wanting to get things like Bayes in the curriculum (b/c I thought those needed/helpful for parsing the AI risk argument)
I do not think this is true. I snapped to ‘Oh God this is right and we’re all dead quite soon’ as a result of reading a short story about postage stamps something like fifteen years ago, and I was totally innocent of Bayesianism in any form.
It’s not a complicated argument at all, and you don’t need any kind of philosophical stance to see it.
I had exactly the same ‘snap’ reaction to my first exposure to ideas like global warming, overpopulation, malthus, coronavirus, asteroids, dysgenics, animal suffering, many-worlds, euthanasia, etc ad inf. Just a few clear and simple facts, and maybe a bit of mathematical intuition, but nothing you wouldn’t get from secondary school, lead immediately to a hideous or at least startling conclusion.
I don’t know what is going on with everyone’s inability to get these things. I think it’s more a reluctance to take abstract ideas seriously. Or maybe needing social proof before thinking about anything weird.
I don’t even think it’s much to do with intelligence. I’ve had conversations with really quite dim people who nevertheless ‘just get’ this sort of thing. And many conversations with very clever people who can’t say what’s wrong with the argument but nevertheless can’t take it seriously.
I wonder if it’s more to do with a natural immunity to peer pressure, and in fact, love of being contrarian for the sake of it (which I have in spades, despite being fairly human otherwise), which may be more of a brain malformation than anything else. It feels like it’s related to a need to stand up for the truth even when (possibly even because) people hate you for it.
Maybe the right path here is to find the already existing correct contrarians, rather than to try to make correct contrarians out of normal well-functioning people.
I do not think this is true. I snapped to ‘Oh God this is right and we’re all dead quite soon’ as a result of reading a short story about postage stamps something like fifteen years ago, and I was totally innocent of Bayesianism in any form.
It’s not a complicated argument at all, and you don’t need any kind of philosophical stance to see it.
I had exactly the same ‘snap’ reaction to my first exposure to ideas like global warming, overpopulation, malthus, coronavirus, asteroids, dysgenics, animal suffering, many-worlds, euthanasia, etc ad inf. Just a few clear and simple facts, and maybe a bit of mathematical intuition, but nothing you wouldn’t get from secondary school, lead immediately to a hideous or at least startling conclusion.
I don’t know what is going on with everyone’s inability to get these things. I think it’s more a reluctance to take abstract ideas seriously. Or maybe needing social proof before thinking about anything weird.
I don’t even think it’s much to do with intelligence. I’ve had conversations with really quite dim people who nevertheless ‘just get’ this sort of thing. And many conversations with very clever people who can’t say what’s wrong with the argument but nevertheless can’t take it seriously.
I wonder if it’s more to do with a natural immunity to peer pressure, and in fact, love of being contrarian for the sake of it (which I have in spades, despite being fairly human otherwise), which may be more of a brain malformation than anything else. It feels like it’s related to a need to stand up for the truth even when (possibly even because) people hate you for it.
Maybe the right path here is to find the already existing correct contrarians, rather than to try to make correct contrarians out of normal well-functioning people.