Zach (et al) are exaggerating how unusual/extreme/weird Yudkowsky’s positions are.
Zach (et al) are exaggerating how much Yudkowsky’s writings are an explicit call to action.
To the extent that Yudkowsky has unusual positions and calls for actions, you think he’s mostly correct on the merits.
Of these, I’d like to push on (1) a bit. However, I think this would probably work better as a new top-level post (working title “Yudkowsky on Yudkowsky”). To give a flavor, though, and because I’m quite likely to fail to write the top-level post, here’s an example. Shah and Yudkowsky on alignment failures.
This may, perhaps, be confounded by the phenomenon where I am one of the last living descendants of the lineage that ever knew how to say anything concrete at all. Richard Feynman—or so I would now say in retrospect—is noticing concreteness dying out of the world, and being worried about that, at the point where he goes to a college and hears a professor talking about “essential objects” in class, and Feynman asks “Is a brick an essential object?”—meaning to work up to the notion of the inside of a brick, which can’t be observed because breaking a brick in half just gives you two new exterior surfaces—and everybody in the classroom has a different notion of what it would mean for a brick to be an essential object.
I encourage you to follow the link to the rest of the conversation, which relates this to alignment work. So we have this phenomenon where one factor in humanity going extinct is that people don’t listen enough to Yudkowsky and his almost unique ability to speak concretely. This also supports (2) above—this isn’t an explicit call to action, he’s just observing a phenomenon.
A (1) take here is that the quote is cherry-picked, a joke, or an outlier, and his overall work implies a more modest self-assessment. A (3) take is that he really is almost uniquely able to speak concretely. My take (4) is that his self-assessment is positively biased. I interpret Zack’s “break-up” with Yudkowsky in the opening post as moving from a (3) model to a (4) model, and encouraging others to do the same.
I would summarize this as saying:
Zach (et al) are exaggerating how unusual/extreme/weird Yudkowsky’s positions are.
Zach (et al) are exaggerating how much Yudkowsky’s writings are an explicit call to action.
To the extent that Yudkowsky has unusual positions and calls for actions, you think he’s mostly correct on the merits.
Of these, I’d like to push on (1) a bit. However, I think this would probably work better as a new top-level post (working title “Yudkowsky on Yudkowsky”). To give a flavor, though, and because I’m quite likely to fail to write the top-level post, here’s an example. Shah and Yudkowsky on alignment failures.
I encourage you to follow the link to the rest of the conversation, which relates this to alignment work. So we have this phenomenon where one factor in humanity going extinct is that people don’t listen enough to Yudkowsky and his almost unique ability to speak concretely. This also supports (2) above—this isn’t an explicit call to action, he’s just observing a phenomenon.
A (1) take here is that the quote is cherry-picked, a joke, or an outlier, and his overall work implies a more modest self-assessment. A (3) take is that he really is almost uniquely able to speak concretely. My take (4) is that his self-assessment is positively biased. I interpret Zack’s “break-up” with Yudkowsky in the opening post as moving from a (3) model to a (4) model, and encouraging others to do the same.