The discussion at HN seems mostly critical of it, so it’s not clear to me how much else needs to be added.
The memes got spread far and wide. A lot of AI safety people will run into arguments with this general form, and they mostly won’t have read enough comments to form a good reply (also, most criticism does not target the heart because the other parts are so much weaker, so will be unconvincing where it’s needed most). Some can come up with a reply to the heart on the fly, but it seems fairly positive to have this on LW to spread the antibody memes.
Sure, but… what can you do to convince someone who doesn’t evaluate arguments? You can’t use the inside view to convince someone else that they should abandon the outside view, because the outside view specifically ignores inside view arguments.
Show them outside view style arguments? People are bounded agents, and there are a bunch of things in the direction of epistemic learned helplessness which make them not want to load arbitrary complex arguments into their brain. This should not lead them to reject reference-class comparisons as evidence of it being worth looking at closer / not having an extreme prior against (though maybe in actual humans this mostly fails anyway).
Admittedly, this does not have an awesome hitrate for me, maybe 1/4? Am interested in ideas for better replies.
The memes got spread far and wide. A lot of AI safety people will run into arguments with this general form, and they mostly won’t have read enough comments to form a good reply (also, most criticism does not target the heart because the other parts are so much weaker, so will be unconvincing where it’s needed most). Some can come up with a reply to the heart on the fly, but it seems fairly positive to have this on LW to spread the antibody memes.
Show them outside view style arguments? People are bounded agents, and there are a bunch of things in the direction of epistemic learned helplessness which make them not want to load arbitrary complex arguments into their brain. This should not lead them to reject reference-class comparisons as evidence of it being worth looking at closer / not having an extreme prior against (though maybe in actual humans this mostly fails anyway).
Admittedly, this does not have an awesome hitrate for me, maybe 1/4? Am interested in ideas for better replies.