I don’t usually consider myself good at reading faces, but wow, the sheer LOOK of contempt and scorn that crossed his face; mefore he turned away and walked off without another word, forever dismissing me from his consideration. I will never forget that moment
A bit off topic, but lately I’ve been thinking about the power of grudges. It’s just so underestimated. There are people who did a minor bad thing to me once (on the order of, make a noise complaint against me) and I kinda hate them forever, even years later. And then I think of people I myself might’ve offended in minor ways in my life, and there’s so many, ouch.
I haven’t found any easy way to fight it, but one counterweight that I’ve kinda stumbled onto is holding “positive grudges”. When someone does me a minor good thing, I make a point of remembering it forever and expressing it when I can. It’s a bit weird, but it makes me feel good.
I rather expected from that time that Aschenbrenner would be trouble for EA, if they just couldn’t stop themselves from promoting Harvard blondes; but I did not say anything against him then on the basis of that conversation, and only marked him down as actively harmful once I saw him starting to oppose all good ideas during his brief tenure at FTX philanthropy. He did of course further go on to actively stoke arms races with China.
The relevance to the Wei Dai part is that Wei Dai seemed to me to be asking, “Aren’t you deciding post facto who is ‘EA’ and who is ‘rationalist’?” and my reply to Wei Dai is implicitly, “My memory claims that it is really really not hard to tell, in advance, early on.”
A bit off topic, but lately I’ve been thinking about the power of grudges. It’s just so underestimated. There are people who did a minor bad thing to me once (on the order of, make a noise complaint against me) and I kinda hate them forever, even years later. And then I think of people I myself might’ve offended in minor ways in my life, and there’s so many, ouch.
I haven’t found any easy way to fight it, but one counterweight that I’ve kinda stumbled onto is holding “positive grudges”. When someone does me a minor good thing, I make a point of remembering it forever and expressing it when I can. It’s a bit weird, but it makes me feel good.
I rather expected from that time that Aschenbrenner would be trouble for EA, if they just couldn’t stop themselves from promoting Harvard blondes; but I did not say anything against him then on the basis of that conversation, and only marked him down as actively harmful once I saw him starting to oppose all good ideas during his brief tenure at FTX philanthropy. He did of course further go on to actively stoke arms races with China.
The relevance to the Wei Dai part is that Wei Dai seemed to me to be asking, “Aren’t you deciding post facto who is ‘EA’ and who is ‘rationalist’?” and my reply to Wei Dai is implicitly, “My memory claims that it is really really not hard to tell, in advance, early on.”