I just saw one recently on the EA forum to the effect that EAs who shortened their timelines only after chatGPT had the intelligence of a houseplant.
Somebody asked if people got credit for <30 year timelines posted in 2025. I replied that this only demonstrated more intelligence than a potted plant.
If you do not understand how this is drastically different from the thing you said I said, ask an LLM to explain it to you; they’re now okay at LSAT-style questions if provided sufficient context.
In reply to your larger question, being very polite about the house burning down wasn’t working. Possibly being less polite doesn’t work either, of course, but it takes less time. In any case, as several commenters have noted, the main plan is to have people who aren’t me do the talking to those sorts of audiences. As several other commenters have noted, there’s a plausible benefit to having one person say it straight. As further commenters have noted, I’m tired, so you don’t really have an option of continuing to hear from a polite Eliezer; I’d just stop talking instead.
It is a damn shame to hear of this tiredness, and I hope that your mood improves, somehow, somewhen, hopefully sooner than you expect.
This reply, though, I am forced to say, does not quite persuade, and to be totally frank even disappoints me a little. It was my understanding that both MIRI and to some extent one of your goals as of now was one of public outreach and communication (as a sub-goal for policy change) - this was at least how I understood this recent tweet describing what MIRI is doing and why people should donate to it, as well as other things you’ve been doing somewhat recently going on a bunch of podcasts and interviews and things of that nature (as well as smaller things such as separating out a ‘low-volume’ public persona account for reach as well as a shitpost-y side one).
Therefore, to put it maybe somewhat bluntly, I thought that thinking deeply and being maximally deliberate about what you communicate and how, and in particular how well it might move policy or the public, was, if not quite the whole idea, maybe a main goal or job of your organization and indeed your public persona. So, though of course a great many allowances are to be made when it comes to the tiredness, I don’t understand how to square the idea that
you don’t really have an option of continuing to hear from a polite Eliezer; I’d just stop talking instead.
with what you and what MIRI are currently, well, for. You said, and I totally understand why, that the plan is to get other people to ‘take over’ that role, but this doesn’t really make it any less of a bad thing, just more of a hopefully temporary one. Is it truly such an all-or-nothing thing, that you’d just abandon all hope at such an important part of MIRI’s goals instead of trying to learn to be (as other commenters have put it) less abrasive?
I hope it is not too rude to hope that you come upon a different attitude when it comes to this at some point, because as it stands it seems kind of contradictory and self-defeating.
I think it’s worth noting that I also have had times where I was impressed with your tact. The two examples that jump to mind are 1) a tweet where you gently questioned Nate Silver’s position that expressing probabilities as frequencies instead of percentages was net harmful, and 2) your “shut it all down” letter to NYT, especially the part where you talk about being positively surprised by the sanity of people outside the industry and the text about Nina losing a tooth. Both of those struck me as emotionally perceptive.
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.
Somebody asked if people got credit for <30 year timelines posted in 2025. I replied that this only demonstrated more intelligence than a potted plant.
If you do not understand how this is drastically different from the thing you said I said, ask an LLM to explain it to you; they’re now okay at LSAT-style questions if provided sufficient context.
In reply to your larger question, being very polite about the house burning down wasn’t working. Possibly being less polite doesn’t work either, of course, but it takes less time. In any case, as several commenters have noted, the main plan is to have people who aren’t me do the talking to those sorts of audiences. As several other commenters have noted, there’s a plausible benefit to having one person say it straight. As further commenters have noted, I’m tired, so you don’t really have an option of continuing to hear from a polite Eliezer; I’d just stop talking instead.
It is a damn shame to hear of this tiredness, and I hope that your mood improves, somehow, somewhen, hopefully sooner than you expect.
This reply, though, I am forced to say, does not quite persuade, and to be totally frank even disappoints me a little. It was my understanding that both MIRI and to some extent one of your goals as of now was one of public outreach and communication (as a sub-goal for policy change) - this was at least how I understood this recent tweet describing what MIRI is doing and why people should donate to it, as well as other things you’ve been doing somewhat recently going on a bunch of podcasts and interviews and things of that nature (as well as smaller things such as separating out a ‘low-volume’ public persona account for reach as well as a shitpost-y side one).
Therefore, to put it maybe somewhat bluntly, I thought that thinking deeply and being maximally deliberate about what you communicate and how, and in particular how well it might move policy or the public, was, if not quite the whole idea, maybe a main goal or job of your organization and indeed your public persona. So, though of course a great many allowances are to be made when it comes to the tiredness, I don’t understand how to square the idea that
with what you and what MIRI are currently, well, for. You said, and I totally understand why, that the plan is to get other people to ‘take over’ that role, but this doesn’t really make it any less of a bad thing, just more of a hopefully temporary one. Is it truly such an all-or-nothing thing, that you’d just abandon all hope at such an important part of MIRI’s goals instead of trying to learn to be (as other commenters have put it) less abrasive?
I hope it is not too rude to hope that you come upon a different attitude when it comes to this at some point, because as it stands it seems kind of contradictory and self-defeating.
I’ve already tried, when I was younger and better able to learn and less tired. I have no reason to believe things go better on the 13th try.
I think it’s worth noting that I also have had times where I was impressed with your tact. The two examples that jump to mind are 1) a tweet where you gently questioned Nate Silver’s position that expressing probabilities as frequencies instead of percentages was net harmful, and 2) your “shut it all down” letter to NYT, especially the part where you talk about being positively surprised by the sanity of people outside the industry and the text about Nina losing a tooth. Both of those struck me as emotionally perceptive.
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.