I accept your correction that I misquoted you. I paraphrased from memory and did miss real nuance. My bad.
Looking at the comment now, I do see that it has a score of −43 currently, and is the only negative karma comment on the post. So maybe a more interesting question is why I (and presumably several others) interpreted it as insult when logical content of “Intelligence(having <30y timeline in 2025) > Intelligence(potted plant)” doesn’t contain any direct insult. My best guess is that people are running informal inference on “do they think of me as lower status”, and any comparison to a lower intelligence entity is likely to trigger that. For instance, I actually find the thing you just said suggesting that I could have an LLM explain an LSAT-style question to me, to be insulting because it implies that you assign decent probability to my intelligence being lower than LLM or LSAT level. (Of course, I rank it less than “calling someone out publicly, even politely”, so I still feel vague social debt to you in this interaction.) I also anticipate that you might respond that you are justified in that assumption given that I seem to not have understood something an LLM could, and that that would only serve to increase the perceived status threat.
The “polite about the house burning” is something I have changed my mind about recently. I initially judged some of your stronger rhetoric as unhelpful because it didn’t help me personally, but have seen enough people say otherwise that I now lean toward that being the right call. The remaining confusion I have is over the instances where you take extra time to either raise your own status or lower someone else’s instead of keeping discussion focused on the object level. Maybe that’s simply because, like me, you sometimes just react to things. Maybe, as someone else suggested, its some sort of punishment strategy. If it is actually intentionally aimed at some goal, I’d be curious to know.
I’m sorry to hear about your health/fatigue. That’s a very unfortunate turn of events, for everyone really. I think your overall contribution is quite positive, so I would certainly vote that you keep talking rather than stop! If I got a vote on the matter, I’d also vote that you leave status out of conversations and play to your strength of explaining complicated concepts in a way that is very intuitive for others. In fact, as much as I had high hopes for your research prospects, I never directly experienced any of that—the thing that has directly impressed me, (and if I’m honest, the only reason I assume you’d also be great at research) has been the way you make new insights accessible through your public writing. So, consider this my vote for more of that.
I’m sorry to hear about your health/fatigue. That’s a very unfortunate turn of events, for everyone really.
It’s actually been this way the whole time. When I first met Eliezer 10 years ago at a decision theory workshop at Cambridge University, I asked him what his AI timelines were over lunch; he promptly blew a raspberry as his answer and then fell asleep.
I accept your correction that I misquoted you. I paraphrased from memory and did miss real nuance. My bad.
Looking at the comment now, I do see that it has a score of −43 currently, and is the only negative karma comment on the post. So maybe a more interesting question is why I (and presumably several others) interpreted it as insult when logical content of “Intelligence(having <30y timeline in 2025) > Intelligence(potted plant)” doesn’t contain any direct insult. My best guess is that people are running informal inference on “do they think of me as lower status”, and any comparison to a lower intelligence entity is likely to trigger that. For instance, I actually find the thing you just said suggesting that I could have an LLM explain an LSAT-style question to me, to be insulting because it implies that you assign decent probability to my intelligence being lower than LLM or LSAT level. (Of course, I rank it less than “calling someone out publicly, even politely”, so I still feel vague social debt to you in this interaction.) I also anticipate that you might respond that you are justified in that assumption given that I seem to not have understood something an LLM could, and that that would only serve to increase the perceived status threat.
The “polite about the house burning” is something I have changed my mind about recently. I initially judged some of your stronger rhetoric as unhelpful because it didn’t help me personally, but have seen enough people say otherwise that I now lean toward that being the right call. The remaining confusion I have is over the instances where you take extra time to either raise your own status or lower someone else’s instead of keeping discussion focused on the object level. Maybe that’s simply because, like me, you sometimes just react to things. Maybe, as someone else suggested, its some sort of punishment strategy. If it is actually intentionally aimed at some goal, I’d be curious to know.
I’m sorry to hear about your health/fatigue. That’s a very unfortunate turn of events, for everyone really. I think your overall contribution is quite positive, so I would certainly vote that you keep talking rather than stop! If I got a vote on the matter, I’d also vote that you leave status out of conversations and play to your strength of explaining complicated concepts in a way that is very intuitive for others. In fact, as much as I had high hopes for your research prospects, I never directly experienced any of that—the thing that has directly impressed me, (and if I’m honest, the only reason I assume you’d also be great at research) has been the way you make new insights accessible through your public writing. So, consider this my vote for more of that.
It’s actually been this way the whole time. When I first met Eliezer 10 years ago at a decision theory workshop at Cambridge University, I asked him what his AI timelines were over lunch; he promptly blew a raspberry as his answer and then fell asleep.