It would have been so easy to meet Heaven’s Gate where it was coming from. Heaven’s Gate had a starting set of assumptions that you could crisply question. You could assert that there was no comet behind the spaceship, or that apparent-suicide wouldn’t allow you to board it.
My ideal version of the OP (that I am not owed) either explicitly says “Soryu/MAPLE is wrong about their factual claims that doom is imminent”, or agrees with that premise but gets into the details of how it believes MAPLE handled that fact badly. I don’t think MAPLE would come out any better in that version (I had a terrible experience there and public data says its been downhill from there), but it would feel like it left more room to recognize if a different organization had the same premise and handled implementation better.
I tried to do some of that in my comment. I didn’t bother passing their ITT (think it’s a waste of time), but tried to make the case that (what I take to be) their verbally stated goals clearly are not being matched by their actions[1].
I did state my arguments in rational-ese and EA-adjacent language but would be happy to see similar presentations in more Western Buddhist-flavored language if they think on the fence MAPLErs or would-be future residents would find it helpful.
imo there are ~4 options to argue against my comment:
a. Actually, the MAPLE strategy is good for what I understood to be their verbally stated goals.
b. I misunderstood what their central verbally stated goals actually are, and this is “load-bearing” for why their actions make sense. To be clear it has to actually be load-bearing. Imo you could replace “AI alignment and strategy research” with “s-risk research” or “figure out an alternative sociopolitical system” and my argument still clears.
c. What I said make sense on verbally summarized grounds but not the full deepness of their goals (why?) and you need to understand the MAPLE ontology at a much deeper level and then the means-ends reasoning arguments would make sense (why?)
d. The internal logic of my comment is meaningfully wrong in some deep way. Why?
It would have been so easy to meet Heaven’s Gate where it was coming from. Heaven’s Gate had a starting set of assumptions that you could crisply question. You could assert that there was no comet behind the spaceship, or that apparent-suicide wouldn’t allow you to board it.
My ideal version of the OP (that I am not owed) either explicitly says “Soryu/MAPLE is wrong about their factual claims that doom is imminent”, or agrees with that premise but gets into the details of how it believes MAPLE handled that fact badly. I don’t think MAPLE would come out any better in that version (I had a terrible experience there and public data says its been downhill from there), but it would feel like it left more room to recognize if a different organization had the same premise and handled implementation better.
I tried to do some of that in my comment. I didn’t bother passing their ITT (think it’s a waste of time), but tried to make the case that (what I take to be) their verbally stated goals clearly are not being matched by their actions[1].
I did state my arguments in rational-ese and EA-adjacent language but would be happy to see similar presentations in more Western Buddhist-flavored language if they think on the fence MAPLErs or would-be future residents would find it helpful.
imo there are ~4 options to argue against my comment:
a. Actually, the MAPLE strategy is good for what I understood to be their verbally stated goals.
b. I misunderstood what their central verbally stated goals actually are, and this is “load-bearing” for why their actions make sense. To be clear it has to actually be load-bearing. Imo you could replace “AI alignment and strategy research” with “s-risk research” or “figure out an alternative sociopolitical system” and my argument still clears.
c. What I said make sense on verbally summarized grounds but not the full deepness of their goals (why?) and you need to understand the MAPLE ontology at a much deeper level and then the means-ends reasoning arguments would make sense (why?)
d. The internal logic of my comment is meaningfully wrong in some deep way. Why?