and (fortunately for me) bear fat. It also seemed about as ethically sourced as I was going to find. From their website:

“We do not hunt bears. We source the raw fat from a local wild game butchering station. It would otherwise end up in the compost.”

I contacted them, payed them a very modest price, and they sent it in the mail.

It’s amazing what you can buy online

The bear fat was liquid (or at least runny) at room temperature, which is probably why the jar says “keep refrigerated”. It didn’t have a strong smell, at least not while closed. I crossed my fingers that this was a good sign.

I wanted to share this evolutionary treat at Inkhaven, and I figured the fat would probably store better in my checked luggage if I left its jar closed. So, I’m trying it for the first time with all the other bloggers and staff who want to show up. I bought fancy local honey and salt flakes at Whole Foods to give this the best shot of working, plus some bread and crackers to eat with it. I also wrote up a little survey for the other folks at Inkhaven to provide their thoughts.

This is maybe a good time to tell you that I drafted the first part of this post before I actually tried the fat with honey and salt, while I was still ignorant but optimistic. The next paragraph and beyond are coming after I taste it, for good or for ill.

3. Bear fat is surprisingly good

The bear fat definitely exceeded expectations! The fridge-temperature fat was quite easy to scoop, and held its shape in the bowl even as it started to melt. Appropriately, it looked a lot like a scoop of ice cream. I sampled a bit by itself, and it tasted similar to the fat on a steak, but stronger and with a smoother texture. Now, the full experiment. Adding honey and flaky salt, I first had some on a spoon, then on bread and on a cracker.

   

It was decent, maybe 6 or 7 out of 10 on the scale in my opinion. I did end up having more. The savory, salty, and sweet flavors combined in a really unique and interesting way. It certainly didn’t taste like a dessert, but it might make a good appetizer. Honey is the right sweetener for this, since it can stand up to the deep flavor of the bear fat. The crunch from the flaky salt was a nice touch. I had some alternate subtitles for this post in case it didn’t turn out this well. (“It wasn’t bad”, and “So you don’t have to”), but I’m happy to say it was in fact surprisingly good.

Next, it was time to share.

Fellow Inkhaven participant Eneasz Brodski (deathisbad.substack.com) enjoying a bite of bear fat

Ten or so people showed up, six of whom filled out my survey. Their reactions varied, but were generally positive, ranging roughly from “this was interesting and thank you for sharing” to “this food is amazing and it should be everywhere”. Two survey takers (Jenn and Skyler) even rated the bear fat snack as more enjoyable than ice cream, while one (Person A, who requested their name be removed) had them both tied at 10. No one who filled out the survey rated it below a 7. Gwern, who has previously written about eating and enjoying pemmican, was a big fan too. He suggested that there could be better ways to serve it rather than with bread and crackers – maybe whipped, like the arctic treat akutaq (aka “Eskimo ice cream”).

The survey results

4. Should you try this?

Bear fat with honey and salt flakes is definitely a thing that you could try, and you could even like. My survey takers are a very biased sample, but it is at least possible to enjoy this more than ice cream.

If you’re not quite as committed to the bit as I am, maybe use a substitute for the bear fat. Schmaltz has about the right texture, though not the same kind of meatiness. Warmed beef tallow might be the most similar flavor experience, or tallow mixed with a liquid oil. You could instead mix liquid oil with clarified butter if you’re vegetarian, or coconut oil if you’re don’t eat meat or dairy but do eat honey. The goal is for the fat to melt in a warm room, but to be spreadable straight from the fridge. Flaky salt and honey should be easy to get at a fancy grocery store.

5. So was Eliezer wrong?

I think Eliezer Yudkowsky’s argument still has some merit even though some people actually enjoy bear fat with honey and salt flakes more than ice cream. The fact still stands that ice cream is what we mass produce and send to grocery stores. Even if our hypothetical aliens could reasonably predict that we’d enjoy any extra fatty, salty, and sweet food should we happen to come across it, that’s not sufficient information to determine what foods we usually eat in practice. And even if somehow we were able to predict one possible world that a superintelligent AI would approve of if it happened to be there, it really does matter what an AI would do in practice, in the complicated world that we’ve built. But still, maybe the aliens knew a little more about us than Yudkowsky gave them credit for.

Coming soon: When the heck did Hammurabi actually rule?