For what it’s worth, my perception of this thread is the opposite of yours: it seems to me John Wentworth’s arguments have been clear, consistent, and easy to follow, whereas you (John Maxwell) have been making very little effort to address his position, instead choosing to repeatedly strawman said position (and also repeatedly attempting to lump in what Wentworth has been saying with what you think other people have said in the past, thereby implicitly asking him to defend whatever you think those other people’s positions were).
Whether you’ve been doing this out of a lack of desire to properly engage, an inability to comprehend the argument itself, or some other odd obstacle is in some sense irrelevant to the object-level fact of what has been happening during this conversation. You’ve made your frustration with “AI safety people” more than clear over the course of this conversation (and I did advise you not to engage further if that was the case!), but I submit that in this particular case (at least), the entirety of your frustration can be traced back to your own lack of willingness to put forth interpretive labor.
To be clear: I am making this comment in this tone (which I am well aware is unkind) because there are multiple aspects of your behavior in this thread that I find not only logically rude, but ordinarily rude as well. I more or less summarized these aspects in the first paragraph of my comment, but there’s one particularly onerous aspect I want to highlight: over the course of this discussion, you’ve made multiple references to other uninvolved people (either with whom you agree or disagree), without making any effort at all to lay out what those people said or why it’s relevant to the current discussion. There are two examples of this from your latest comment alone:
Daniel K agreed with me the other day that there isn’t a standard reference for this claim. [Note: your link here is broken; here’s a fixed version.]
A MIRI employee openly admitted here that they apply different standards of evidence to claims of safety vs claims of not-safety.
Ignoring the question of whether these two quoted statements are true (note that even the fixed version of the link above goes only to a top-level post, and I don’t see any comments on that post from the other day), this is counterproductive for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it’s inefficient. If you believe a particular statement is false (and furthermore, that your basis for this belief is sound), you should first attempt to refute that statement directly, which gives your interlocutor the opportunity to either counter your refutation or concede the point, thereby moving the conversation forward. If you instead counter merely by invoking somebody else’s opinion, you both increase the difficulty of answering and end up offering weaker evidence.
Secondly, it’s irrelevant. John Wentworth does not work at MIRI (neither does Daniel Kokotajlo, for that matter), so bringing up aspects of MIRI’s position you dislike does nothing but highlight a potential area where his position differs from MIRI’s. (I say “potential” because it’s not at all obvious to me that you’ve been representing MIRI’s position accurately.) In order to properly challenge his position, again it becomes more useful to critique his assertions directly rather than round them off to the closest thing said by someone from MIRI.
Thirdly, it’s a distraction. When you regularly reference a group of people who aren’t present in the actual conversation, repeatedly make mention of your frustration and “grumpiness” with those people, and frequently compare your actual interlocutor’s position to what you imagine those people have said, all while your actual interlocutor has said nothing to indicate affiliation with or endorsement of those people, it doesn’t paint a picture of an objective critic. To be blunt: it paints a picture of someone with a one-sided grudge against the people in question, and is attempting to inject that grudge into conversations where it shouldn’t be present.
I hope future conversations can be more pleasant than this.
I appreciate the defense and agree with a fair bit of this. That said, I’ve actually found the general lack of interpretive labor somewhat helpful in this instance—it’s forcing me to carefully and explicitly explain a lot of things I normally don’t, and John Maxwell has correctly pointed out a lot of seeming-inconsistencies in those explanations. At the very least, it’s helping make a lot of my models more explicit and legible. It’s mentally unpleasant, but a worthwhile exercise to go through.
I think I want John to feel able to have this kind of conversation when it feels fruitful to him, and not feel obligated to do so otherwise. I expect this is the case, but just wanted to make it common knowledge.
For what it’s worth, my perception of this thread is the opposite of yours: it seems to me John Wentworth’s arguments have been clear, consistent, and easy to follow, whereas you (John Maxwell) have been making very little effort to address his position, instead choosing to repeatedly strawman said position (and also repeatedly attempting to lump in what Wentworth has been saying with what you think other people have said in the past, thereby implicitly asking him to defend whatever you think those other people’s positions were).
Whether you’ve been doing this out of a lack of desire to properly engage, an inability to comprehend the argument itself, or some other odd obstacle is in some sense irrelevant to the object-level fact of what has been happening during this conversation. You’ve made your frustration with “AI safety people” more than clear over the course of this conversation (and I did advise you not to engage further if that was the case!), but I submit that in this particular case (at least), the entirety of your frustration can be traced back to your own lack of willingness to put forth interpretive labor.
To be clear: I am making this comment in this tone (which I am well aware is unkind) because there are multiple aspects of your behavior in this thread that I find not only logically rude, but ordinarily rude as well. I more or less summarized these aspects in the first paragraph of my comment, but there’s one particularly onerous aspect I want to highlight: over the course of this discussion, you’ve made multiple references to other uninvolved people (either with whom you agree or disagree), without making any effort at all to lay out what those people said or why it’s relevant to the current discussion. There are two examples of this from your latest comment alone:
Ignoring the question of whether these two quoted statements are true (note that even the fixed version of the link above goes only to a top-level post, and I don’t see any comments on that post from the other day), this is counterproductive for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it’s inefficient. If you believe a particular statement is false (and furthermore, that your basis for this belief is sound), you should first attempt to refute that statement directly, which gives your interlocutor the opportunity to either counter your refutation or concede the point, thereby moving the conversation forward. If you instead counter merely by invoking somebody else’s opinion, you both increase the difficulty of answering and end up offering weaker evidence.
Secondly, it’s irrelevant. John Wentworth does not work at MIRI (neither does Daniel Kokotajlo, for that matter), so bringing up aspects of MIRI’s position you dislike does nothing but highlight a potential area where his position differs from MIRI’s. (I say “potential” because it’s not at all obvious to me that you’ve been representing MIRI’s position accurately.) In order to properly challenge his position, again it becomes more useful to critique his assertions directly rather than round them off to the closest thing said by someone from MIRI.
Thirdly, it’s a distraction. When you regularly reference a group of people who aren’t present in the actual conversation, repeatedly make mention of your frustration and “grumpiness” with those people, and frequently compare your actual interlocutor’s position to what you imagine those people have said, all while your actual interlocutor has said nothing to indicate affiliation with or endorsement of those people, it doesn’t paint a picture of an objective critic. To be blunt: it paints a picture of someone with a one-sided grudge against the people in question, and is attempting to inject that grudge into conversations where it shouldn’t be present.
I hope future conversations can be more pleasant than this.
I appreciate the defense and agree with a fair bit of this. That said, I’ve actually found the general lack of interpretive labor somewhat helpful in this instance—it’s forcing me to carefully and explicitly explain a lot of things I normally don’t, and John Maxwell has correctly pointed out a lot of seeming-inconsistencies in those explanations. At the very least, it’s helping make a lot of my models more explicit and legible. It’s mentally unpleasant, but a worthwhile exercise to go through.
I think I want John to feel able to have this kind of conversation when it feels fruitful to him, and not feel obligated to do so otherwise. I expect this is the case, but just wanted to make it common knowledge.