If that’s your reaction to my reaction, then it was a miss in at least some ways, which is on me.
I did not feel angry (more like frustrated?) when I wrote it nor did I intend to express anger, but I did read your review itself as expressing anger and hostility in various forms—you’re doing your best to fight through that and play fair with the ideas as you see them, which is appreciated - and have generally read your statements about Yudkowsky and related issues consistently as being something in the vicinity of angry, also as part of a consistent campaign, and perhaps some of this was reflected in my response. It’s also true that I have a cached memory of you often responding as if things said are more hostile than I felt they were or were intended, although I do not recall examples at this point.
And I hereby report that, despite at points in the past putting in considerable effort trying to parse your statements, and at some point found it too difficult, frustrating and aversive in some combination and mostly stopped attempting to do so when my initial attempt on a given statement bounced (which sometimes it doesn’t).
(Part of what is ‘esoteric’ is perhaps that the perfect-enemy-of-good thing means a lot of load-bearing stuff is probably unsaid by you, and you may not realize that you haven’t said it?)
But also, frankly, when people write much dumber reviews with much dumber things in them, I mostly can’t even bring myself to be mad, because I mean what else can one expect from such sources—there’s only one such review that actually did make me angry, because it was someone where I expected better. It’s something I’ve worked a lot on, and I think made progress on—I don’t actually e.g. get mad at David Sacks anymore as a person, although I still sometimes get mad that I have to once again write about David Sacks.
To the extent I was actually having a reaction to you here it was a sign that I respect you enough to care, that I sense opportunity in some form, and that you’re saying actual things that matter rather than just spouting gibberish or standard nonsense.
Similarly, with the one exception, if those people had complained about my reaction to their reaction in the ways I’d expect them to do so, I would have ignored them.
Versus your summary of your review, I would say I read it more as:
We are currently in an alignment winter. (This is bad). This is asserted as ‘obvious’ and then causes are cited, all in what I read as a hostile manner, and an assertion of ‘facts not in evidence’ that I indeed disagree with, including various forms of derision that read in-context as status attacks and accusations of bad epistemic action, and the claim that the value loading problem has been solved, which is all offered in a fashion that implies you think this is all clearly true if not rather obvious, and this is all loaded up front despite it not being especially relevant to the book, and echoing things you talk about a lot. This sets the whole thing up as an adversarial exercise. You can notice that in my reaction, I treated these details as central, in a way you don’t seem to think are, or at least I think the central thing boils down to this thing?
Alignment is not solved yet but people widely believe it is. (This is bad). It’s weird because you say ‘we solved [X] and people think [X] solves alignment but it doesn’t’ where I don’t think it’s true we solved [X].
I was expecting to hate the book but it actually retreats on most of the rhetoric I blame for contributing to the alignment winter. (This is good) Yes.
The style of the book is bad, but I won’t dwell on it and in fact spend a paragraph on the issue and then move on. ‘Truly appalling’ editorial choices, weird and often condescending, etc. Yes it’s condensed but you come on very strong here (which is fine, you clearly believe it, but I wouldn’t minimize its role). Also your summary skips over the ‘contempt for LLMs’ paragraph.
I actually disagree with the overall thesis, but think it’s virtuous to focus on the points of agreement when someone points out an important issue so I don’t dwell on that either and instead.
“Emphatically agree” (literal words) that AI labs are not serious about the alignment problem.
State a short version of what the alignment problem actually is. (Important because it’s usually conflated with or confused with simpler problems that sound a lot easier to solve.)
I signal boost Eliezer’s other and better writing because I think my audience is disproportionately made up of people who might be able to contribute to the alignment problem if they’re not deeply confused about it and I think Eliezer’s earlier work is under-read.
I reiterate that I think the book is kinda bad, since I need a concluding paragraph.
I read ‘ok’ in this context as better than ‘kinda bad’ fwiw.
As for ‘I should just ask you,’ I notice this instinctively feels aversive as likely opening up a very painful and time consuming and highly frustrating interaction or set of interactions and I notice I have the strong urge not to do it. I forget the details of the interactions with you in particular or close others that caused this instinct, and it could be a mistake. I could be persuaded to try again.
I do know that when I see the interactions of the entire Janus-style crowd on almost anything, I have the same feeling I had with early LW, where I expect to get lectured to and yelled at and essentially downvoted a lot, including in ‘get a load of this idiot’ style ways, if I engage directly in most ways and it puts me off interacting. Essentially it doesn’t feel like a safe space for views outside a certain window. This makes me sad because I have a lot of curiosity there, and it is entirely possible this is deeply stupid and if either side braved mild social awkwardness we’d all get big gains from trade and sharing info. I don’t know.
I realize it is frustrating to report things in my head where I can’t recall many of the sources of the things, but I am guessing that you would want me to do that given that this is the situation.
I dunno, man, this is definitely a ‘write the long letter’ situation and I’m calling it here.
(If you want to engage further, my reading of LW comments even on my own posts is highly unreliable, but I would get a PM or Twitter DM or email etc pretty reliably).
If that’s your reaction to my reaction, then it was a miss in at least some ways, which is on me.
I did not feel angry (more like frustrated?) when I wrote it nor did I intend to express anger, but I did read your review itself as expressing anger and hostility in various forms—you’re doing your best to fight through that and play fair with the ideas as you see them, which is appreciated - and have generally read your statements about Yudkowsky and related issues consistently as being something in the vicinity of angry, also as part of a consistent campaign, and perhaps some of this was reflected in my response. It’s also true that I have a cached memory of you often responding as if things said are more hostile than I felt they were or were intended, although I do not recall examples at this point.
And I hereby report that, despite at points in the past putting in considerable effort trying to parse your statements, and at some point found it too difficult, frustrating and aversive in some combination and mostly stopped attempting to do so when my initial attempt on a given statement bounced (which sometimes it doesn’t).
(Part of what is ‘esoteric’ is perhaps that the perfect-enemy-of-good thing means a lot of load-bearing stuff is probably unsaid by you, and you may not realize that you haven’t said it?)
But also, frankly, when people write much dumber reviews with much dumber things in them, I mostly can’t even bring myself to be mad, because I mean what else can one expect from such sources—there’s only one such review that actually did make me angry, because it was someone where I expected better. It’s something I’ve worked a lot on, and I think made progress on—I don’t actually e.g. get mad at David Sacks anymore as a person, although I still sometimes get mad that I have to once again write about David Sacks.
To the extent I was actually having a reaction to you here it was a sign that I respect you enough to care, that I sense opportunity in some form, and that you’re saying actual things that matter rather than just spouting gibberish or standard nonsense.
Similarly, with the one exception, if those people had complained about my reaction to their reaction in the ways I’d expect them to do so, I would have ignored them.
Versus your summary of your review, I would say I read it more as:
We are currently in an alignment winter. (This is bad). This is asserted as ‘obvious’ and then causes are cited, all in what I read as a hostile manner, and an assertion of ‘facts not in evidence’ that I indeed disagree with, including various forms of derision that read in-context as status attacks and accusations of bad epistemic action, and the claim that the value loading problem has been solved, which is all offered in a fashion that implies you think this is all clearly true if not rather obvious, and this is all loaded up front despite it not being especially relevant to the book, and echoing things you talk about a lot. This sets the whole thing up as an adversarial exercise. You can notice that in my reaction, I treated these details as central, in a way you don’t seem to think are, or at least I think the central thing boils down to this thing?
Alignment is not solved yet but people widely believe it is. (This is bad). It’s weird because you say ‘we solved [X] and people think [X] solves alignment but it doesn’t’ where I don’t think it’s true we solved [X].
I was expecting to hate the book but it actually retreats on most of the rhetoric I blame for contributing to the alignment winter. (This is good) Yes.
The style of the book is bad, but I won’t dwell on it and in fact spend a paragraph on the issue and then move on. ‘Truly appalling’ editorial choices, weird and often condescending, etc. Yes it’s condensed but you come on very strong here (which is fine, you clearly believe it, but I wouldn’t minimize its role). Also your summary skips over the ‘contempt for LLMs’ paragraph.
I actually disagree with the overall thesis, but think it’s virtuous to focus on the points of agreement when someone points out an important issue so I don’t dwell on that either and instead.
“Emphatically agree” (literal words) that AI labs are not serious about the alignment problem.
State a short version of what the alignment problem actually is. (Important because it’s usually conflated with or confused with simpler problems that sound a lot easier to solve.)
I signal boost Eliezer’s other and better writing because I think my audience is disproportionately made up of people who might be able to contribute to the alignment problem if they’re not deeply confused about it and I think Eliezer’s earlier work is under-read.
I reiterate that I think the book is kinda bad, since I need a concluding paragraph.
I read ‘ok’ in this context as better than ‘kinda bad’ fwiw.
As for ‘I should just ask you,’ I notice this instinctively feels aversive as likely opening up a very painful and time consuming and highly frustrating interaction or set of interactions and I notice I have the strong urge not to do it. I forget the details of the interactions with you in particular or close others that caused this instinct, and it could be a mistake. I could be persuaded to try again.
I do know that when I see the interactions of the entire Janus-style crowd on almost anything, I have the same feeling I had with early LW, where I expect to get lectured to and yelled at and essentially downvoted a lot, including in ‘get a load of this idiot’ style ways, if I engage directly in most ways and it puts me off interacting. Essentially it doesn’t feel like a safe space for views outside a certain window. This makes me sad because I have a lot of curiosity there, and it is entirely possible this is deeply stupid and if either side braved mild social awkwardness we’d all get big gains from trade and sharing info. I don’t know.
I realize it is frustrating to report things in my head where I can’t recall many of the sources of the things, but I am guessing that you would want me to do that given that this is the situation.
I dunno, man, this is definitely a ‘write the long letter’ situation and I’m calling it here.
(If you want to engage further, my reading of LW comments even on my own posts is highly unreliable, but I would get a PM or Twitter DM or email etc pretty reliably).