“This short story perfectly depicts the motivations and psychological makeup of my milieu,” I think wryly as I strong upvote. I’m going to need to discuss this at length with my therapist. Probably the author is one of those salty mid-performing engineers who didn’t get the offer they wanted from Anthropic or whatever. That thought cheers me up a little.
Esther catches sight of the content on my screen over my shoulder. “I saw that too,” she remarks, looking faintly worried in a way which reminds me of why I am hopelessly in love with what she represents. “Are we, like, the bad guys, or maybe deluding ourselves that we’re the good guys in a bad situation? It seems like that author thinks so. It does seem like biding my time hasn’t really got me any real influence yet.”
I rack my brain for something virtuous to say. “Yeah, um, safety-washing is a real drag, right?” Her worry intensifies, so I know I’m pronouncing the right shibboleths. God, I am really spiritually emaciated right now. I need to cheer her up. “But think about it, we really are in the room, right? Who else in the world can say that? It’s not like Vox or Krishna are going to wake up any time soon. That’s a lot of counterfactual expected impact.”
She relaxes. “You’re right. Just need to keep vigilant for important opportunities to speak up. Thanks.” We both get back to tuning RL environments and meta-ML pipelines.
The OP is now one of the most upvoted LessWrong posts of all time, and has remained frontpage for over a week. I think we can expect that The Company Man and Esther (who presumably canonically skim LW sometimes) really have seen this story. I predict they strong upvoted. I would be interested in word of God on the matter.
“This short story perfectly depicts the motivations and psychological makeup of my milieu,” I think wryly as I strong upvote. I’m going to need to discuss this at length with my therapist. Probably the author is one of those salty mid-performing engineers who didn’t get the offer they wanted from Anthropic or whatever. That thought cheers me up a little.
Esther catches sight of the content on my screen over my shoulder. “I saw that too,” she remarks, looking faintly worried in a way which reminds me of why I am hopelessly in love with what she represents. “Are we, like, the bad guys, or maybe deluding ourselves that we’re the good guys in a bad situation? It seems like that author thinks so. It does seem like biding my time hasn’t really got me any real influence yet.”
I rack my brain for something virtuous to say. “Yeah, um, safety-washing is a real drag, right?” Her worry intensifies, so I know I’m pronouncing the right shibboleths. God, I am really spiritually emaciated right now. I need to cheer her up. “But think about it, we really are in the room, right? Who else in the world can say that? It’s not like Vox or Krishna are going to wake up any time soon. That’s a lot of counterfactual expected impact.”
She relaxes. “You’re right. Just need to keep vigilant for important opportunities to speak up. Thanks.” We both get back to tuning RL environments and meta-ML pipelines.
The OP is now one of the most upvoted LessWrong posts of all time, and has remained frontpage for over a week. I think we can expect that The Company Man and Esther (who presumably canonically skim LW sometimes) really have seen this story. I predict they strong upvoted. I would be interested in word of God on the matter.