Because when I talk to academics who might be good collaborators with MIRI, and they’ve read Eliezer’s stuff, they pretty often have had negative reactions to Eliezer’s writing. I try to re-explain MIRI’s work in less off-putting ways, but it’s hard to overcome initial impressions.
What percentage, would you say, of technical academics (who’ve read Eliezer’s writtings and conversed with you on the subject) have been turned off by it?
Wow. This really is a bubble. And here I was thinking the 3 sigma crowd might be less likely to be turned off by Eliezer. Do they state their reasons; if they do, could you list the compelling ones?
Probably all sorts of subtle things in the writing voice that people who trained to be scientists in academia learn by the time they get to PhD, and they can tell if those are missing and get the subconscious crackpot signal. Same as what happens every time when an outsider tries to influence people in a subculture and keeps getting the subtle subculture communication patterns wrong.
Might be easier if EY went in saying “here’s some science I did, take a look” rather than “you’re doing it all wrong, you should be working on this stuff like this instead”.
I have emailed roughly a dozen phds I know from grad school and work. I’ve asked if they remember what pushed them away, and if they don’t to take a second look. Hopefully some of them will register to give their own responses (and so you can converse with them), but for the ones who don’t register but email me, I’ll add them here myself.
My own response- I’m a physics phd, and for the first example that springs to mind, I find the quantum physics sequence very off putting. It opens by saying quantum physics isn’t mysterious and by the time it gets to the born probabilities, it admits that quantum physics is very much mysterious. I’m sure you can find previous posts where I’ve argued against many worlds as the one true interpretation.
First outsider response back;
James R. physics phd- “I’m pretty familiar with LessWrong, and have previously tried to read the first sequence. It seemed a lot like what you’d find on any atheist blog (a bit on evidence and sagan’s dragon, etc). I stopped when I got to a discussion of emergence that was appallingly ignorant. It was especially vexing given that the author, while deriding the idea, clearly believes intelligence is an emergent phenomenon, not dependent on the underlying neurons, or else he wouldn’t advocate you can reproduce it in silicon. Especially ironic given that a the whole next sequence (I didn’t read it) seems to be about the fact that words mean things. I won’t bother reading an author who won’t do the bare minimum of due diligence to investigate a term before writing a whole blog post about it.”
Why do you believe there is “a sizable fraction” of such people? The above mentioned anecdote is really the only instance that comes to (my) mind.
Because when I talk to academics who might be good collaborators with MIRI, and they’ve read Eliezer’s stuff, they pretty often have had negative reactions to Eliezer’s writing. I try to re-explain MIRI’s work in less off-putting ways, but it’s hard to overcome initial impressions.
What percentage, would you say, of technical academics (who’ve read Eliezer’s writtings and conversed with you on the subject) have been turned off by it?
So in my limited experience with physics and statistics phds I’ve sent here, its north of 80%.
Wow. This really is a bubble. And here I was thinking the 3 sigma crowd might be less likely to be turned off by Eliezer. Do they state their reasons; if they do, could you list the compelling ones?
Probably all sorts of subtle things in the writing voice that people who trained to be scientists in academia learn by the time they get to PhD, and they can tell if those are missing and get the subconscious crackpot signal. Same as what happens every time when an outsider tries to influence people in a subculture and keeps getting the subtle subculture communication patterns wrong.
Might be easier if EY went in saying “here’s some science I did, take a look” rather than “you’re doing it all wrong, you should be working on this stuff like this instead”.
I have emailed roughly a dozen phds I know from grad school and work. I’ve asked if they remember what pushed them away, and if they don’t to take a second look. Hopefully some of them will register to give their own responses (and so you can converse with them), but for the ones who don’t register but email me, I’ll add them here myself.
My own response- I’m a physics phd, and for the first example that springs to mind, I find the quantum physics sequence very off putting. It opens by saying quantum physics isn’t mysterious and by the time it gets to the born probabilities, it admits that quantum physics is very much mysterious. I’m sure you can find previous posts where I’ve argued against many worlds as the one true interpretation.
First outsider response back; James R. physics phd- “I’m pretty familiar with LessWrong, and have previously tried to read the first sequence. It seemed a lot like what you’d find on any atheist blog (a bit on evidence and sagan’s dragon, etc). I stopped when I got to a discussion of emergence that was appallingly ignorant. It was especially vexing given that the author, while deriding the idea, clearly believes intelligence is an emergent phenomenon, not dependent on the underlying neurons, or else he wouldn’t advocate you can reproduce it in silicon. Especially ironic given that a the whole next sequence (I didn’t read it) seems to be about the fact that words mean things. I won’t bother reading an author who won’t do the bare minimum of due diligence to investigate a term before writing a whole blog post about it.”
Ouch. (The statistics PhD thing is saddening to me but not surprising, alas.)