I think that’s a reasonable interpretation of the actual serious content of the post, and my understanding of Eliezer’s position basically matches yours. But the post starts like this:
tl;dr: It’s obvious at this point that humanity isn’t going to solve the alignment problem, or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight. Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with with slightly more dignity.
And it sticks with the ‘death with dignity’ framing, talking about doubling our chances of survival from 0% to 0%, striving to earn ‘dignity points’ to take to our graves, and so on. It’s also explicitly presented as a MIRI thing, not just a personal Eliezer thing.
Underneath all this, of course, he is talking about doing actually useful things to increase our survival odds (albeit from ‘negligible’ to ‘still basically negligible’). But both the surface-level framing and the actual emotional content are drenched in despair and fatalism.
It’s probably clear that I think the ‘death with dignity’ framing is bad and unhelpful, but obviously I can’t be sure that Eliezer’s post did more harm than good. You and Harlan evidently hate being cast as inevitable-doomers, though, and if this was an unfair and harmful move on the part of Amodei, I think communications like the Death With Dignity post are partly to blame for making it a viable one.
If the post itself was ambiguous, I think there has been a ton of evidence in the 3+ years since that post that this community has a VERY non-fatalistic attitude about the situation.
I think that’s a reasonable interpretation of the actual serious content of the post, and my understanding of Eliezer’s position basically matches yours. But the post starts like this:
And it sticks with the ‘death with dignity’ framing, talking about doubling our chances of survival from 0% to 0%, striving to earn ‘dignity points’ to take to our graves, and so on. It’s also explicitly presented as a MIRI thing, not just a personal Eliezer thing.
Underneath all this, of course, he is talking about doing actually useful things to increase our survival odds (albeit from ‘negligible’ to ‘still basically negligible’). But both the surface-level framing and the actual emotional content are drenched in despair and fatalism.
It’s probably clear that I think the ‘death with dignity’ framing is bad and unhelpful, but obviously I can’t be sure that Eliezer’s post did more harm than good. You and Harlan evidently hate being cast as inevitable-doomers, though, and if this was an unfair and harmful move on the part of Amodei, I think communications like the Death With Dignity post are partly to blame for making it a viable one.
If the post itself was ambiguous, I think there has been a ton of evidence in the 3+ years since that post that this community has a VERY non-fatalistic attitude about the situation.