Mm, interesting, I hadn’t thought much about the need for more popular facing discourse. Do we need some sort of viral engagement with say, Ed Zitron or Carl Brown?
It seems your focus here is more on direct outreach to key players, rather than changing public opinion directly, but your comment about the viral YouTube response to skeptics kind of points in this way.
I’m tempted to open up a discussion about lessons we can learn from the information war during the covid pandemic for this, but, seeing as I wasn’t a part of the rationalist community at that time, I’m worried about stepping on some hidden land mines.
I kind of fell down the John Ioannidis rabbit hole early on at the time (and on some of the details, like the IFR, it did end up settling into his upper bounds I think, TBF). But I wonder if there aren’t lessons to be learned there? There was a lot of failure to communicate in the states around the pandemic, basically a failure to warn, and then suddenly flashing the 3.4% CFR in red on your television screen, and then the publicly-received circus that was machine learning model predictions of IFRs, which I think turned out pretty accurate in the end, but you would have people logging in and staring at their local hospital and seeing that the model was terribly wrong locally on that day, and then concluding the whole thing was a sham.
The end result in my interpretation was a great loss of public trust in public health expertise, even to the point that we now have a lot of retrospectives by academics and what not sort of validating that public response, even as, per my understanding, it seems like the expert consensus turned out pretty good at predicting what would happen?
Sorry, my comment is not really very on topic. I appreciate this post, and I think a lot of what it says aligns with general effective altruist principles: Are you really a world class researcher advancing the state of the art, or is the counterfactual a world where someone else takes your role and basically achieves the same result? As you say, AI research is high status within our community, so it’s worth navel gazing about motivations.
That being said, as a low impact professional, I wonder if there’s anything more for me to do, other than write this rambling comment, and donate my small change to EA LTF? It is very frustrating feeling useless when there is so much going on.
Mm, interesting, I hadn’t thought much about the need for more popular facing discourse. Do we need some sort of viral engagement with say, Ed Zitron or Carl Brown?
It seems your focus here is more on direct outreach to key players, rather than changing public opinion directly, but your comment about the viral YouTube response to skeptics kind of points in this way.
I’m tempted to open up a discussion about lessons we can learn from the information war during the covid pandemic for this, but, seeing as I wasn’t a part of the rationalist community at that time, I’m worried about stepping on some hidden land mines.
I kind of fell down the John Ioannidis rabbit hole early on at the time (and on some of the details, like the IFR, it did end up settling into his upper bounds I think, TBF). But I wonder if there aren’t lessons to be learned there? There was a lot of failure to communicate in the states around the pandemic, basically a failure to warn, and then suddenly flashing the 3.4% CFR in red on your television screen, and then the publicly-received circus that was machine learning model predictions of IFRs, which I think turned out pretty accurate in the end, but you would have people logging in and staring at their local hospital and seeing that the model was terribly wrong locally on that day, and then concluding the whole thing was a sham.
The end result in my interpretation was a great loss of public trust in public health expertise, even to the point that we now have a lot of retrospectives by academics and what not sort of validating that public response, even as, per my understanding, it seems like the expert consensus turned out pretty good at predicting what would happen?
Sorry, my comment is not really very on topic. I appreciate this post, and I think a lot of what it says aligns with general effective altruist principles: Are you really a world class researcher advancing the state of the art, or is the counterfactual a world where someone else takes your role and basically achieves the same result? As you say, AI research is high status within our community, so it’s worth navel gazing about motivations.
That being said, as a low impact professional, I wonder if there’s anything more for me to do, other than write this rambling comment, and donate my small change to EA LTF? It is very frustrating feeling useless when there is so much going on.