Being empathetic and being nice aren’t always the same thing. Loving actions are sometimes adversarial. When I imagine myself in the same position, I would want a friend to confront me and demand to know what the hell I’m thinking.
“We are doomed and there is nothing to be done, so I might as well doom us harder” can be made psychologically unsafe. It’s plenty of reason to end a friendship. They should feel pressure and shame for doing such a taboo thing, not to punish them, but because the lack of hard pushback acts as tacit approval, as if we can all be friends at the end of the day, as if friendship is more important than the death of all things.
Is it? I have often felt my relationship with a friend strengthen when I frankly tell them that they ought to quit their jobs on ethical and/or mission grounds. (Prior to this whole AI labs business.)
Sorry, I should have expanded a bit more. The quoted part is only the first five minutes of a two-hour conversation; I definitely believe in having frank conversations about x-risk with people who are on the ground.
What I don’t believe in is jumping directly to [here’s what you ought to do], which feels deeply condescending, as opposed to staying at [let’s find our cruxes, why do you believe what you believe?].
It is also not obvious to me that having them leave is the right decision, as it might have been ~5 years ago. There seems to be delicate internal opinion politics right now in the labs where the x-risk-pilled are a non-negligible minority and their presence could significantly improve our chances of (for example) future pauses/bans, or deployment of alignment ideas, or alignment problems being solved by powerful internal models.
Being empathetic and being nice aren’t always the same thing. Loving actions are sometimes adversarial. When I imagine myself in the same position, I would want a friend to confront me and demand to know what the hell I’m thinking.
“We are doomed and there is nothing to be done, so I might as well doom us harder” can be made psychologically unsafe. It’s plenty of reason to end a friendship. They should feel pressure and shame for doing such a taboo thing, not to punish them, but because the lack of hard pushback acts as tacit approval, as if we can all be friends at the end of the day, as if friendship is more important than the death of all things.
Pressuring the people at frontier ai labs who believe in x-risk to leave is an extremely naive way of relating to doom.
Is it? I have often felt my relationship with a friend strengthen when I frankly tell them that they ought to quit their jobs on ethical and/or mission grounds. (Prior to this whole AI labs business.)
Sorry, I should have expanded a bit more. The quoted part is only the first five minutes of a two-hour conversation; I definitely believe in having frank conversations about x-risk with people who are on the ground.
What I don’t believe in is jumping directly to [here’s what you ought to do], which feels deeply condescending, as opposed to staying at [let’s find our cruxes, why do you believe what you believe?].
It is also not obvious to me that having them leave is the right decision, as it might have been ~5 years ago. There seems to be delicate internal opinion politics right now in the labs where the x-risk-pilled are a non-negligible minority and their presence could significantly improve our chances of (for example) future pauses/bans, or deployment of alignment ideas, or alignment problems being solved by powerful internal models.