MV: So the reason the book was written was because Eliezer and I found pretty clearly that the general public did respond much more reasonably to these sorts of arguments than the more educated and elite, you know, that the cab drivers and people in stores had a strong intuition that we shouldn’t want to make ourselves extinct, while elites tend to be like, well, really, isn’t that just the nature of things and the cycle of life? And that sort of thing is a more final say than I’m not convinced this is going to happen, you know?
Wait, is he saying that he played a role in the writing of IABIED?
No; Vassar and Yudkowsky haven’t been on good terms lately. I would assume he meant that the pattern of non-elites being more receptive to anti-extinction arguments also held back in the early 2010s when Vassar was leading the then-Singularity Institute, and that he thinks this has informed MIRI’s post-2022 public outreach pivot.
Wait, is he saying that he played a role in the writing of IABIED?
No; Vassar and Yudkowsky haven’t been on good terms lately. I would assume he meant that the pattern of non-elites being more receptive to anti-extinction arguments also held back in the early 2010s when Vassar was leading the then-Singularity Institute, and that he thinks this has informed MIRI’s post-2022 public outreach pivot.