The overall “EA is scary / criticizing leaders is scary” meme is very frequently something I roll my eyes at, I find it alien and sometimes laughable when people say they’re worried about being bold and brave cuz all I ever see are people being rewarded for constructive criticism. But man, I feel like if I didn’t know about some of this stuff then I’m missing a huge piece of the puzzle. Unclear yet what I’ll think about, say, the anon meta on forums after this comment sinks in / propagates, but my guess is it’ll be very different than what I thought before.
People are way too quick to reward themselves for trying (my update is my priority queue in doing a proper writeup): Nate & enablers saying that productivity / irreplaceability is an excuse to triage out fundamental interpersonal effort is equivalent (as far as I’m concerned) to a 2022 University Community Builder (TM) deciding that they’re entitled to opulent retreats the moment they declare stated interest in saving the world. “For the greater good” thinking is fraught and dicey even when you’re definitely valuable enough for the case to genuinely be made, but obviously there’s pressure toward accepting a huge error rate if you simply want to believe you or a colleague is that productive/insightful. I honestly think Nate’s position here is more excusable than enablers: you basically need to see nobel physicist level output before you consider giving someone this much benefit of the doubt, and even then you should decide not to after considering it, I’m kinda dumbfounded that it was this easy for MIRI’s culture to be like this. (yes my epistemic position is going to be wrong about the stakes because “undisclosed by default”, but there are a bajillion sources of my roll to disbelieve if anyone says “well actually undisclosed MIRI codebases are nobel physicist level).
I feel very vindicated having written this comment, and I am subtracting karma from everyone who gave Nate points for writing a long introspective gdoc. You guys should’ve assumed that it would be a steep misfire.
Someone told me that some friends of theirs hated a talk or office hours with Nate, and I super devil’s advocated the idea that lots of people have reasons for disliking the “blunt because if I suffer fools we’ll all lower our standards” style that I’m not sympathetic with: I now need to apologize to them for being dismissive. I mean for chrissakes yall, in my first 1:1 with Eliezer he was not suffering fools, he helped me speedrun noticing how misled my optimism about my project at the time was and it was jovial and pleasant, so I felt like an idiot and I look back fondly on the interaction. So no, the comments about how comms style is downstream of trying to outperform those prestigious etiquette professional academics goodharting on useless but legible research that Nate retreats to elsewhere in the comments here do not hold.
Extremely from the heart warm comments about Nate from my PoV (not coming from a phonedin/trite/etiquette “soften the blow” place, but very glad that there’s that upside):
I’m a huge replacing guilt fan
reading Nate on github and lesswrong has been very important to me in my CS education. The old intelligence.org/research-guide mattered so much to me at very important life/development pivot.
Nate’s strategy / philosophy of alignment posts, particularly recently, have been phenomenal.
in a sibling comment, Nate wrote:
If you stay and try to express yourself despite experiencing strong feelings of frustration, you’re “almost yelling”. If you leave because you’re feeling a bunch of frustration and people say they don’t like talking to you while you’re feeling a bunch of frustration, you’re “storming out”.
This is hard and unfair and I absolutely feel for him, I’ve been there[1].
I don’t know if we’ve ever been in the same room. I’m going off of web presence, and very little comments or rumors others have said.
on second thought: I’ve mostly only been there in say a soup kitchen run by trans commie lesbians, who are eagerly looking for the first excuse they can find to cancel the cis guy. I guess I don’t at all relate to the possibility that someone would feel that way in bay area tech scene.
This is a generally constructive comment. One bit left me confused, and I wonder if you can unpack what it means?
I am subtracting karma from everyone who gave Nate points for writing a long introspective gdoc. You guys should’ve assumed that it would be a steep misfire.
What was the misfire? (I mean literally what does ‘it’ stand for in this sentence?) Also, what kind of points and karma are we talking about, presumably metaphorical?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BGLu3iCGjjcSaeeBG/related-discussion-from-thomas-kwa-s-miri-research?commentId=fPz6jxjybp4Zmn2CK This brief subthread can be read as “giving nate points for trying” and is too credulous about if “introspection” actually works—my wild background guess is that roughly 60% of the time “introspection” is more “elaborate self-delusion” than working as intended, and there are times when someone saying “no but I’m trying really hard to be good at it” drives that probability up instead of down. I didn’t think this was one of those times before reading Kurt’s comment. A more charitable view is that this prickliness (understatement) is something that’s getting triage’d out / deprioritized, not gymnastically dodged, but I think it’s unreasonable to ask people to pay attention to the difference.
That’s besides the point: the “it” was just the gdoc. “it would be a steep misfire” would mean “the gdoc tries to talk about the situation and totally does not address what matters”. The subtraction of karma was metaphorical (I don’t think I even officially voted on lesswrong!). I want to emphasize that I’m still very weak, cuz for instance I can expect people in that subthread to later tell me a detailed inside view about how giving Nate points for trying (by writing that doc) doesn’t literally mean that they were drawn into this “if von neumann has to scream at me to be productive, then it would be selfish to set a personal boundary” take, but I think it’s reasonable for me to be suspicious and cautious and look for more evidence that people would not fall for this class of “holding some people to different standards for for-the-greater-good reasons” again.
This comment’s updates for me personally:
The overall “EA is scary / criticizing leaders is scary” meme is very frequently something I roll my eyes at, I find it alien and sometimes laughable when people say they’re worried about being bold and brave cuz all I ever see are people being rewarded for constructive criticism. But man, I feel like if I didn’t know about some of this stuff then I’m missing a huge piece of the puzzle. Unclear yet what I’ll think about, say, the anon meta on forums after this comment sinks in / propagates, but my guess is it’ll be very different than what I thought before.
People are way too quick to reward themselves for trying (my update is my priority queue in doing a proper writeup): Nate & enablers saying that productivity / irreplaceability is an excuse to triage out fundamental interpersonal effort is equivalent (as far as I’m concerned) to a 2022 University Community Builder (TM) deciding that they’re entitled to opulent retreats the moment they declare stated interest in saving the world. “For the greater good” thinking is fraught and dicey even when you’re definitely valuable enough for the case to genuinely be made, but obviously there’s pressure toward accepting a huge error rate if you simply want to believe you or a colleague is that productive/insightful. I honestly think Nate’s position here is more excusable than enablers: you basically need to see nobel physicist level output before you consider giving someone this much benefit of the doubt, and even then you should decide not to after considering it, I’m kinda dumbfounded that it was this easy for MIRI’s culture to be like this. (yes my epistemic position is going to be wrong about the stakes because “undisclosed by default”, but there are a bajillion sources of my roll to disbelieve if anyone says “well actually undisclosed MIRI codebases are nobel physicist level).
I feel very vindicated having written this comment, and I am subtracting karma from everyone who gave Nate points for writing a long introspective gdoc. You guys should’ve assumed that it would be a steep misfire.
Someone told me that some friends of theirs hated a talk or office hours with Nate, and I super devil’s advocated the idea that lots of people have reasons for disliking the “blunt because if I suffer fools we’ll all lower our standards” style that I’m not sympathetic with: I now need to apologize to them for being dismissive. I mean for chrissakes yall, in my first 1:1 with Eliezer he was not suffering fools, he helped me speedrun noticing how misled my optimism about my project at the time was and it was jovial and pleasant, so I felt like an idiot and I look back fondly on the interaction. So no, the comments about how comms style is downstream of trying to outperform those prestigious etiquette professional academics goodharting on useless but legible research that Nate retreats to elsewhere in the comments here do not hold.
Extremely from the heart warm comments about Nate from my PoV (not coming from a phonedin/trite/etiquette “soften the blow” place, but very glad that there’s that upside):
I’m a huge replacing guilt fan
reading Nate on github and lesswrong has been very important to me in my CS education. The old intelligence.org/research-guide mattered so much to me at very important life/development pivot.
Nate’s strategy / philosophy of alignment posts, particularly recently, have been phenomenal.
in a sibling comment, Nate wrote:
This is hard and unfair and I absolutely feel for him, I’ve been there[1].
I don’t know if we’ve ever been in the same room. I’m going off of web presence, and very little comments or rumors others have said.
on second thought: I’ve mostly only been there in say a soup kitchen run by trans commie lesbians, who are eagerly looking for the first excuse they can find to cancel the cis guy. I guess I don’t at all relate to the possibility that someone would feel that way in bay area tech scene.
This is a generally constructive comment. One bit left me confused, and I wonder if you can unpack what it means?
What was the misfire? (I mean literally what does ‘it’ stand for in this sentence?) Also, what kind of points and karma are we talking about, presumably metaphorical?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BGLu3iCGjjcSaeeBG/related-discussion-from-thomas-kwa-s-miri-research?commentId=fPz6jxjybp4Zmn2CK This brief subthread can be read as “giving nate points for trying” and is too credulous about if “introspection” actually works—my wild background guess is that roughly 60% of the time “introspection” is more “elaborate self-delusion” than working as intended, and there are times when someone saying “no but I’m trying really hard to be good at it” drives that probability up instead of down. I didn’t think this was one of those times before reading Kurt’s comment. A more charitable view is that this prickliness (understatement) is something that’s getting triage’d out / deprioritized, not gymnastically dodged, but I think it’s unreasonable to ask people to pay attention to the difference.
That’s besides the point: the “it” was just the gdoc. “it would be a steep misfire” would mean “the gdoc tries to talk about the situation and totally does not address what matters”. The subtraction of karma was metaphorical (I don’t think I even officially voted on lesswrong!). I want to emphasize that I’m still very weak, cuz for instance I can expect people in that subthread to later tell me a detailed inside view about how giving Nate points for trying (by writing that doc) doesn’t literally mean that they were drawn into this “if von neumann has to scream at me to be productive, then it would be selfish to set a personal boundary” take, but I think it’s reasonable for me to be suspicious and cautious and look for more evidence that people would not fall for this class of “holding some people to different standards for for-the-greater-good reasons” again.