When you start wondering if one of your heroes is playing 11D chess when they do things that run counter to your idealized notion of who they are… it probably means you’ve idealized them a bit too much. Eliezer is still “just a man”, as the Merovingian might say.
You may also underestimate the kind of pressures to which he is subjected. Are you familiar with /r/sneerclub at all? This was a group of redditors united by contempt for Less Wrong rationalism, who collected dirt on anything to do with the rationalist movement, and even supplied some of it to a New York Times journalist. And that was before the current AI boom, in which even billionaires can feel threatened by him, to the point that pioneer MIRI donor Peter Thiel now calls him a legionnaire of Antichrist.
Add to that 10+ years of daily debate on social media, and it shouldn’t be surprising that any idea of always being diplomatic, has died a death of a thousand cuts.
I do think that this is probably part of my misprediction—that I simply idealize others too much and don’t give enough credit to how inconsistent humans actually are. “Idealize” is probably just the Good version of “flatten”, with “demonize” being the Bad version, both of which are probably because it takes less neurons to model someone else that way.
I actually just recently had the displeasure of stumbling upon that reddit and it made me sad that people wanted to devote their energies to just being unkind without a goal. So I’m probably also not modeling how my own principle of avoiding offense unless helpful would erode over time. I’ve seen it happen to many public figures on twitter—it seems to be part of the system.
When you start wondering if one of your heroes is playing 11D chess when they do things that run counter to your idealized notion of who they are… it probably means you’ve idealized them a bit too much. Eliezer is still “just a man”, as the Merovingian might say.
You may also underestimate the kind of pressures to which he is subjected. Are you familiar with /r/sneerclub at all? This was a group of redditors united by contempt for Less Wrong rationalism, who collected dirt on anything to do with the rationalist movement, and even supplied some of it to a New York Times journalist. And that was before the current AI boom, in which even billionaires can feel threatened by him, to the point that pioneer MIRI donor Peter Thiel now calls him a legionnaire of Antichrist.
Add to that 10+ years of daily debate on social media, and it shouldn’t be surprising that any idea of always being diplomatic, has died a death of a thousand cuts.
I do think that this is probably part of my misprediction—that I simply idealize others too much and don’t give enough credit to how inconsistent humans actually are. “Idealize” is probably just the Good version of “flatten”, with “demonize” being the Bad version, both of which are probably because it takes less neurons to model someone else that way.
I actually just recently had the displeasure of stumbling upon that reddit and it made me sad that people wanted to devote their energies to just being unkind without a goal. So I’m probably also not modeling how my own principle of avoiding offense unless helpful would erode over time. I’ve seen it happen to many public figures on twitter—it seems to be part of the system.