That’s also what your brain is doing when you say you don’t want to work on this anymore. Scott doesn’t want you to quit! (Partially because he values Lightcone’s work, and partially because it would look bad for him if you can publicly blame your burnout on him.) Crucially, your brain knows this.
Man, I really wish this was the case, and it’s non-zero of what is going on, but the vast majority of what I am expressing with my (genuine) desire to quit is the stress and frustration associated with the gaslighting, which is one level more abstract than the issue you talk about.
Like yes, there is a threat here being like “for fuck’s sake, stop gaslighting or I am genuinely going to blow up my part of the pie”, but it’s not actually about the object level, and I don’t actually have much of any genuine hope of that working in the same way one might expect from a negotiation tactic.
I am just genuinely actually very tired, and Scott changing his mind on this and going “oh yeah, actually you are right” actually wouldn’t do much to make me want to not quit, because it wouldn’t address the continuous gaslighting where every time anyone tries to talk about any of the adversarial dynamics, they immediately get told this is all made up and get repeated “I haven’t seen EAs (other than SBF) do a lot of lying, equivocating, or even being particularly shy about their beliefs” and “everyone is being honest all the time and actually it’s just you who is lying right now and always”.
Yeah, the frustrating part is almost always on a meta level. I think Zack’s point about “No natural units of pie” applies to the gaslighting issue as well though. Asserting one’s viewpoint means asserting it as truth which invalidates differing perspectives. “I disagree, you contradict, he gaslights”.
It’s difficult because sometimes the gas lights really don’t seem to be dimming, and sometimes that perception is downstream of some motivated thinking because I really don’t want to believe we’re running out of oil already, dammit. And so the result is simultaneously kinda an honest statement of perspective (at least, as honest as these tend to get) while also being a (not-necessarily-consciously) motivated action pushing people to disregard their own senses. And then we have to decide how to judge this mess of bias and honesty, and if we don’t judge such that the product after a round trip of perceiving C/D and responding accordingly we get more C than last time… shit’s fucked. And without objective units of pie that people can agree on when judging who was in the wrong.
So like… am I trying to gaslight people into questioning their own sanity so they accept what I want them to accept, or am I just flinching away from what scares me, like we all do? Both, and the question of whether I deserve the leniency and empathy is a difficult one, because what are the units of this pie and where’s the objective cutoff? And because our tolerance for further bullshit tends to diminish after accumulating bullshit, so it gets even more difficult to get back to the other side of criticality.
Man, I really wish this was the case, and it’s non-zero of what is going on, but the vast majority of what I am expressing with my (genuine) desire to quit is the stress and frustration associated with the gaslighting, which is one level more abstract than the issue you talk about.
Like yes, there is a threat here being like “for fuck’s sake, stop gaslighting or I am genuinely going to blow up my part of the pie”, but it’s not actually about the object level, and I don’t actually have much of any genuine hope of that working in the same way one might expect from a negotiation tactic.
I am just genuinely actually very tired, and Scott changing his mind on this and going “oh yeah, actually you are right” actually wouldn’t do much to make me want to not quit, because it wouldn’t address the continuous gaslighting where every time anyone tries to talk about any of the adversarial dynamics, they immediately get told this is all made up and get repeated “I haven’t seen EAs (other than SBF) do a lot of lying, equivocating, or even being particularly shy about their beliefs” and “everyone is being honest all the time and actually it’s just you who is lying right now and always”.
Yeah, the frustrating part is almost always on a meta level. I think Zack’s point about “No natural units of pie” applies to the gaslighting issue as well though. Asserting one’s viewpoint means asserting it as truth which invalidates differing perspectives. “I disagree, you contradict, he gaslights”.
It’s difficult because sometimes the gas lights really don’t seem to be dimming, and sometimes that perception is downstream of some motivated thinking because I really don’t want to believe we’re running out of oil already, dammit. And so the result is simultaneously kinda an honest statement of perspective (at least, as honest as these tend to get) while also being a (not-necessarily-consciously) motivated action pushing people to disregard their own senses. And then we have to decide how to judge this mess of bias and honesty, and if we don’t judge such that the product after a round trip of perceiving C/D and responding accordingly we get more C than last time… shit’s fucked. And without objective units of pie that people can agree on when judging who was in the wrong.
So like… am I trying to gaslight people into questioning their own sanity so they accept what I want them to accept, or am I just flinching away from what scares me, like we all do? Both, and the question of whether I deserve the leniency and empathy is a difficult one, because what are the units of this pie and where’s the objective cutoff? And because our tolerance for further bullshit tends to diminish after accumulating bullshit, so it gets even more difficult to get back to the other side of criticality.