This piece is at its best when providing concrete detail about the nonobvious labor required to put on a conference: the shrub-tree breaking under the groundkeeper’s weight, the negotiations with the furniture and badge suppliers. At its worst, it devolves into empty ingroup loyalty-signaling that’s hard to excuse as an artifact of being written in a day: it’s easy to credit that rough prose would have been polished given more time to work on it, but a deficit of self-awareness seems unlikely to be remedied by mere time.
The attribution of the alleged “dirty, poor, graffitied, smelly, closed-down, and ramshackle” quality of the area in south Berkeley to “Moloch” betrays a marked indifference to both the allusion’s source material and the facts.
Regarding the former, “Meditations on Moloch” isn’t about everything bad in the world being the fault of “Moloch”. It’s specifically about coordination failures: things being contrary to the preferences of the relevant actors due to a lack of coordination away from a bad Nash equilibrium. I don’t doubt that the problems of urban decay could be analyzed in terms of coordination failures, but there’s nothing in the text that hints at any such analysis. As far as the reader can tell, the content of the allusion amounts to, “Moloch = bad stuff, Lightcone/Lighthaven = good for resisting bad stuff.” Indeed, the distinguishing feature of coordination problems is that they can’t be solved by a lone actor being unusually good! The Moloch allusion would make sense if Lightcone Infrastructure had been active in local government to find collective solutions to urban decay that couldn’t be pursued unilaterally, but no such effort is mentioned in the text or exists to my knowledge.
Regarding the latter, the evidence for urban decay in this south Berkeley neighborhood is questionable. I guess I can buy “graffitied” insofar as I do remember seeing a graffito on the wall of the building on the corner of Stuart and Telegraph. But “poor”? That neighborhood is more expensive than 97.2% of the U.S.! “Closed-down” would initially seem to be supported by, e.g., the former home of the Pacific Center for Human Growth near Telegraph and Derby appearing to be abandoned—but that’s because developers are planning to put a 50-unit appartment building there.
The post descends into self-parody in the entry about conference attendees working for frontier AI companies despite having read ingroup authors. If you understand concepts like “adversarial debate” or “being well-read”, it should not be surprising that someone might have read your group’s literature and yet disagree with you about the ethics of working in one of the most productive sectors of the economy! This is sadly consistent with my read from previous experience that the author and his employer don’t really believe in debate and don’t really believe in being well-read. Robust, informed disagreement is defection against the ingroup.
This piece is at its best when providing concrete detail about the nonobvious labor required to put on a conference: the shrub-tree breaking under the groundkeeper’s weight, the negotiations with the furniture and badge suppliers. At its worst, it devolves into empty ingroup loyalty-signaling that’s hard to excuse as an artifact of being written in a day: it’s easy to credit that rough prose would have been polished given more time to work on it, but a deficit of self-awareness seems unlikely to be remedied by mere time.
The attribution of the alleged “dirty, poor, graffitied, smelly, closed-down, and ramshackle” quality of the area in south Berkeley to “Moloch” betrays a marked indifference to both the allusion’s source material and the facts.
Regarding the former, “Meditations on Moloch” isn’t about everything bad in the world being the fault of “Moloch”. It’s specifically about coordination failures: things being contrary to the preferences of the relevant actors due to a lack of coordination away from a bad Nash equilibrium. I don’t doubt that the problems of urban decay could be analyzed in terms of coordination failures, but there’s nothing in the text that hints at any such analysis. As far as the reader can tell, the content of the allusion amounts to, “Moloch = bad stuff, Lightcone/Lighthaven = good for resisting bad stuff.” Indeed, the distinguishing feature of coordination problems is that they can’t be solved by a lone actor being unusually good! The Moloch allusion would make sense if Lightcone Infrastructure had been active in local government to find collective solutions to urban decay that couldn’t be pursued unilaterally, but no such effort is mentioned in the text or exists to my knowledge.
Regarding the latter, the evidence for urban decay in this south Berkeley neighborhood is questionable. I guess I can buy “graffitied” insofar as I do remember seeing a graffito on the wall of the building on the corner of Stuart and Telegraph. But “poor”? That neighborhood is more expensive than 97.2% of the U.S.! “Closed-down” would initially seem to be supported by, e.g., the former home of the Pacific Center for Human Growth near Telegraph and Derby appearing to be abandoned—but that’s because developers are planning to put a 50-unit appartment building there.
The post descends into self-parody in the entry about conference attendees working for frontier AI companies despite having read ingroup authors. If you understand concepts like “adversarial debate” or “being well-read”, it should not be surprising that someone might have read your group’s literature and yet disagree with you about the ethics of working in one of the most productive sectors of the economy! This is sadly consistent with my read from previous experience that the author and his employer don’t really believe in debate and don’t really believe in being well-read. Robust, informed disagreement is defection against the ingroup.