I appreciate pretty much everything about your reply up above.
Agreement that there was a false equivalency re: right now vs. ever.
Agreement that my phrasing presupposed an outcome (though that makes sense when you take the context of “the guy talking is the curriculum director at CFAR”). I predict that outcome, optimistically, but in fact the actual target should be and is “investigate” not “repair.”
Unfortunately for the goal of record-keeping and evidence-creation, most of those interactions have taken place in person. I could generate stories about what they’re like, but a better option seems to be “start taking notes now when they happen, and ask permission to make said notes public with reasonable anonymity.”
Thanks for responding 100% positively/exactly as I would hope a LWer would respond. I’d love it if you let me know if I myself am not living up to that standard, as you gently did above.
Re: the previous interactions: that no notes from them are available is not the problem, nor would have notes help in any meaningful way. (Plus—and I really hate to be so blunt about this, but—notes can say whatever the note-taker, or even the note-poster-to-a-public-website, wants them to say! I’m not seriously suggesting falsification of anecdotal evidence, and as I say below, this is not really my primary concern here, but from the appearance-of-propriety perspective, having notes is not a great situation.)
No, the reason I asked about whether the cited interactions took place in person is certainly not disbelief or lack of evidence; and it is only in lesser part the desire to examine the interactions and see what I can conclude from them. The real reason is that an interaction in person is tremendously different from an interaction via a web forum (like this one)!!
These differences are so profound and far-reaching—and so especially relevant for people with “our sort” of minds—that I hesitate to even begin enumerating them (though I’ll attempt to, upon request; but they should be obvious, I think!). The point, in any case, is that viewed in light of these differences, your track record of convincing nay-sayers, while undoubtedly real, should be much less persuasive, even to yourself, than you imply it to be.
It would be very different if you could point us to an online exchange, where you, and a serious and thoughtful interlocutor, took the time to compose comments and replies back and forth—the paradigmatic example of such, around here, being the Yudkowsky–Hanson “AI Foom” debate. (Ah, but how did that one turn out, eh?)
These differences are so profound and far-reaching—and so especially relevant for people with “our sort” of minds—that I hesitate to even begin enumerating them (though I’ll attempt to, upon request; but they should be obvious, I think!
I request this enumeration, if your offer extends to interlopers and not just Duncan.
(The differences I can think of are instant vs asynchronous communication, nonverbal+verbal vs. verbal only, and speaking only to one another vs. having an audience. But I don’t see why these are *inevitably* so profound and far-reaching.
I appreciate pretty much everything about your reply up above.
Agreement that there was a false equivalency re: right now vs. ever.
Agreement that my phrasing presupposed an outcome (though that makes sense when you take the context of “the guy talking is the curriculum director at CFAR”). I predict that outcome, optimistically, but in fact the actual target should be and is “investigate” not “repair.”
Unfortunately for the goal of record-keeping and evidence-creation, most of those interactions have taken place in person. I could generate stories about what they’re like, but a better option seems to be “start taking notes now when they happen, and ask permission to make said notes public with reasonable anonymity.”
Thanks for responding 100% positively/exactly as I would hope a LWer would respond. I’d love it if you let me know if I myself am not living up to that standard, as you gently did above.
Thank you for the kind words.
Re: the previous interactions: that no notes from them are available is not the problem, nor would have notes help in any meaningful way. (Plus—and I really hate to be so blunt about this, but—notes can say whatever the note-taker, or even the note-poster-to-a-public-website, wants them to say! I’m not seriously suggesting falsification of anecdotal evidence, and as I say below, this is not really my primary concern here, but from the appearance-of-propriety perspective, having notes is not a great situation.)
No, the reason I asked about whether the cited interactions took place in person is certainly not disbelief or lack of evidence; and it is only in lesser part the desire to examine the interactions and see what I can conclude from them. The real reason is that an interaction in person is tremendously different from an interaction via a web forum (like this one)!!
These differences are so profound and far-reaching—and so especially relevant for people with “our sort” of minds—that I hesitate to even begin enumerating them (though I’ll attempt to, upon request; but they should be obvious, I think!). The point, in any case, is that viewed in light of these differences, your track record of convincing nay-sayers, while undoubtedly real, should be much less persuasive, even to yourself, than you imply it to be.
It would be very different if you could point us to an online exchange, where you, and a serious and thoughtful interlocutor, took the time to compose comments and replies back and forth—the paradigmatic example of such, around here, being the Yudkowsky–Hanson “AI Foom” debate. (Ah, but how did that one turn out, eh?)
I request this enumeration, if your offer extends to interlopers and not just Duncan.
(The differences I can think of are instant vs asynchronous communication, nonverbal+verbal vs. verbal only, and speaking only to one another vs. having an audience. But I don’t see why these are *inevitably* so profound and far-reaching.