I think Roko posting the thing was ok. It was in the same class of things being discussed at the time, like Rolf Nelson’s AI deterrence and so on. Eliezer overreacted and caused a Streisand effect, without it only a few of us would even remember it today.
To add color to the point about me: I was a research associate at MIRI then (then called SI). I’d joined in the hope of doing decision theory math, but found that there wasn’t as much math I liked happening inside. However, there were many email discussions about saving the world, which I first tried hard to follow, but then they became just really overwhelming for me. That’s the background of my remark. Later that year I left the program. Maybe you’re right and this all was a failure of strategy on my part :-)
Thanks for the backstory! (Don’t know if you remember, but I asked you back then and you didn’t want to talk on the meta level either.) I think what I was trying to say by citing you is that humans can get emotionally overwhelmed just by thinking about the world ending or saving the world, which probably isn’t great for their strategic competence when dealing with this topic.
Yeah. Maybe it wasn’t even due to that specific topic, could’ve been anything else, like knitting. There was just a lot of emails about it (several every day for months?) and for some reason it felt really hard to follow for me, on top of my work at Google at the time. So then it flipped around to “don’t wanna talk about it, don’t wanna meta-talk about it, just make it go away”. I’m sorry the backstory isn’t more dignified.
I think Roko posting the thing was ok. It was in the same class of things being discussed at the time, like Rolf Nelson’s AI deterrence and so on. Eliezer overreacted and caused a Streisand effect, without it only a few of us would even remember it today.
To add color to the point about me: I was a research associate at MIRI then (then called SI). I’d joined in the hope of doing decision theory math, but found that there wasn’t as much math I liked happening inside. However, there were many email discussions about saving the world, which I first tried hard to follow, but then they became just really overwhelming for me. That’s the background of my remark. Later that year I left the program. Maybe you’re right and this all was a failure of strategy on my part :-)
Thanks for the backstory! (Don’t know if you remember, but I asked you back then and you didn’t want to talk on the meta level either.) I think what I was trying to say by citing you is that humans can get emotionally overwhelmed just by thinking about the world ending or saving the world, which probably isn’t great for their strategic competence when dealing with this topic.
Yeah. Maybe it wasn’t even due to that specific topic, could’ve been anything else, like knitting. There was just a lot of emails about it (several every day for months?) and for some reason it felt really hard to follow for me, on top of my work at Google at the time. So then it flipped around to “don’t wanna talk about it, don’t wanna meta-talk about it, just make it go away”. I’m sorry the backstory isn’t more dignified.