What are the most egregious examples of SI’s arrogance?
Since you explicitly ask a question phrased thus, I feel obligated to mention that last April I witnessed a certain email incident that I thought was somewhat extremely bad in some ways.
I do believe that lessons have been learned since then, though. Probably there’s no need to bring the matter up again, and I only mention it since according to my ethics it’s the required thing to do when asked such an explicit question as above.
(Some readers may wonder why I’m not providing details here. That’s because after some thought, I for my part decided against making the incident public, since I expect it might subsequently get misrepresented to look worse than what’s fair. (There might be value in showing records of the incident to new SIAI employees as an example of how not to do things, though.))
Curse me for presenting myself as someone having interesting secret knowledge. Now I get several PMs asking for details.
In short, this “incident” was about one or two SIAI folks making a couple of obvious errors of judgment, and in the case of the error that sparked the whole thing, getting heatedly defensive about it for a moment. Other SIAI folks however recognized the obvious mistakes as such, so the issue was resolved, even though unprofessional conduct was observed for a moment.
The actual mistakes were rather minor, nothing dramatic. The surprising thing was that heated defensiveness took place on the way to those mistakes getting corrected.
(And since Eliezer is the SIAI guy most often accused of arrogance, I’ll additionally state that here that is not the case. Eliezer was very professional in the email exchange in question.)
Since you explicitly ask a question phrased thus, I feel obligated to mention that last April I witnessed a certain email incident that I thought was somewhat extremely bad in some ways.
I do believe that lessons have been learned since then, though. Probably there’s no need to bring the matter up again, and I only mention it since according to my ethics it’s the required thing to do when asked such an explicit question as above.
(Some readers may wonder why I’m not providing details here. That’s because after some thought, I for my part decided against making the incident public, since I expect it might subsequently get misrepresented to look worse than what’s fair. (There might be value in showing records of the incident to new SIAI employees as an example of how not to do things, though.))
Curse me for presenting myself as someone having interesting secret knowledge. Now I get several PMs asking for details.
In short, this “incident” was about one or two SIAI folks making a couple of obvious errors of judgment, and in the case of the error that sparked the whole thing, getting heatedly defensive about it for a moment. Other SIAI folks however recognized the obvious mistakes as such, so the issue was resolved, even though unprofessional conduct was observed for a moment.
The actual mistakes were rather minor, nothing dramatic. The surprising thing was that heated defensiveness took place on the way to those mistakes getting corrected.
(And since Eliezer is the SIAI guy most often accused of arrogance, I’ll additionally state that here that is not the case. Eliezer was very professional in the email exchange in question.)