Not having talked to any such people myself, I think I tentatively disbelieve that those are their true objections (despite their claims). My best guess as to what actual objection would be most likely to generate that external claim would be something like… “this is an extremely weird thing to be worried about, and very far outside of (my) Overton window, so I’m worried that your motivations for doing [x] are not true concern about model welfare but something bad that you don’t want to say out loud”.
I think it’s pretty close to their true objection, more like “you want to include this in your moral circle of concern but I’m still suffering? screw you, include me first!”—I suspect there’s an information flow problem here, where this community intentionally avoids inflammatory things, and people who are inflamed by their lives sucking are consistently inflammatory; and so people who only hang out here don’t get a picture of what’s going on for them. or at least, when encountering messages from folks like this, see them as confusing inflammation best avoided, rather than something to zoom in on and figure out how to heal. I’m not sure of this, but it’s the impression I get from the unexpectedly high rate of surprise in threads like this one.
Not having talked to any such people myself, I think I tentatively disbelieve that those are their true objections (despite their claims). My best guess as to what actual objection would be most likely to generate that external claim would be something like… “this is an extremely weird thing to be worried about, and very far outside of (my) Overton window, so I’m worried that your motivations for doing [x] are not true concern about model welfare but something bad that you don’t want to say out loud”.
I think it’s pretty close to their true objection, more like “you want to include this in your moral circle of concern but I’m still suffering? screw you, include me first!”—I suspect there’s an information flow problem here, where this community intentionally avoids inflammatory things, and people who are inflamed by their lives sucking are consistently inflammatory; and so people who only hang out here don’t get a picture of what’s going on for them. or at least, when encountering messages from folks like this, see them as confusing inflammation best avoided, rather than something to zoom in on and figure out how to heal. I’m not sure of this, but it’s the impression I get from the unexpectedly high rate of surprise in threads like this one.