IMO this project was a good use of your time ex ante.[1] Unclear if it will end up being actually useful but I think it’s good that you made it.
“A new process for mapping discussions” is kind of a boring title and IMO does not accurately reflect the content. It’s mapping beliefs more so than discussions. Titles are hard but my first idea for a title would be “I made a website that shows a graph of what public figures believe about SB 1047″
I didn’t much care about the current content because it’s basically saying things I already knew (like, the people pessimistic about SB 1047 are all the usual suspects—Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, a16z).
If I cared about AI safety but didn’t know anything about SB 1047, this site would have led me to believe that SB 1047 was good because all the AI safety people support it. But I already knew that AI safety people supported SB 1047.
In general, I don’t care that much about what various people believe. It’s unlikely that I would change my mind based on seeing a chart like the ones on this site.[2] Perhaps most LW readers are in the same boat. I think this is the sort of thing journalists and maybe public policy people care more about.
I have changed my mind based on opinion polls before. Specifically, I’ve changed my mind on scientific issues based on polls of scientists showing that they overwhelmingly support one side (e.g. I used to be anti-nuclear power until I learned that the expert consensus went the other way). The surveys on findingconsensus.ai are much smaller and less representative.
[1] At least that’s my gut feeling. I don’t know you personally but my impression from seeing you online is that you’re very talented and therefore your counterfactual activities would have also been valuable ex ante, so I can’t really say that this was the best use of your time. But I don’t think it was a bad use.
[2] Especially because almost all the people on the side I disagree with are people I have very little respect for, eg a16z.
Yeah, I feel the same way about being personally disinterested in the content. I am already perhaps-problematically overfocused on following opinions/arguments/news about AI. I am clearly not the target audience for something like this. Nor am I personally engaged in trying to educate/persuade people who know little enough about the issues that they would be the target audience.
So, while I certainly approve of the idea, I suspect that LessWrong readers are mostly not your target audience, and at least some are probably also in my boat of not even being all that interested in persuading/educating the people who would be the audience.
So my guess is that that explains the lack of enthusiastic response. I don’t think that that’s a sign that it’s a bad project though!
I appreciated the work and ideas you shared here. While I understand the kinda natural flow of I designed this cool product > this allowed me to form a clear concept of a potentially useful technique, I think writing
1. an announcement post for the website and why you think it could be a game changer in collective/democratic decision making and similar fields (with a much more succinct coverage of the object level stuff on SB 1047, given that this is LW; and maybe a bit more yet on the good stuff you anticipate from this kind of product, e.g. in terms of tactical benefits for AI safety); and, separately, 2. a short post going ’here’s a neat trick I formulated while working on [link to #1]. I think it could help people get much more out of their discussions’
would have made it easier for your audience to respond better.
I think you did a pretty good job of conveying why you’re enthusiastic both about your project and about your mapping technique, but I suspect a) the object-level-induced noisiness of the part where you introduce the website might drown out the core value of it, while b) the simplicity of the mapping idea may suffer from the curse whereby people think simple ideas were already evident to them just because they make intuitive sense, which might stop them from appreciating the implications/usefulness of the concept. It also seems plausible—this is speculative, obvs—that the LW readership has a distribution that skews towards people who are pretty good at holding a bunch of objects in memory and retrieving them effortlessly, such that maybe they’re less excited about this tool than gen pop might lead you to anticipate (I know these last points aren’t directly the type of feedback you requested).
I would appreciate feedback on how this article could be better.
The work took me quite a long time and seems in line with a LessWrong ethos. And yet people here didn’t seem to like it very much.
Some feedback:
IMO this project was a good use of your time ex ante.[1] Unclear if it will end up being actually useful but I think it’s good that you made it.
“A new process for mapping discussions” is kind of a boring title and IMO does not accurately reflect the content. It’s mapping beliefs more so than discussions. Titles are hard but my first idea for a title would be “I made a website that shows a graph of what public figures believe about SB 1047″
I didn’t much care about the current content because it’s basically saying things I already knew (like, the people pessimistic about SB 1047 are all the usual suspects—Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, a16z).
If I cared about AI safety but didn’t know anything about SB 1047, this site would have led me to believe that SB 1047 was good because all the AI safety people support it. But I already knew that AI safety people supported SB 1047.
In general, I don’t care that much about what various people believe. It’s unlikely that I would change my mind based on seeing a chart like the ones on this site.[2] Perhaps most LW readers are in the same boat. I think this is the sort of thing journalists and maybe public policy people care more about.
I have changed my mind based on opinion polls before. Specifically, I’ve changed my mind on scientific issues based on polls of scientists showing that they overwhelmingly support one side (e.g. I used to be anti-nuclear power until I learned that the expert consensus went the other way). The surveys on findingconsensus.ai are much smaller and less representative.
[1] At least that’s my gut feeling. I don’t know you personally but my impression from seeing you online is that you’re very talented and therefore your counterfactual activities would have also been valuable ex ante, so I can’t really say that this was the best use of your time. But I don’t think it was a bad use.
[2] Especially because almost all the people on the side I disagree with are people I have very little respect for, eg a16z.
Thanks, appreciated.
Yeah, I feel the same way about being personally disinterested in the content. I am already perhaps-problematically overfocused on following opinions/arguments/news about AI. I am clearly not the target audience for something like this. Nor am I personally engaged in trying to educate/persuade people who know little enough about the issues that they would be the target audience. So, while I certainly approve of the idea, I suspect that LessWrong readers are mostly not your target audience, and at least some are probably also in my boat of not even being all that interested in persuading/educating the people who would be the audience.
So my guess is that that explains the lack of enthusiastic response. I don’t think that that’s a sign that it’s a bad project though!
I appreciated the work and ideas you shared here. While I understand the kinda natural flow of I designed this cool product > this allowed me to form a clear concept of a potentially useful technique, I think writing
1. an announcement post for the website and why you think it could be a game changer in collective/democratic decision making and similar fields (with a much more succinct coverage of the object level stuff on SB 1047, given that this is LW; and maybe a bit more yet on the good stuff you anticipate from this kind of product, e.g. in terms of tactical benefits for AI safety); and, separately,
2. a short post going ’here’s a neat trick I formulated while working on [link to #1]. I think it could help people get much more out of their discussions’
would have made it easier for your audience to respond better.
I think you did a pretty good job of conveying why you’re enthusiastic both about your project and about your mapping technique, but I suspect
a) the object-level-induced noisiness of the part where you introduce the website might drown out the core value of it, while
b) the simplicity of the mapping idea may suffer from the curse whereby people think simple ideas were already evident to them just because they make intuitive sense, which might stop them from appreciating the implications/usefulness of the concept. It also seems plausible—this is speculative, obvs—that the LW readership has a distribution that skews towards people who are pretty good at holding a bunch of objects in memory and retrieving them effortlessly, such that maybe they’re less excited about this tool than gen pop might lead you to anticipate (I know these last points aren’t directly the type of feedback you requested).
Thanks for this post!