In a thread which claimed that Nate Soares radicalized a co-founder of e-acc, Nate deleted my comment – presumably to hide negative information and anecdotes about how he treats people. He also blocked me from commenting on his posts.
The information which Nate suppressed
The post concerned (among other topics) how to effectively communicate about AI safety, and positive anecdotes about Nate’s recent approach. (Additionally, he mentions “I’m regularly told that I’m just an idealistic rationalist who’s enamored by the virtue of truth”—a love which apparently does not extend to allowing people to read negative truths about his own behavior.)
Here are the parents of the comment which Nate deleted:
i’m reminded today of a dinner conversation i had once w one of the top MIRI folks...
we talked AI safety and i felt he was playing status games in our conversation moreso than actually engaging w the substance of my questions- negging me and implying i was not very smart if i didn’t immediately react w fear to the parable of the paperclip, if i asked questions about hardware & infrastructure & connectivity & data constraints...
luckily i don’t define myself by my intelligence so i wasn’t cowed into doom but instead joined the budding e/acc movement a few weeks later.
still i was unsettled by the attempted psychological manipulation and frame control hiding under the hunched shoulders and soft ever so polite voice.
My deleted comment (proof) responded to Mo’s record of the tweet:
we talked AI safety and i felt he was playing status games in our conversation moreso than actually engaging w the substance of my questions- negging me and implying i was not very smart if i didn’t immediately react w fear to the parable of the paperclip
I, personally, have been on the receiving end of (what felt to me like) a Nate-bulldozing, which killed my excitement for engaging with the MIRI-sphere, and also punctured my excitement for doing alignment theory...
Discussing norms with Nate leads to an explosion of conversational complexity. In my opinion, such discussion can sound really nice and reasonable, until you remember that you just wanted him to e.g. not insult your reasoning skills and instead engage with your object-level claims… but somehow your simple request turns into a complicated and painful negotiation. You never thought you’d have to explain “being nice.”
Then—in my experience—you give up trying to negotiate anything from him and just accept that he gets to follow whatever “norms” he wants.
Why did Nate delete negative information about himself?
Nate gave the reasoning “Discussion of how some people react poorly to perceived overconfidence[1] is just barely topical. Discussion of individual conduct isn’t.”. But my anecdote is a valid report of the historical consequences of talking with Nate – just as valid as the e/acc co-founder’s tweet. Severalothercommenters had already supported the e/acc tweet information as quite relevant to the thread.
Therefore, I conclude that Nate deleted the true information I shared because it made him look bad.
EDIT: Nate also blocked me from commenting on his posts:
See how Nate frames the issue as “reacting poorly to perceived overconfidence”, which is not how the e/acc co-founder described her experience. She called it “psychological manipulation” but did not say she thought Nate being overconfident was an issue. Nate deflects from serious charges (“psychological manipulation”) to a charge which would be more convenient for him (“overconfidence”).
I think there is a decent chance I would have asked people to move the discussion somewhere else as well (as a post author not as a LW moderator), not with any particular interest of hiding information, but because I have models about what kind of conversation tends to go well or badly online.
It’s obvious to me that the relevant discussion would have probably derailed and consumed the whole rest of the conversation, not in particularly productive ways, even if it had important true things in it. The post is not centrally about Nate, but about generalized strategies, and interpersonal drama tends to consume all.
I really really want authors on LW to feel more comfortable not less comfortable moving comments off of their post to somewhere else on the site.
This actually made me think the right UI for authors might be that instead of having a “delete from post” button, we have a “move to open thread” button, which leaves a small note behind indicating that a comment thread has been moved to the open thread, and then discussion can continue there. I’ll think about it for a while.
(Relatedly, I have vastly overspent my “how much I have time to discuss LW moderation things” in the past 2 weeks, so I probably won’t participate much in the discussion in as much as anyone wants to respond, and also, I have learned that generalized moderation discussions are best had not in the middle of a fight between people who have very strong feelings)
This actually made me think the right UI for authors might be that instead of having a “delete from post” button, we have a “move to open thread” button, which leaves a small note behind indicating that a comment thread has been moved to the open thread, and then discussion can continue there. I’ll think about it for a while.
I strongly endorse this.
Data Secrets Lox makes very heavy use of the “move post”/“split topic”/“merge topics” functionality of the forum software we use, and it works spectacularly well. It almost completely defuses or prevents a huge swath of arguments, disagreements, annoyances, etc. about what’s appropriate to post when and where, etc.
Thanks to this capability, DSL is able to maintain a policy of “never delete content” (except for obvious spam, or content that is outright illegal), while still ensuring that discussions don’t get clogged up with totally off-topic digressions.
Moving/splitting/merging instead of deletion makes a forum much more pleasant to use.
This post seems to me like very strong evidence that Nate was absolutely correct to block Alex.
For context, I have a deep and abiding fondness for both Alex and Nate, and have spent the last several years off to the side sort of aghast and dismayed at the deterioration in their relationship. I’ve felt helpless to bridge the gap, and have mostly ended up saying very little to either party about it.
But the above feels to me like a particularly grotesque combination of [petty] and [disingenuous], and it’s unfortunately in-line with my sense that Alex has been something-like hounding Nate for a while. Actively nursing a grudge, taking every cheap opportunity to grind an axe, deliberately targeting “trash Nate’s reputation via maximally uncharitable summaries and characterizations” rather than something like “cause people to accurately understand the history of our disagreement so they can form their own judgments,” locating all of the grievance entirely within Nate and taking no responsibility for his own contributions to the dynamic/the results of his consensual interactions and choices, etc. etc. etc. I’ve genuinely been trying to cling to neutrality in this feud between two people I respect, but at this point it’s no longer possible.
(I’ll note that my own sense, looking in from the outside, is that something like a full year of friendly-interactions-with-Nate passed between the conversations Alex represents as having been so awful, and the start of Alex’s public vendetta, which was more closely coincident with some romantic drama. If I had lower epistemic standards, I might find it easy to write a sentence like “Therefore, I conclude that Alex’s true grievance is about a girl, and he is only pretending that it’s about their AI conversations because that’s a more-likely-to-garner-sympathy pretext.” I actually don’t conclude that, because concluding that would be irresponsible and insufficiently justified; it’s merely my foremost hypothesis among several.)
A small handful of threads in response to the above:
Stuck in the monkey frame
I was once idly complaining about being baffled by people’s reactions to some of my own posts and comments, and my spouse replied: “maybe it’s because people think you’re trying to upset people, when in fact you’re doing something-other-than-not-trying-to-upset-people, and few people are capable of imagining motives other than ‘try to cause other people to feel a certain way.’”
...which sure does feel like it fits the above. “If someone who was just a monkey-obsessed monkey did this, it would have been in order to have such-and-such impact on the other monkeys; therefore that’s definitely what happened.”
In fact (as the above post conspicuously elides), Nate left those comment threads up for a while, and explicitly flagged his intent to delete them, and gave people a window to change his mind or take their screenshots or whatever, which is not at all consistent with the hypothesis “trying to hide stuff that makes him look bad.”
Nate’s post was making a general point—don’t preemptively hamstring your message because you’re worried they won’t accept your true belief. He presented evidence of this strategy working surprisingly well in the format of the book that he and Eliezer have written, which is intentionally not-cringing.
Saying “ah, but when you talk to me in person I find it unpleasant, and so did these five other people” is, as Nate correctly characterized, barely topical. “Underdeployed Strategy X has powerful upsides; here’s evidence of those upsides in a concrete case” is not meaningfully undercut by “your particular version of a thing that might not even be intended as a central example of Strategy X has sometimes had negative side effects.”
In other words, on my understanding, Nate didn’t delete the comment thread “because it made him look bad,” he deleted it because it wasn’t the conversation he was there to have, and as more and more depressingly monkeydrama comments piled up, it became a meaningful distraction away from that conversation.
(LessWrong does this all the time, which is a huge part of why I find it counterproductive to try to have thoughts, here; the crowd does not have wisdom or virtue and upvotes frequently fail to track the product of [true] and [useful].)
Depressingly in line with expectation
I myself have long had a policy of blocking people who display a sufficiently high product of [overconfident] and [uncharitable]. Like, the sort of person who immediately concludes that X is downstream of some specific shittiness, and considers no other hypotheses, and evinces no interest in evidence or argument (despite nominal protestations to the contrary).
Once in a while, a bunch of the people I’ve blocked will all get together to talk shit about me, and sometimes people will send me screenshots, and guess what sorts of things they have to say?
Separate entirely from questions of cause or blame, (my understanding of) Nate’s experience of Alex has been “this guy will come at me, uncharitably, without justification, and will disingenuously misrepresent me, and will twist my words, and will try to cast my actions in the most negative possible light, and will tenaciously derail conversations away from their subject matter and towards useless drama.” (My shoulder model of) Nate, not wanting that, blocked Alex, and lo—this post appears, conspicuously failing to falsify the model.
(Parentheticals because I do not in fact have firsthand knowledge of Nate’s thinking here.)
I am sad about it, but by this point I am not surprised. When you block someone for being vindictive and petty, they predictably frame that self-protective action in vindictive, petty ways. Some people are caught in a dark world.
We used to care about base rates
By my read, Nate speaks to several hundred people a year about AI, and has had ongoing, in-depth relationships (of the tier he had with Alex) with at least twenty people and possibly as many as a hundred.
Lizardman’s constant is 4%. I’ll totally grant that the rate of people being grumpy about their conversational interactions with Nate exceeds lizardman; I wouldn’t be surprised if it climbs as high as (gasp) 15%.
But idk, “some people don’t like this guy’s conversational style” is not news. Even “some people don’t like this guy’s conversational style enough to be turned away from the entire cause” is not news, if you put it in context along with “btw it’s the same conversational style that has drawn literally thousands of people toward the cause, and meaningfully accelerated dozens-if-not-hundreds, and is currently getting kudos from people like Schneier, Bernanke, and Stephen Fry.”
I have been directly, personally involved in somewhere between ten and a hundred hours of conversation and debrief and model-sharing and practice in which Nate was taking seriously the claim that he could do better, and making real actual progress in closing down some of his failure modes, and—
I dunno. I myself had a reputation for getting into too many fights on Facebook, and finally I was like “okay, fine, fuck it,” and I (measurably, objectively) cut back my Facebook fights by (literally) 95%, and kept it up for multiple years.
Do you think people rewarded me, reputationally, with a 95% improvement in their models of me? No, because people aren’t good at stuff like that.
The concerns about Nate’s conversational style, and the impacts of the way he comports himself, aren’t nonsense. Some people in fact manage to never bruise another person, conversationally, the way Nate has bruised more than one person.
But they’re objectively overblown, and they’re objectively overblown in exactly the way you’d predict if people were more interested in slurping up interpersonal drama than in a) caring about truth, or b) getting shit done.
If you in fact care about tinkering with the Nate-machine, either on behalf of making it more effective at trying to save the world, or just on behalf of niceness and cooperation and people having a good time, I think you’ll find that Nate is 90th-percentile or above willing-and-able to accept critical feedback.
But constructive critical feedback doesn’t come from seeds like this. Strong downvote, with substantial disappointment.
I appreciate you writing this, and think it was helpful. I don’t have a strong take on Nate’s object-level decisions here, why TurnTrout said what he said, etc. But I wanted to flag that the following seems like a huge understatement:
The concerns about Nate’s conversational style, and the impacts of the way he comports himself, aren’t nonsense. Some people in fact manage to never bruise another person, conversationally, the way Nate has bruised more than one person.
But they’re objectively overblown, and they’re objectively overblown in exactly the way you’d predict if people were more interested in slurping up interpersonal drama than in a) caring about truth, or b) getting shit done.
For context, I’ve spoken to Nate for tens of hours. Overall, I’d describe our relationship as positive. And I’m part of the rationalist and AIS communities, and have been for more than 5 years; I spend tens of hours per week talking to people in those communities. There are many nice things I could say about Nate. But I would definitely consider him top-decile rude and, idk, bruising in conversation within those communities; to me, and I think to others, he stands out as notably likely to offend or be damagingly socially oblivious. My sense is that my opinion is fairly widely shared. Nate was one of the participants in the conversation about AI safety that I have ever seen become most hostile and close to violence, though my impression was that the other party was significantly more in the wrong in that case.
I don’t know what the base rates of people being grumpy post interacting with Nate are, and agree it’s a critical question. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rate is far north of 15% for people that aren’t already in the rationalist community who talk to him about AIS for more than an hour or something. I would weakly guess he has a much more polarizing effect on policymakers than other people who regularly talk to policymakers about AIS, and am close to 50-50 on whether his performance is worse overall than the average of that group.
I feel bad posting this. It’s a bit personal, or something. But he’s writing a book, and talking to important people about it, so it matters.
But I would definitely consider him top-decile rude and, idk, bruising in conversation within those communities; to me, and I think to others, he stands out as notably likely to offend or be damagingly socially oblivious.
I’m not going to carry on checking this thread; I mostly just wanted to drop my one top-level response. But in response to this, my main trigger is something like “okay, how could I assess a question like this in contact with how I think about social dark matter and DifferentWorlds™?”
Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: the Gathering, is constantly fielding questions on his blog from players who are like “literally no one is in favor of [extremely popular thing], I’ve been to eight different game shops and five tournaments and talked about it with, no exaggeration, over a hundred people.”
And I can see the mistake those people are making, because I’m outside of the information bubble they’re caught in. It’s trickier to catch the mistake when you’re inside the bubble.
Or, to put it another way: most of the people that like Nate’s conversational style and benefit greatly from it and find it a breath of fresh air aren’t here in the let’s-complain-about-it conversation.
I feel bad posting this. It’s a bit personal, or something. But he’s writing a book, and talking to important people about it, so it matters.
It does matter. And by all accounts, it’s going very well. That’s evidence upon which someone could choose to update (on, e.g., questions like “am I representative of the kind of people Nate’s talking to, who matter with regards to this whole thing going well over the next six months?”).
At the very least, I can confidently say that I know of no active critic-of-Nate’s-style who’s within an order of magnitude of having Nate’s positive impact on getting this problem taken seriously. Like, none of the people who are big mad about this are catching the ears of senators with their supposedly better styles.
I largely agree with your top-level comment here, though I want to provide pushback on this part:
At the very least, I can confidently say that I know of no active critic-of-Nate’s-style who’s within an order of magnitude of having Nate’s positive impact on getting this problem taken seriously. Like, none of the people who are big mad about this are catching the ears of senators with their supposedly better styles.
I have personally learned the hard way to really not let my inside-view models of what will be offputting to people be replaced with this kind of outside view. The obvious example I remember here is SBF, who yes, was extremely successful at political advocacy before it all collapsed, and I did indeed have many people tell me that I should just update that that is how you do politics, and was through that beaten into tolerating some behavior I much rather had never tolerated.
Like, social dynamics are messy, counter-reactions are often delayed, manufactured confidence can work for a surprisingly long time and then suddenly all fall apart in a dramatic counter-reaction.
This isn’t to say that I don’t believe that what MIRI and Nate are doing is working. Indeed, my inside view, which is informed by all of my experiences and beliefs, thinks that the approach Nate and Eliezer are taking is great, and probably the right one. But even on this very issue that is being discussed in Nate’s post, before the Trump administration, I’ve had tons of people approach me and say that I should now finally accept that the inside-game model of politics works given how much enormous success we are seeing with the safety provisions in the AI act, and all the movement at RAND.
And in that case, all I had to say was “well, I am sorry, but my inside view says things will not pay off, and we will see a counter-reaction that will overall draw things into the red”, which I don’t think has necessarily been proven right, but I think looks a lot more plausible to most than it did then. And I don’t want you to set a precedent here that this kind of outside view argument is treated more reliably or trustworthy than it actually is, even if I locally agree with the conclusion.
This is a little off topic, but do you have any examples of counter-reactions overall drawing things into the red?
With other causes like fighting climate change and environmentalism, it’s hard to see any activism being a net negative. Extremely sensationalist (and unscientific) promotions of the cause (e.g. The Day After Tomorrow movie) do not appear to harm it. It only seems to move the Overton window in favour of environmentalism.
It seems, most of the counter-reaction doesn’t depend on your method of messaging, it results from the success of your messaging. The mere shift in opinions in favour of your position, inevitably creates a counter-reaction among those who aren’t yet convinced.
Anti-environmentalists do not seem to use these overly hyped messages (like The Day After Tomorrow) as their strawman. Instead, they directly attack the most reputable climatologists who argue for global warming. No matter how gentle and non-sensationalist these climatologists are, they still get dunked on just as badly. I don’t think it would backfire, if they argued harder and more urgently on their beliefs.
People who support environmentalism, are very capable of ignoring the overzealous messaging on their own side, and have a good laugh at movies like The Day After Tomorrow.
Reverse-psychology effects only seem to occur for moral disagreements, not strategic/scientific disagreements, where people are positively attracted to the Overton window of their opponents.
And even the crappiest campaigns (e.g. militant veganism) have little proven success in “swaying the world to do the opposite via reverse-psychology.” This is despite directly attacking their audience and calling them evil, and making lots of negative actions like blocking traffic and damaging property.I'm not sure
Assuming no counter-reaction, big name book endorsements are solid evidence of success.
Disclaimer: not an expert just a guy on the internet
It appears to me that the present republican administration is largely a counter-reaction to various social justice and left-leaning activism. IMO a very costly one.
I actually didn’t see that glaring example! Very good point.
That said, my feeling is Trump et al. weren’t reacting against any specific woke activism, but very woke policies (and opinions) which resulted from the activism.
Although they reversed very many Democrat policies, I don’t think they reversed them so badly that a stronger Democrat policy will result in a stronger policy in the opposite direction under the Trump administration.[citation needed] I guess The Overton window effect may still be stronger than the reverse-psychology effect.
In a counterfactual world where one of these woke policies/opinions was weaker among Democrats (e.g. the right to abortion), that specific opinion would probably do even worse under Trump (abortion might be banned). Trump’s policies are still positively correlated with public opinion. He mostly held back from banning abortion and cutting medical benefits because he knew these liberal policies were popular. But he aggressively attacked immigration (and foreign aid) because these liberal policies were less popular. Despite appearances, he’s not actually maximizing E(liberal tears).
The one counter-reaction, is that in aggregate, all the woke policies and opinions may have made Trump popular enough to get elected? But I doubt that pausing AI etc. will be so politically significant it’ll determine who wins the election.
PS: I changed my mind on net negatives. Net negative activism may be possible when it makes the cause (e.g. AI Notkilleveryoneism) becomes partisan and snaps into one side of the political aisle? But even Elon Musk supporting it hasn’t caused that to happen?
That said, my feeling is Trump et al. weren’t reacting against any specific woke activism, but very woke policies (and opinions) which resulted from the activism.
I don’t think this is true, and that indeed the counter-reaction is strongly to the woke activism. My sense is a lot of current US politics stuff is very identity focused, the policies on both sides matter surprisingly little (instead a lot of what is going on is something more like personal persecution of the outgroup and trying to find ways to hurt them, and to prop up your own status, which actually ends up with surprisingly similar policies on both ends).
I agree, but I don’t think individual woke activists writing books and sending it to policymakers, can directly increase the perception of “there is too much wokeness,” even if no policymakers listen to them.
They only increase the perception of “there is too much wokeness,” by way of successfully changing opinions and policies.
The perception that “there is too much wokeness” depends on
Actual woke opinions and policies by the government and people
Anti-woke activism which convince conservatives that “the government and leftwingers” are far more woke than they actually are
Not pro-woke activism (in the absence of actual woke opinions and policies)
So the only way activists can be a net negative, is if making policymakers more woke (e.g. more pro-abortion), can causally make future policymakers even less woke than they would be otherwise.
This is possible if it makes people feel “there is too much wokeness” and elect Trump. But for a single subtopic of wokeness e.g. pro-abortion, it’s unlikely to singlehandedly determine whether Trump is elected, and therefore making policymakers more pro-abortion in particular, probably has a positive influence on whether future policymakers are pro-abortion (by moving the Overton window on this specific topic).
This is probably even more true for strategic/scientific disagreements rather than moral disagreements: if clinical trial regulations were stricter during a Democrat administration, they probably will remain stricter during the next Republican administration. It’s very hard to believe that the rational prediction could be “making the regulations stronger will cause the expected future regulations to be weaker.”
You don’t hear about the zillions of policies which Trump did not reverse (or turn upside down). You don’t hear about the zillions of scientific positions held by Democrat decisionmakers which Trump did not question (or invert).
I agree, but I don’t think individual woke activists writing books and sending it to policymakers, can directly increase the perception of “there is too much wokeness,” even if no policymakers listen to them.
Why? This seems completely contrary to how I understand things.
Ibram X. Kendi mostly did not get any of his proposals enacted by any legislature, yet his association with progressivism caused significant backlash among centrist voters who became convinced the left believes any measure of success that doesn’t have perfectly equal results between races is inherently racist.
Tema Okun mostly did not get any of her proposals enacted by any legislature, but her work was pushed by universities and non-profits, became part of the standard curriculum for DEI teachings at many companies throughout the US, and entrenched in the general population the idea that the left thinks “a sense of urgency” is white supremacy and should be eliminated.
“Defund the police” and ACAB chanters in 2020 mostly did not get their proposals enacted by legislatures, but they also created significant backlash among voters who became convinced the left is talking crazy on matters of crime detection and prevention.
Frankly, opposition to wokeness has almost entirely flowed from opposition to cultural instances of wokeness as opposed to specific pieces of legislature.
I guess they succeeded in changing many people’s opinions. The right wing reaction is against left wing people’s opinions. The DEI curriculum is somewhere in between opinions and policies.
I think the main effect of people having farther left opinions, is still making policies further left rather than further right due to counter-reaction. And this is despite the topic being much more moralistic and polarizing than AI x-risk.
That said, my feeling is Trump et al. weren’t reacting against any specific woke activism
I strongly disagree with this. I think the simplest and most illustrative example I can point to is that of pro-Palestinian activists. They almost universally failed to obtain their desired policies (divestments, the expulsion of ‘Zionists’ from left-of-center spheres), but nonetheless their specific activism, such as on college campuses, engendered a tremendous amount of backlash, both in the general election and afterwards (such as through a closer US-Israel relationship, etc). It has also resulted in ongoing heavy-handed[1] actions by the Trump administration to target universities who allowed this, deport foreigners who engaged in it, and crack down on such speech in the public sphere.
In general, I think Trump 2.0 is a reaction to the wokeness of 2017-2022, which is itself a reaction to Trump 1.0, and most of this stuff is symbolic as opposed to substantive in nature.[2] I do think Trump 1.0 is a reaction to genuine policy and cultural changes that have pushed the West in a more progressive direction over the decades,[3] but I believe what happened afterward is qualitatively different in how it came about.
Although they reversed very many Democrat policies, I don’t think they reversed them so badly that a stronger Democrat policy will result in a stronger policy in the opposite direction under the Trump administration.
I also disagree with this, though less strongly than above, mostly because I’m deeply uncertain about what will happen in the near-term future. The reason I don’t agree is that Trump 2.0 has managed and likely will continue to manage to enact fundamental structural changes in the system that will heavily limit what kinds of policies can actually be enacted by Democrats in the future. In particular, I’m referring to the gutting of the bureaucratic-administrative state and the nomination and confirmation of Trump-supporting candidates to the judiciary.
For instance, despite all the talk about prison abolitionism and ACAB in the summer of 2020, close to no jurisdictions actually enacted complete defundings of police departments. But progressive activism in this general direction nevertheless created long-lasting backlash that people still point to even today.
I don’t believe that in a world without pro-Palestinian protests, Trump would be noticeably less pro-Israel.
I think in such a world, even the Democrats would be more comfortable supporting Israel without reservations and caveats.
I think the protests and pressure against the Vietnam war, forced even Republican administrations to give in and end the war. This is despite crackdowns on protests similar to those against pro-Palestinian protests.
I think some of the Supreme Court justices appointed under Trump aren’t that extreme and refused to given in to his pressure.
But even if it’s true that the Trump administration is making these structural changes, it still doesn’t feel intuitive to me that e.g., a stronger anti-abortion policy under Democrats, would cause Trump to get elected, which would cause structural changes, which would cause a weaker anti-abortion policy in the future. The influence is diluted through each of these causes, such that the resulting effect is probably pretty small compared to the straightforward effect “a stronger anti-abortion policy today makes the default anti-abortion policy for the future stronger.”
The world is complex, but unless there is some unusual reason to expect an effort to backfire and have literally the opposite effect in the long run, it’s rational to expect efforts which empirically appear to work, to work. It feels mysterious to expect many things to be “net negatives” based on an inside view.
I agree
I agree certain kinds of actions can fail to obtain desired results, and still have backlash.
If you have “activism” which is violent or physically threatening enough (maybe extremists in pro-Palestinian protests), it does create backlash to the point of being a significant net negative.
Even more consequential, are the violent actions by Hamas in reaction to Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians. This actually does cause even more mistreatment, so much so that most of the mistreatment may be caused by it.
But this is violence we are talking about, not activism. The nonviolent protesters are still a net positive towards their cause.
Edit: I do think this proposal of vilifying AI labs could potentially be a net negative.
I don’t believe that in a world without pro-Palestinian protests, Trump would be noticeably less pro-Israel.
The first Trump administration did not take actions such as:
deporting foreigners who expressed active support for Palestine on social media
cutting off funding from top universities whose student body was deemed too supportive of Palestinian terrorism
assert Harvard engaged in “violent violation” of civil rights law by creating a campus environment Jewish students found unsafe because university leadership did not crack down on campus protests to a sufficient extent
Regardless of whether you think these actions taken by Trump 2.0 are desirable or undesirable, I know Trump 1.0 did not engage in them.
The question is not whether Trump, in his heart of hearts, was more or less pro-Israel in his first term. The point we’re focused on here is whether pro-Palestinian protests created significant backlash from the Trump administration, which it demonstrably did: Trump 2.0 took pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian activism actions that it had never done prior to the protests themselves.
I think some of the Supreme Court justices appointed under Trump aren’t that extreme and refused to given in to his pressure.
I didn’t say Supreme Court justices. The most Trump-following judges that have been appointed and confirmed are mostly at the other levels of the judicial branch, namely federal district and appellate court judges (such as Judge Cannon in the Southern District of Florida and Judge Ho at the 5th Circuit). Since the Supreme Court resolves an ever-shrinking percentage of cases it receives certiorari on, more and more of the legal developments that affect the status quo are being resolved by such judges.[1]
And while I don’t want to turn this into a discussion about SCOTUS itself, when it came to the most important Trump-related matters before it in the past year-and-a-half (namely Trump v. Anderson on Trump’s personal eligibility for the presidency, and Trump v. Casa, Inc. on the viability of national injunctions preventing the Trump administration from enacting its executive orders on stuff like birthright citizenship), the court sided with Trump every time.
There were many points of concern raised earlier this year about what would happen if Trump were to receive a negative response from SCOTUS on a major issue (would he abide by it, or create a constitutional crisis by defying them?). Thus far, this potential problem has been dodged because SCOTUS has not given him any serious thumbs-down on anything major.
But even if it’s true that the Trump administration is making these structural changes, it still doesn’t feel intuitive to me that e.g., a stronger anti-abortion policy under Democrats, would cause Trump to get elected, which would cause structural changes, which would cause a weaker anti-abortion policy in the future. The influence is diluted through each of these causes, such that the resulting effect is probably pretty small compared to the straightforward effect “a stronger anti-abortion policy today makes the default anti-abortion policy for the future stronger.”
This is a strange example to pick, because a careful analysis of it reveals the complete opposite of what you’re claiming.[2]Roe v. Wade created the anti-abortion movement as a genuine national force with strong religious and political backing,[3] whereas it hadn’t existed (outside of tiny, local groups) before. This created a steady supply of single-issue Republican voters for decades, ever-tightening controls and restrictions in Red states, and eventually an overruling of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson resulting in even stricter regimes than what had been prevalent at common law (see: quickening and the academic debate over it).
it’s rational to expect efforts which empirically appear to work
What… empirics are you talking about? I’ve seen no empirical analysis from you on any of these topics.
I don’t have the energy right now to explain the intricacies of the American judicial branch, but I fear the fact you jumped directly to the Supreme Court when a careful observer of it knows the vast majority of relevant developments in law happen in district courts and appellate circuits reflects that I perhaps should
In fact, the decades-long fight over abortion is the quintessential example of how activism and policy changes lead to significant backlash moving forward; I genuinely don’t think I could have possibly picked a better example to illustrate my case
Trump 2.0 being more pro-Israel could be due to him being more extreme in all directions (perhaps due to new staff members, vice president, I don’t know), rather than due to pro-Palestinian protests.
The counter-reaction are against the protesters, not the cause itself. The Vietnam War protests also created a counter-reaction against the protesters, despite successfully ending the war.
I suspect for a lot of these pressure campaigns which work, the target has a tendency to pretend he isn’t backing down due to the campaign (but other reasons), or act like he’s not budging at all until finally giving in. The target doesn’t want people to think that pressure campaigns work on him, the target wants people to think that any pressure him will only get a counter-reaction out of him, in order to discourage others from pressuring him.
You’re probably right about the courts though, I didn’t know that.
I agree that there is more anti-abortion efforts due to Roe v. Wade, but I disagree that these efforts actually overshot to a point where restrictions on abortion are even harsher than they would be if Roe v. Wade never happened. I still think it moved the Overton window such that even conservatives feel abortion is kind of normal, maybe bad, but not literally like killing a baby.
The people angry against affirmative action have a strong feeling that different races should get the same treatment e.g. when applying to university. I don’t think any of them overshot into wanting to bring back segregation or slavery.
Oops, “efforts which empirically appear to work” was referring to how the book, If Anyone Builds, It Everyone Dies attracted many big name endorsements who aren’t known for endorsing AI x-risk concerns until now.
Nate messaged me a thing in chat and I found it helpful and asked if I could copy it over:
fwiw a thing that people seem to me to be consistently missing is the distinction between what i was trying to talk about, namely the advice “have you tried saying what you actually think is the important problem, plainly, even once? ideally without broadcasting signals of how it’s a socially shameful belief to hold?”, and the alternative advice that i was not advocating, namely “have you considered speaking to people in a way that might be described as ‘brazen’ or ‘rude’ depending on who’s doing the describing?”.
for instance, in personal conversation, i’m pretty happy to directly contradict others’ views—and that has nothing to do with this ‘courage’ thing i’m trying to describe. nate!courage is completely compatible with saying “you don’t have to agree with me, mr. senator, but my best understanding of the evidence is [thing i believe]. if ever you’re interested in discussing the reasons in detail, i’d be happy to. and until then, we can work together in areas where our interests overlap.” there are plenty of ways to name your real worry while being especially respectful and polite! nate!courage and politeness are nearly orthogonal axes, on my view.
[people having trouble separating them] does maybe enhance my sense that the whole community is desperately lacking in nate!courage, if so many people have such trouble distinguishing between “try naming your real worry” and “try being brazen/rude”. (tho ofc part of the phenomenon is me being bad at anticipating reader confusions; the illusion of transparency continues to be a doozy.)
FWIW, as someone who’s been working pretty closely with Nate for the past ten years (and as someone whose preferred conversational dynamic is pretty warm-and-squishy), I actively enjoy working with the guy and feel positive about our interactions.
On the other hand, we should expect that the first people to speak out against someone will be the most easily activated (in a neurological sense)- because of past trauma, or additional issues with the focal person, or having a shitty year. Speaking out is partially a function of pain level, and pain(Legitimate grievance + illegitimate grievance) > pain(legitimate grievance). It doesn’t mean there isn’t a legitimate grievance large enough to merit concern.
Can you be more concrete about what “catching the ears of senators” means? That phrase seems like it could refer to a lot of very different things of highly disparate levels of impressiveness.
[acknowledging that you might not reply] Sorry, I don’t think I understand your point about the MtG questions: are you saying you suspect I’m missing the amount (or importance-adjusted amount) of positive responses to Nate? If so, maybe you misunderstood me. I certainly wouldn’t claim it’s rare to have a very positive response to talking to him (I’ve certainly had very positive conversations with him too!); my point was that very negative reactions to talking to him are not rare (in my experience, including among impactful and skilled people doing important work on AIS, according to me), which felt contrary to my read of the vibes of your comment. But again, I agree very positive reactions are also not rare!
Or, to put it another way: most of the people that like Nate’s conversational style and benefit greatly from it and find it a breath of fresh air aren’t here in the let’s-complain-about-it conversation.
I mean, we’re having this conversation on LessWrong. It’s, to put it mildly, doing more than a bit of selection for people who like Nate’s conversational style. Also, complaining about people is stressful and often socially costly, and it would be pretty weird for random policymakers to make it clear to random LW users how their conversation with Nate Soares had gone. How those effect compare to the more-specific selection effect of this being a complaint thread spurred by people who might have axes to grind is quite unclear to me.
At the very least, I can confidently say that I know of no active critic-of-Nate’s-style who’s within an order of magnitude of having Nate’s positive impact on getting this problem taken seriously. Like, none of the people who are big mad about this are catching the ears of senators with their supposedly better styles.
I believe that’s true of you. I know of several historically-active-critic-of-Eliezer’s-style who I think have been much more effective at getting this problem taken seriously in DC than Eliezer post-Sequences, but not of Nate’s or Eliezer’s with respect to this book in particular, but I also just don’t know much about how they’re responding other than the blurbs (which I agree are impressive! But also subject to selection effect!). I’m worried there’s substantial backfire effect playing out, which is nontrivial to catch, which is one of the reasons I’m interested in this thread.
Saying “ah, but when you talk to me in person I find it unpleasant, and so did these five other people” is, as Nate correctly characterized, barely topical. “Underdeployed Strategy X has powerful upsides; here’s evidence of those upsides in a concrete case” is not meaningfully undercut by “your particular version of a thing that might not even be intended as a central example of Strategy X has sometimes had negative side effects.”
It is indeed more related than a randomly selected post would be. The relevant part is not because of the subject matter (as you solely talk about during this comment thread), but because of the nature of the evidence it uses to make its case.
The vast majority[1] of the original post, along with subsequent comments, uses Nate Soares’s personal experience meeting with congressional staffers, elected officials, cold-emailing famous and notorious people to get endorsements for his book, etc, as evidence of how his strategy works out in practice/can succeed for his purposes.
If the post was along the lines of “I, Nate Soares, talked to this expert on PR and this is what he recommended for how AI Safety should handle public communication” or “I, Nate Soares, analyzed these papers and came to this conclusion” or “I, Nate Soares, believe for technical alignment reasons that [X is true]”, then talking about his supposed personal abrasiveness or how he turned off other people would be off-topic and arguably ad hominem.
But if the post is mostly Nate Soares describing his own conversations where he employed this strategy, suppressing descriptions of other conversations of his where he employed these strategies but his interlocutors were turned off/thought he was manipulative/thought he was so abrasive they got scared of him/etc. is entirely inappropriate. He himself has opened the door to this topic by bringing it up in the first place! Allowing the same body of evidence to be used, but only when arguing for one side, is incompatible with principles of truth-seeking.
I (measurably, objectively) cut back my Facebook fights by (literally) 95%, and kept it up for multiple years. Do you think people rewarded me, reputationally, with a 95% improvement in their models of me? No, because people aren’t good at stuff like that.
I suspect there are a ton of new people who would have gotten in fights with you in a counterfactual universe where you hadn’t made that change, but who haven’t done so in this one. The change isn’t from “they think of Duncan negatively” to “they think of Duncan positively,” but more so from “they think of Duncan negatively” to “they think of Duncan neutrally” or even “they don’t think of Duncan at all.”
As for the ones who have already engaged in fights with you and continued to dislike you[1]… well, why would they change their opinions of you? You had an established reputation at that point; part of the role reputation plays in human social interactions is to ensure social punishment for perceived transgressions of norms, regardless of when the purported transgressor starts signaling he is changing his behavior. For all people may wax poetically about accepting change and giving people second chances, in practice that doesn’t really happen, in a way I think is quite justifiable from their POV.
The concerns about Nate’s conversational style, and the impacts of the way he comports himself, aren’t nonsense. Some people in fact manage to never bruise another person, conversationally, the way Nate has bruised more than one person.
Fallacious black and white thinking, here.[2] Some people manage to never bruise anyone like Nate did, but a heck of a lot more people manage to bruise far fewer people than Nate. If you’ve never hurt anyone, you’re probably too conservative in your speech. If you’ve hurt and turned off too many people, you’re almost certainly insufficiently conservative in your speech.
objectively overblown
Not sure what the word “objectively” is meant to accomplish here, more than just signaling “I really really think this is true” and trying to wrap it in a veneer of impartiality to pack a bigger rhetorical punch. Discussions about human social interactions and the proper use of norms are very rarely resolvable in entirely objective ways, and moreover in this case, for reasons given throughout the years on this site, I think your conclusion (about them being “overblown”) is more likely than not wrong, at least as I understand proper norms of interpersonal interaction in such environments.
I think you’ll find that Nate is 90th-percentile or above willing-and-able to accept critical feedback.
Might or might not be true.[3] But as I see it, since reality doesn’t grade on a curve, even 90th-percentile-for-humans in terms of accepting criticism is grossly insufficient for actually accepting criticism that you believe distracts from your main points or flows from perspectives you don’t inherently care about.
“You’re trying to argue for X, but your claim is factually false for reason Y” is something a 90th-percentile receiver of feedback can grapple with seriously and incorporate into their thinking process easily, if they fundamentally care about truth-seeking as an end goal in addition to X.
“You’re trying to argue for X, but you should stop for reason Z, which I know you don’t inherently care about but trust me that if we run down a list of all your flaws, you’ll see past the motivated cognition and confirmation bias and realize this is distracting from X” is significantly more difficult for such a person to seriously engage with.[4]
Or, more likely, overblown rhetoric distracting from the critical point of discussion (edit: I first mistakenly wrote this as fallacy of gray, which is the complete opposite of what I meant)
And “seriously” does not mean “performatively”; it’s a substantive descriptor, not a procedural one. There is no ritual of public discourse one can perform, where one uses fancy LW jargon and the vocabulary of “updating” in the face of evidence and an even-keeled tone of voice, that can substitute for the act of actually updating according to impartial rules of evidence and reasoning.
A couple of ways this comment feels like it’s talking past Duncan:
As for the ones who have already engaged in fights with you and continued to dislike you[1]… well, why would they change their opinions of you? You had an established reputation at that point; part of the role reputation plays in human social interactions is to ensure social punishment for perceived transgressions of norms, regardless of when the purported transgressor starts signaling he is changing his behavior. For all people may wax poetically about accepting change and giving people second chances, in practice that doesn’t really happen, in a way I think is quite justifiable from their POV.
Feels like Duncan said “X didn’t happen, because people aren’t good at it” and you’re saying “indeed, people aren’t good at X, what did you expect?”
Like, do you claim that “reputation fails to update in the face of actual changes in behavior (not just someone announcing their intent to change)” is a good thing?
Fallacious black and white thinking, here.
Feels like you think Duncan thinks the options are “Nate’s amount of bruising” and “no bruising”. I don’t know why you’d think Duncan thinks that.
Like, do you claim that “reputation fails to update in the face of actual changes in behavior (not just someone announcing their intent to change)” is a good thing?
I’m saying “subconsciously pre-committing to ignoring claims/purported evidence of changed behavior, because usually they’re wrong and it’s not worth the cost of litigating individual cases” is often times the correct thing to do.
Feels like you think Duncan thinks the options are “Nate’s amount of bruising” and “no bruising”. I don’t know why you’d think Duncan thinks that.
No, I don’t believe Duncan thinks this (it’s a pretty dumb thing to believe, and Duncan is smart). I believe Duncan was intentionally using rhetorically dishonest language to distract from the possibility of “reducing” bruising by talking only about “never” bruising another person.
I think this behavior of Nate’s is dumb and annoying and I appreciate you calling it out.
FWIW I very much doubt this is Nate executing a careful strategy to suppress negative information about him (his action was probably counterproductive from that perspective), I think he just has standards according to which it’s fine for him to do this when he thinks people are being dumb and annoying, and he thinks your comment is off-topic because he considers it irrelevant to the main thrust of his post.
After talking to someone about this a little, I’m a bit more sympathetic to Soares’s actions here; I think they were probably a mistake for pragmatic reasons, but I’m also sympathetic to arguments that LessWrong is better off if it’s a space where people enforce whatever commenting policies they like, and I don’t want to be part of social punishment if I don’t endorse the social punishment. So I partially retract the first part of my comment. Idk, I might think more about this.
Does it matter if it’s a conscious strategy? His internal experience might be “this is dumb and annoying”, but unless that’s uncorrelated with how a post reflects on him, the effect is going to be distorting the information people present about him in his posts.
I think it would be bad for every single post that Nate publishes on maybe-sorta-related subjects to turn into a platform for relitigating his past behavior[1]. This would predictably eat dozens of hours of time across a bunch of people. If you think Nate’s advice is bad, maybe because you think that people following it risk behaving more like Nate (in the negative ways that you experienced), then I think you should make an argument to that effect directly, which seems more likely to accomplish (what I think is) your goal.
I would share your concern if TurnTrout or others were replying to everything Nate published in this way. But well… the original comment seemed reasonably relevant to the topic of the post and TurnTrout’s reply seemed relevant to the comment. So it seems like there’s likely a limiting principle here that would prevent your concern from being realized.
I think it would be bad for every single post that Nate publishes on maybe-sorta-related subjects to turn into a platform for relitigating his past behavior
I totally agree, but I think that the topic of the post was pretty related to the things people have complained about before, so it’s more on topic than it would be on a random Nate post (e.g. it seems more relevant on that post than on most of Nate’s blog posts).
I agree it’s more related than a randomly selected Nate post would be, but the comment itself did not seem particularly aimed at arguing that Nate’s advice was bad or that following it would have undesirable consequences[1]. (I think the comments it was responding to were pretty borderline here.)
I think I am comfortable arguing that it would be bad if every post that Nate made on subjects like “how to communicate with people about AI x-risk” included people leaving comments with argument-free pointers to past Nate-drama.
The most recent post by Nate seemed good to me; I think its advice was more-than-sufficiently hedged and do not think that people moving in that direction on the margin would be bad for the world. If people think otherwise they should say so, and if they want to use Nate’s interpersonal foibles as evidence that the advice is bad that’s fine, though (obviously) I don’t expect I’d find such arguments very convincing.
I agree it’s more related than a randomly selected Nate post would be
It is indeed more related than a randomly selected post would be. The relevant part is not because of the subject matter (as you solely talk about during this comment thread), but because of the nature of the evidence it uses to make its case.
The vast majority[1] of the original post, along with subsequent comments, uses Nate Soares’s personal experience meeting with congressional staffers, elected officials, cold-emailing famous and notorious people to get endorsements for his book, etc, as evidence of how his strategy works out in practice/can succeed for his purposes.
If the post was along the lines of “I, Nate Soares, talked to this expert on PR and this is what he recommended for how AI Safety should handle public communication” or “I, Nate Soares, analyzed these papers and came to this conclusion” or “I, Nate Soares, believe for technical alignment reasons that [X is true]”, then talking about his supposed personal abrasiveness or how he turned off other people would be off-topic and arguably ad hominem.
But if the post is mostly Nate Soares describing his own conversations where he employed this strategy, suppressing descriptions of other conversations of his where he employed these strategies but his interlocutors were turned off/thought he was manipulative/thought he was so abrasive they got scared of him/etc. is entirely inappropriate. He himself has opened the door to this topic by bringing it up in the first place! Allowing the same body of evidence to be used, but only when arguing for one side, is incompatible with principles of truth-seeking.
If people think otherwise they should say so
LessWrong seems to hold local validity in arguing as a core principle, or so I think. The process by which you argue for a conclusion is worth discussing, not just the conclusion itself.
He himself has opened the door to this topic by bringing it up in the first place!
I don’t think just because you use a personal example in order to communicate (and possible defend) the core thesis of a post, that this hereby opens you up to have all vaguely-relevant personal information about you discussed and dissected in the comment section.
If someone writes “I’ve found this kind of software development timeline forecasting strategy to work well” then that absolutely isn’t a complete blanket invitation for everyone to air all work-related problems they ever had with you on that post, or even all work-related problems they had with your software development project planning.
To be clear, that kind of information can be quite important to share for other reasons (and I have many times in the past written up my concerns with various community leaders both on LW and the EA Forum), but in as much as someone is trying to argue for any kind of generalized principles on a specific post, I think it’s definitely within the bounds of moderatable action if someone brings up a bunch of personal information in an aggressive way.
I do think that kind of stuff is often appropriate for other places on the site.
And to be clear, I think someone can succeed at raising the relevant points in a way that doesn’t predictably derail the whole discussion, and also signals appropriate respect for people’s public/private boundaries, but one should model this as a quite dicey operation that is reasonably likely to fail, and if someone wants to do this, I would expect attempts at cooperating and not letting the discussion fall into one of the standard internet demon thread attractors. If someone doesn’t have that skill, I think they shouldn’t attempt it (and just post the information somewhere else).
If someone writes “I’ve found this kind of software development timeline forecasting strategy to work well” then that absolutely isn’t a complete blanket invitation for everyone to air all work-related problems they ever had with you on that post, or even all work-related problems they had with your software development project planning.
It does seem to me like an invitation[1] to say “Actually, I’ve spoken with a few of this guy’s previous managers and all three of them say he used the same strat on his projects at their firms, but his predictions were way off.”
But that’s not quite the crux of the matter; what’s critical (for you, at least) is the capacity to derail convos into off-topic Demon Threads, if there is too much aggression or not enough respect or too many boundaries broken.[2]
That’s not quite so critical for me, but I’m not a mod, and I have written enough about this already, and for that reason I shall stop it here.
I think it was fine for Nate to delete your comment and block you, and fine for you to repost it as a short form.
But my anecdote is a valid report of the historical consequences of talking with Nate – just as valid as the e/acc co-founder’s tweet.
“just as valid” [where validity here = topical] seems like an overclaim here. And at the time of your comment, Nate had already commented in other threads, which are now linked in a footnote in the OP:
By “cowardice” here I mean the content, not the tone or demeanor. I acknowledge that perceived arrogance and overconfidence can annoy people in communication, and can cause backlash. For more on what I mean by courageous vs cowardly content, see this comment. I also spell out the argument more explicitly in this thread.
So it’s a bit of a stretch to say that any AI safety-related discussion or interpersonal interaction that Nate has ever had in any context is automatically topical.
I also think your description of Nate’s decision to delete your comment as “not … allowing people to read negative truths about his own behavior” is somewhat overwrought. Both of the comment threads you linked were widely read and discussed at the time, and this shortform will probably also get lots of eyeballs and attention.
At the very least, there is an alternate interpretation, which is that the comment really was off-topic in Nate’s view, and given the history between the two of you, he chose to block + delete instead of re-litigating or engaging in a back-and-forth that both of you would probably find unpleasant and unproductive. Maybe it would have been more noble or more wise of him to simply let your comment stand without direct engagement, but that can also feel unpleasant (for Nate or others).
I think it’s important information for people considering engaging with or taking communication advice from Nate to know that there has been a long history of people having a range of difficult to unpleasant to harmful experiences engaging with him. My knowledge of this is mostly from my former role as research manager at MIRI and the cases I heard about were all in a professional setting.
The e/acc person’s description is similar to descriptions I heard from these other cases.
Personal note—given lesswrong is specifically about speaking all truths including the uncomfortable, I find it disappointing to see comment deletion happen in a situation like this.
If I’m being honest, I’m much less concerned about the fact that So8res blocked you from commenting than I am by the fact that he deleted your comment.
The block was a reasonable action in my eyes to prevent more drama, but the deletion was demonstrative of being willing to suppress true information that would indicate his plan could fail catastrophically.
I do think there’s something to be said for @RobertM and @habryka’s concerns that it would be a bad thing to set a norm where any sorta-relevant post becomes an area to relitigate past drama, as drama has a tendency to consume everything, but as @GeneSmith had said, this almost certainly has a limiting principle, and I see less of a danger than usual here (though I am partial to @habryka’s solution of having the delete comment UI button be different).
A key part of the reason here is that the 1st footnote demonstrates a pattern of trying to deflect from more serious issues into more safe issue territory, which makes me much more suspicious that the reason for why TurnTrout’s comment was deleted was because of the more sensible reasons that Habryka and RobertM argued.
Let’s just say I’m much less willing to trust Nate’s reasoning without independent confirmation going forward.
The block was a reasonable action in my eyes to prevent more drama
Note that the block is not post-specific, but user-specific. Turntrout was banned from all So8res posts, not just this one comment thread with “drama.”
If you’re concerned about deleting negative comments, you should see blocking the people making them as effectively deleting their comments from every future post.
In a thread which claimed that Nate Soares radicalized a co-founder of e-acc, Nate deleted my comment – presumably to hide negative information and anecdotes about how he treats people. He also blocked me from commenting on his posts.
The information which Nate suppressed
The post concerned (among other topics) how to effectively communicate about AI safety, and positive anecdotes about Nate’s recent approach. (Additionally, he mentions “I’m regularly told that I’m just an idealistic rationalist who’s enamored by the virtue of truth”—a love which apparently does not extend to allowing people to read negative truths about his own behavior.)
Here are the parents of the comment which Nate deleted:
My deleted comment (proof) responded to Mo’s record of the tweet:
Why did Nate delete negative information about himself?
Nate gave the reasoning “Discussion of how some people react poorly to perceived overconfidence[1] is just barely topical. Discussion of individual conduct isn’t.”. But my anecdote is a valid report of the historical consequences of talking with Nate – just as valid as the e/acc co-founder’s tweet. Several other commenters had already supported the e/acc tweet information as quite relevant to the thread.
Therefore, I conclude that Nate deleted the true information I shared because it made him look bad.
EDIT: Nate also blocked me from commenting on his posts:
See how Nate frames the issue as “reacting poorly to perceived overconfidence”, which is not how the e/acc co-founder described her experience. She called it “psychological manipulation” but did not say she thought Nate being overconfident was an issue. Nate deflects from serious charges (“psychological manipulation”) to a charge which would be more convenient for him (“overconfidence”).
I think there is a decent chance I would have asked people to move the discussion somewhere else as well (as a post author not as a LW moderator), not with any particular interest of hiding information, but because I have models about what kind of conversation tends to go well or badly online.
It’s obvious to me that the relevant discussion would have probably derailed and consumed the whole rest of the conversation, not in particularly productive ways, even if it had important true things in it. The post is not centrally about Nate, but about generalized strategies, and interpersonal drama tends to consume all.
I really really want authors on LW to feel more comfortable not less comfortable moving comments off of their post to somewhere else on the site.
This actually made me think the right UI for authors might be that instead of having a “delete from post” button, we have a “move to open thread” button, which leaves a small note behind indicating that a comment thread has been moved to the open thread, and then discussion can continue there. I’ll think about it for a while.
(Relatedly, I have vastly overspent my “how much I have time to discuss LW moderation things” in the past 2 weeks, so I probably won’t participate much in the discussion in as much as anyone wants to respond, and also, I have learned that generalized moderation discussions are best had not in the middle of a fight between people who have very strong feelings)
I strongly endorse this.
Data Secrets Lox makes very heavy use of the “move post”/“split topic”/“merge topics” functionality of the forum software we use, and it works spectacularly well. It almost completely defuses or prevents a huge swath of arguments, disagreements, annoyances, etc. about what’s appropriate to post when and where, etc.
Thanks to this capability, DSL is able to maintain a policy of “never delete content” (except for obvious spam, or content that is outright illegal), while still ensuring that discussions don’t get clogged up with totally off-topic digressions.
Moving/splitting/merging instead of deletion makes a forum much more pleasant to use.
This post seems to me like very strong evidence that Nate was absolutely correct to block Alex.
For context, I have a deep and abiding fondness for both Alex and Nate, and have spent the last several years off to the side sort of aghast and dismayed at the deterioration in their relationship. I’ve felt helpless to bridge the gap, and have mostly ended up saying very little to either party about it.
But the above feels to me like a particularly grotesque combination of [petty] and [disingenuous], and it’s unfortunately in-line with my sense that Alex has been something-like hounding Nate for a while. Actively nursing a grudge, taking every cheap opportunity to grind an axe, deliberately targeting “trash Nate’s reputation via maximally uncharitable summaries and characterizations” rather than something like “cause people to accurately understand the history of our disagreement so they can form their own judgments,” locating all of the grievance entirely within Nate and taking no responsibility for his own contributions to the dynamic/the results of his consensual interactions and choices, etc. etc. etc. I’ve genuinely been trying to cling to neutrality in this feud between two people I respect, but at this point it’s no longer possible.
(I’ll note that my own sense, looking in from the outside, is that something like a full year of friendly-interactions-with-Nate passed between the conversations Alex represents as having been so awful, and the start of Alex’s public vendetta, which was more closely coincident with some romantic drama. If I had lower epistemic standards, I might find it easy to write a sentence like “Therefore, I conclude that Alex’s true grievance is about a girl, and he is only pretending that it’s about their AI conversations because that’s a more-likely-to-garner-sympathy pretext.” I actually don’t conclude that, because concluding that would be irresponsible and insufficiently justified; it’s merely my foremost hypothesis among several.)
A small handful of threads in response to the above:
Stuck in the monkey frame
I was once idly complaining about being baffled by people’s reactions to some of my own posts and comments, and my spouse replied: “maybe it’s because people think you’re trying to upset people, when in fact you’re doing something-other-than-not-trying-to-upset-people, and few people are capable of imagining motives other than ‘try to cause other people to feel a certain way.’”
...which sure does feel like it fits the above. “If someone who was just a monkey-obsessed monkey did this, it would have been in order to have such-and-such impact on the other monkeys; therefore that’s definitely what happened.”
In fact (as the above post conspicuously elides), Nate left those comment threads up for a while, and explicitly flagged his intent to delete them, and gave people a window to change his mind or take their screenshots or whatever, which is not at all consistent with the hypothesis “trying to hide stuff that makes him look bad.”
Nate’s post was making a general point—don’t preemptively hamstring your message because you’re worried they won’t accept your true belief. He presented evidence of this strategy working surprisingly well in the format of the book that he and Eliezer have written, which is intentionally not-cringing.
Saying “ah, but when you talk to me in person I find it unpleasant, and so did these five other people” is, as Nate correctly characterized, barely topical. “Underdeployed Strategy X has powerful upsides; here’s evidence of those upsides in a concrete case” is not meaningfully undercut by “your particular version of a thing that might not even be intended as a central example of Strategy X has sometimes had negative side effects.”
In other words, on my understanding, Nate didn’t delete the comment thread “because it made him look bad,” he deleted it because it wasn’t the conversation he was there to have, and as more and more depressingly monkeydrama comments piled up, it became a meaningful distraction away from that conversation.
(LessWrong does this all the time, which is a huge part of why I find it counterproductive to try to have thoughts, here; the crowd does not have wisdom or virtue and upvotes frequently fail to track the product of [true] and [useful].)
Depressingly in line with expectation
I myself have long had a policy of blocking people who display a sufficiently high product of [overconfident] and [uncharitable]. Like, the sort of person who immediately concludes that X is downstream of some specific shittiness, and considers no other hypotheses, and evinces no interest in evidence or argument (despite nominal protestations to the contrary).
Once in a while, a bunch of the people I’ve blocked will all get together to talk shit about me, and sometimes people will send me screenshots, and guess what sorts of things they have to say?
Separate entirely from questions of cause or blame, (my understanding of) Nate’s experience of Alex has been “this guy will come at me, uncharitably, without justification, and will disingenuously misrepresent me, and will twist my words, and will try to cast my actions in the most negative possible light, and will tenaciously derail conversations away from their subject matter and towards useless drama.” (My shoulder model of) Nate, not wanting that, blocked Alex, and lo—this post appears, conspicuously failing to falsify the model.
(Parentheticals because I do not in fact have firsthand knowledge of Nate’s thinking here.)
I am sad about it, but by this point I am not surprised. When you block someone for being vindictive and petty, they predictably frame that self-protective action in vindictive, petty ways. Some people are caught in a dark world.
We used to care about base rates
By my read, Nate speaks to several hundred people a year about AI, and has had ongoing, in-depth relationships (of the tier he had with Alex) with at least twenty people and possibly as many as a hundred.
Lizardman’s constant is 4%. I’ll totally grant that the rate of people being grumpy about their conversational interactions with Nate exceeds lizardman; I wouldn’t be surprised if it climbs as high as (gasp) 15%.
But idk, “some people don’t like this guy’s conversational style” is not news. Even “some people don’t like this guy’s conversational style enough to be turned away from the entire cause” is not news, if you put it in context along with “btw it’s the same conversational style that has drawn literally thousands of people toward the cause, and meaningfully accelerated dozens-if-not-hundreds, and is currently getting kudos from people like Schneier, Bernanke, and Stephen Fry.”
I have been directly, personally involved in somewhere between ten and a hundred hours of conversation and debrief and model-sharing and practice in which Nate was taking seriously the claim that he could do better, and making real actual progress in closing down some of his failure modes, and—
I dunno. I myself had a reputation for getting into too many fights on Facebook, and finally I was like “okay, fine, fuck it,” and I (measurably, objectively) cut back my Facebook fights by (literally) 95%, and kept it up for multiple years.
Do you think people rewarded me, reputationally, with a 95% improvement in their models of me? No, because people aren’t good at stuff like that.
The concerns about Nate’s conversational style, and the impacts of the way he comports himself, aren’t nonsense. Some people in fact manage to never bruise another person, conversationally, the way Nate has bruised more than one person.
But they’re objectively overblown, and they’re objectively overblown in exactly the way you’d predict if people were more interested in slurping up interpersonal drama than in a) caring about truth, or b) getting shit done.
If you in fact care about tinkering with the Nate-machine, either on behalf of making it more effective at trying to save the world, or just on behalf of niceness and cooperation and people having a good time, I think you’ll find that Nate is 90th-percentile or above willing-and-able to accept critical feedback.
But constructive critical feedback doesn’t come from seeds like this. Strong downvote, with substantial disappointment.
I appreciate you writing this, and think it was helpful. I don’t have a strong take on Nate’s object-level decisions here, why TurnTrout said what he said, etc. But I wanted to flag that the following seems like a huge understatement:
For context, I’ve spoken to Nate for tens of hours. Overall, I’d describe our relationship as positive. And I’m part of the rationalist and AIS communities, and have been for more than 5 years; I spend tens of hours per week talking to people in those communities. There are many nice things I could say about Nate. But I would definitely consider him top-decile rude and, idk, bruising in conversation within those communities; to me, and I think to others, he stands out as notably likely to offend or be damagingly socially oblivious. My sense is that my opinion is fairly widely shared. Nate was one of the participants in the conversation about AI safety that I have ever seen become most hostile and close to violence, though my impression was that the other party was significantly more in the wrong in that case.
I don’t know what the base rates of people being grumpy post interacting with Nate are, and agree it’s a critical question. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rate is far north of 15% for people that aren’t already in the rationalist community who talk to him about AIS for more than an hour or something. I would weakly guess he has a much more polarizing effect on policymakers than other people who regularly talk to policymakers about AIS, and am close to 50-50 on whether his performance is worse overall than the average of that group.
I feel bad posting this. It’s a bit personal, or something. But he’s writing a book, and talking to important people about it, so it matters.
I’m not going to carry on checking this thread; I mostly just wanted to drop my one top-level response. But in response to this, my main trigger is something like “okay, how could I assess a question like this in contact with how I think about social dark matter and DifferentWorlds™?”
Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: the Gathering, is constantly fielding questions on his blog from players who are like “literally no one is in favor of [extremely popular thing], I’ve been to eight different game shops and five tournaments and talked about it with, no exaggeration, over a hundred people.”
And I can see the mistake those people are making, because I’m outside of the information bubble they’re caught in. It’s trickier to catch the mistake when you’re inside the bubble.
Or, to put it another way: most of the people that like Nate’s conversational style and benefit greatly from it and find it a breath of fresh air aren’t here in the let’s-complain-about-it conversation.
It does matter. And by all accounts, it’s going very well. That’s evidence upon which someone could choose to update (on, e.g., questions like “am I representative of the kind of people Nate’s talking to, who matter with regards to this whole thing going well over the next six months?”).
At the very least, I can confidently say that I know of no active critic-of-Nate’s-style who’s within an order of magnitude of having Nate’s positive impact on getting this problem taken seriously. Like, none of the people who are big mad about this are catching the ears of senators with their supposedly better styles.
I largely agree with your top-level comment here, though I want to provide pushback on this part:
I have personally learned the hard way to really not let my inside-view models of what will be offputting to people be replaced with this kind of outside view. The obvious example I remember here is SBF, who yes, was extremely successful at political advocacy before it all collapsed, and I did indeed have many people tell me that I should just update that that is how you do politics, and was through that beaten into tolerating some behavior I much rather had never tolerated.
Like, social dynamics are messy, counter-reactions are often delayed, manufactured confidence can work for a surprisingly long time and then suddenly all fall apart in a dramatic counter-reaction.
This isn’t to say that I don’t believe that what MIRI and Nate are doing is working. Indeed, my inside view, which is informed by all of my experiences and beliefs, thinks that the approach Nate and Eliezer are taking is great, and probably the right one. But even on this very issue that is being discussed in Nate’s post, before the Trump administration, I’ve had tons of people approach me and say that I should now finally accept that the inside-game model of politics works given how much enormous success we are seeing with the safety provisions in the AI act, and all the movement at RAND.
And in that case, all I had to say was “well, I am sorry, but my inside view says things will not pay off, and we will see a counter-reaction that will overall draw things into the red”, which I don’t think has necessarily been proven right, but I think looks a lot more plausible to most than it did then. And I don’t want you to set a precedent here that this kind of outside view argument is treated more reliably or trustworthy than it actually is, even if I locally agree with the conclusion.
This is a little off topic, but do you have any examples of counter-reactions overall drawing things into the red?
With other causes like fighting climate change and environmentalism, it’s hard to see any activism being a net negative. Extremely sensationalist (and unscientific) promotions of the cause (e.g. The Day After Tomorrow movie) do not appear to harm it. It only seems to move the Overton window in favour of environmentalism.
It seems, most of the counter-reaction doesn’t depend on your method of messaging, it results from the success of your messaging. The mere shift in opinions in favour of your position, inevitably creates a counter-reaction among those who aren’t yet convinced.
Anti-environmentalists do not seem to use these overly hyped messages (like The Day After Tomorrow) as their strawman. Instead, they directly attack the most reputable climatologists who argue for global warming. No matter how gentle and non-sensationalist these climatologists are, they still get dunked on just as badly. I don’t think it would backfire, if they argued harder and more urgently on their beliefs.
People who support environmentalism, are very capable of ignoring the overzealous messaging on their own side, and have a good laugh at movies like The Day After Tomorrow.
Reverse-psychology effects only seem to occur for moral disagreements, not strategic/scientific disagreements, where people are positively attracted to the Overton window of their opponents.
And even the crappiest campaigns (e.g. militant veganism) have little proven success in “swaying the world to do the opposite via reverse-psychology.” This is despite directly attacking their audience and calling them evil, and making lots of negative actions like blocking traffic and damaging property.I'm not sure
Assuming no counter-reaction, big name book endorsements are solid evidence of success.
Disclaimer: not an expert just a guy on the internet
It appears to me that the present republican administration is largely a counter-reaction to various social justice and left-leaning activism. IMO a very costly one.
I actually didn’t see that glaring example! Very good point.
That said, my feeling is Trump et al. weren’t reacting against any specific woke activism, but very woke policies (and opinions) which resulted from the activism.
Although they reversed very many Democrat policies, I don’t think they reversed them so badly that a stronger Democrat policy will result in a stronger policy in the opposite direction under the Trump administration.[citation needed] I guess The Overton window effect may still be stronger than the reverse-psychology effect.
In a counterfactual world where one of these woke policies/opinions was weaker among Democrats (e.g. the right to abortion), that specific opinion would probably do even worse under Trump (abortion might be banned). Trump’s policies are still positively correlated with public opinion. He mostly held back from banning abortion and cutting medical benefits because he knew these liberal policies were popular. But he aggressively attacked immigration (and foreign aid) because these liberal policies were less popular. Despite appearances, he’s not actually maximizing E(liberal tears).
The one counter-reaction, is that in aggregate, all the woke policies and opinions may have made Trump popular enough to get elected? But I doubt that pausing AI etc. will be so politically significant it’ll determine who wins the election.
PS: I changed my mind on net negatives. Net negative activism may be possible when it makes the cause (e.g. AI Notkilleveryoneism) becomes partisan and snaps into one side of the political aisle? But even Elon Musk supporting it hasn’t caused that to happen?
I don’t think this is true, and that indeed the counter-reaction is strongly to the woke activism. My sense is a lot of current US politics stuff is very identity focused, the policies on both sides matter surprisingly little (instead a lot of what is going on is something more like personal persecution of the outgroup and trying to find ways to hurt them, and to prop up your own status, which actually ends up with surprisingly similar policies on both ends).
I agree, but I don’t think individual woke activists writing books and sending it to policymakers, can directly increase the perception of “there is too much wokeness,” even if no policymakers listen to them.
They only increase the perception of “there is too much wokeness,” by way of successfully changing opinions and policies.
The perception that “there is too much wokeness” depends on
Actual woke opinions and policies by the government and people
Anti-woke activism which convince conservatives that “the government and leftwingers” are far more woke than they actually are
Not pro-woke activism (in the absence of actual woke opinions and policies)
So the only way activists can be a net negative, is if making policymakers more woke (e.g. more pro-abortion), can causally make future policymakers even less woke than they would be otherwise.
This is possible if it makes people feel “there is too much wokeness” and elect Trump. But for a single subtopic of wokeness e.g. pro-abortion, it’s unlikely to singlehandedly determine whether Trump is elected, and therefore making policymakers more pro-abortion in particular, probably has a positive influence on whether future policymakers are pro-abortion (by moving the Overton window on this specific topic).
This is probably even more true for strategic/scientific disagreements rather than moral disagreements: if clinical trial regulations were stricter during a Democrat administration, they probably will remain stricter during the next Republican administration. It’s very hard to believe that the rational prediction could be “making the regulations stronger will cause the expected future regulations to be weaker.”
You don’t hear about the zillions of policies which Trump did not reverse (or turn upside down). You don’t hear about the zillions of scientific positions held by Democrat decisionmakers which Trump did not question (or invert).
Why? This seems completely contrary to how I understand things.
Ibram X. Kendi mostly did not get any of his proposals enacted by any legislature, yet his association with progressivism caused significant backlash among centrist voters who became convinced the left believes any measure of success that doesn’t have perfectly equal results between races is inherently racist.
Tema Okun mostly did not get any of her proposals enacted by any legislature, but her work was pushed by universities and non-profits, became part of the standard curriculum for DEI teachings at many companies throughout the US, and entrenched in the general population the idea that the left thinks “a sense of urgency” is white supremacy and should be eliminated.
“Defund the police” and ACAB chanters in 2020 mostly did not get their proposals enacted by legislatures, but they also created significant backlash among voters who became convinced the left is talking crazy on matters of crime detection and prevention.
Frankly, opposition to wokeness has almost entirely flowed from opposition to cultural instances of wokeness as opposed to specific pieces of legislature.
I guess they succeeded in changing many people’s opinions. The right wing reaction is against left wing people’s opinions. The DEI curriculum is somewhere in between opinions and policies.
I think the main effect of people having farther left opinions, is still making policies further left rather than further right due to counter-reaction. And this is despite the topic being much more moralistic and polarizing than AI x-risk.
I strongly disagree with this. I think the simplest and most illustrative example I can point to is that of pro-Palestinian activists. They almost universally failed to obtain their desired policies (divestments, the expulsion of ‘Zionists’ from left-of-center spheres), but nonetheless their specific activism, such as on college campuses, engendered a tremendous amount of backlash, both in the general election and afterwards (such as through a closer US-Israel relationship, etc). It has also resulted in ongoing heavy-handed[1] actions by the Trump administration to target universities who allowed this, deport foreigners who engaged in it, and crack down on such speech in the public sphere.
In general, I think Trump 2.0 is a reaction to the wokeness of 2017-2022, which is itself a reaction to Trump 1.0, and most of this stuff is symbolic as opposed to substantive in nature.[2] I do think Trump 1.0 is a reaction to genuine policy and cultural changes that have pushed the West in a more progressive direction over the decades,[3] but I believe what happened afterward is qualitatively different in how it came about.
I also disagree with this, though less strongly than above, mostly because I’m deeply uncertain about what will happen in the near-term future. The reason I don’t agree is that Trump 2.0 has managed and likely will continue to manage to enact fundamental structural changes in the system that will heavily limit what kinds of policies can actually be enacted by Democrats in the future. In particular, I’m referring to the gutting of the bureaucratic-administrative state and the nomination and confirmation of Trump-supporting candidates to the judiciary.
To put it mildly and euphemistically.
For instance, despite all the talk about prison abolitionism and ACAB in the summer of 2020, close to no jurisdictions actually enacted complete defundings of police departments. But progressive activism in this general direction nevertheless created long-lasting backlash that people still point to even today.
In addition to a heaping dose of symbolic stuff.
I don’t believe that in a world without pro-Palestinian protests, Trump would be noticeably less pro-Israel.
I think in such a world, even the Democrats would be more comfortable supporting Israel without reservations and caveats.
I think the protests and pressure against the Vietnam war, forced even Republican administrations to give in and end the war. This is despite crackdowns on protests similar to those against pro-Palestinian protests.
I think some of the Supreme Court justices appointed under Trump aren’t that extreme and refused to given in to his pressure.
But even if it’s true that the Trump administration is making these structural changes, it still doesn’t feel intuitive to me that e.g., a stronger anti-abortion policy under Democrats, would cause Trump to get elected, which would cause structural changes, which would cause a weaker anti-abortion policy in the future. The influence is diluted through each of these causes, such that the resulting effect is probably pretty small compared to the straightforward effect “a stronger anti-abortion policy today makes the default anti-abortion policy for the future stronger.”
The world is complex, but unless there is some unusual reason to expect an effort to backfire and have literally the opposite effect in the long run, it’s rational to expect efforts which empirically appear to work, to work. It feels mysterious to expect many things to be “net negatives” based on an inside view.
I agree
I agree certain kinds of actions can fail to obtain desired results, and still have backlash.
If you have “activism” which is violent or physically threatening enough (maybe extremists in pro-Palestinian protests), it does create backlash to the point of being a significant net negative.
Even more consequential, are the violent actions by Hamas in reaction to Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians. This actually does cause even more mistreatment, so much so that most of the mistreatment may be caused by it.
But this is violence we are talking about, not activism. The nonviolent protesters are still a net positive towards their cause.
Edit: I do think this proposal of vilifying AI labs could potentially be a net negative.
The first Trump administration did not take actions such as:
deporting foreigners who expressed active support for Palestine on social media
cutting off funding from top universities whose student body was deemed too supportive of Palestinian terrorism
assert Harvard engaged in “violent violation” of civil rights law by creating a campus environment Jewish students found unsafe because university leadership did not crack down on campus protests to a sufficient extent
Regardless of whether you think these actions taken by Trump 2.0 are desirable or undesirable, I know Trump 1.0 did not engage in them.
The question is not whether Trump, in his heart of hearts, was more or less pro-Israel in his first term. The point we’re focused on here is whether pro-Palestinian protests created significant backlash from the Trump administration, which it demonstrably did: Trump 2.0 took pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian activism actions that it had never done prior to the protests themselves.
I didn’t say Supreme Court justices. The most Trump-following judges that have been appointed and confirmed are mostly at the other levels of the judicial branch, namely federal district and appellate court judges (such as Judge Cannon in the Southern District of Florida and Judge Ho at the 5th Circuit). Since the Supreme Court resolves an ever-shrinking percentage of cases it receives certiorari on, more and more of the legal developments that affect the status quo are being resolved by such judges.[1]
And while I don’t want to turn this into a discussion about SCOTUS itself, when it came to the most important Trump-related matters before it in the past year-and-a-half (namely Trump v. Anderson on Trump’s personal eligibility for the presidency, and Trump v. Casa, Inc. on the viability of national injunctions preventing the Trump administration from enacting its executive orders on stuff like birthright citizenship), the court sided with Trump every time.
There were many points of concern raised earlier this year about what would happen if Trump were to receive a negative response from SCOTUS on a major issue (would he abide by it, or create a constitutional crisis by defying them?). Thus far, this potential problem has been dodged because SCOTUS has not given him any serious thumbs-down on anything major.
This is a strange example to pick, because a careful analysis of it reveals the complete opposite of what you’re claiming.[2] Roe v. Wade created the anti-abortion movement as a genuine national force with strong religious and political backing,[3] whereas it hadn’t existed (outside of tiny, local groups) before. This created a steady supply of single-issue Republican voters for decades, ever-tightening controls and restrictions in Red states, and eventually an overruling of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson resulting in even stricter regimes than what had been prevalent at common law (see: quickening and the academic debate over it).
What… empirics are you talking about? I’ve seen no empirical analysis from you on any of these topics.
I don’t have the energy right now to explain the intricacies of the American judicial branch, but I fear the fact you jumped directly to the Supreme Court when a careful observer of it knows the vast majority of relevant developments in law happen in district courts and appellate circuits reflects that I perhaps should
In fact, the decades-long fight over abortion is the quintessential example of how activism and policy changes lead to significant backlash moving forward; I genuinely don’t think I could have possibly picked a better example to illustrate my case
Along with strengthening the power of the originalist strain of thought within judicial and legal academia circles
Trump 2.0 being more pro-Israel could be due to him being more extreme in all directions (perhaps due to new staff members, vice president, I don’t know), rather than due to pro-Palestinian protests.
The counter-reaction are against the protesters, not the cause itself. The Vietnam War protests also created a counter-reaction against the protesters, despite successfully ending the war.
I suspect for a lot of these pressure campaigns which work, the target has a tendency to pretend he isn’t backing down due to the campaign (but other reasons), or act like he’s not budging at all until finally giving in. The target doesn’t want people to think that pressure campaigns work on him, the target wants people to think that any pressure him will only get a counter-reaction out of him, in order to discourage others from pressuring him.
You’re probably right about the courts though, I didn’t know that.
I agree that there is more anti-abortion efforts due to Roe v. Wade, but I disagree that these efforts actually overshot to a point where restrictions on abortion are even harsher than they would be if Roe v. Wade never happened. I still think it moved the Overton window such that even conservatives feel abortion is kind of normal, maybe bad, but not literally like killing a baby.
The people angry against affirmative action have a strong feeling that different races should get the same treatment e.g. when applying to university. I don’t think any of them overshot into wanting to bring back segregation or slavery.
Oops, “efforts which empirically appear to work” was referring to how the book, If Anyone Builds, It Everyone Dies attracted many big name endorsements who aren’t known for endorsing AI x-risk concerns until now.
Nate messaged me a thing in chat and I found it helpful and asked if I could copy it over:
I wish Nate had optimized his post more for being clear about which of these things he was talking about!
yeah, I left off this part but Nate also said
FWIW, as someone who’s been working pretty closely with Nate for the past ten years (and as someone whose preferred conversational dynamic is pretty warm-and-squishy), I actively enjoy working with the guy and feel positive about our interactions.
On the other hand, we should expect that the first people to speak out against someone will be the most easily activated (in a neurological sense)- because of past trauma, or additional issues with the focal person, or having a shitty year. Speaking out is partially a function of pain level, and pain(Legitimate grievance + illegitimate grievance) > pain(legitimate grievance). It doesn’t mean there isn’t a legitimate grievance large enough to merit concern.
Can you be more concrete about what “catching the ears of senators” means? That phrase seems like it could refer to a lot of very different things of highly disparate levels of impressiveness.
[acknowledging that you might not reply] Sorry, I don’t think I understand your point about the MtG questions: are you saying you suspect I’m missing the amount (or importance-adjusted amount) of positive responses to Nate? If so, maybe you misunderstood me. I certainly wouldn’t claim it’s rare to have a very positive response to talking to him (I’ve certainly had very positive conversations with him too!); my point was that very negative reactions to talking to him are not rare (in my experience, including among impactful and skilled people doing important work on AIS, according to me), which felt contrary to my read of the vibes of your comment. But again, I agree very positive reactions are also not rare!
I mean, we’re having this conversation on LessWrong. It’s, to put it mildly, doing more than a bit of selection for people who like Nate’s conversational style. Also, complaining about people is stressful and often socially costly, and it would be pretty weird for random policymakers to make it clear to random LW users how their conversation with Nate Soares had gone. How those effect compare to the more-specific selection effect of this being a complaint thread spurred by people who might have axes to grind is quite unclear to me.
I believe that’s true of you. I know of several historically-active-critic-of-Eliezer’s-style who I think have been much more effective at getting this problem taken seriously in DC than Eliezer post-Sequences, but not of Nate’s or Eliezer’s with respect to this book in particular, but I also just don’t know much about how they’re responding other than the blurbs (which I agree are impressive! But also subject to selection effect!). I’m worried there’s substantial backfire effect playing out, which is nontrivial to catch, which is one of the reasons I’m interested in this thread.
I think I’ve already explained why this misses the point:
I suspect there are a ton of new people who would have gotten in fights with you in a counterfactual universe where you hadn’t made that change, but who haven’t done so in this one. The change isn’t from “they think of Duncan negatively” to “they think of Duncan positively,” but more so from “they think of Duncan negatively” to “they think of Duncan neutrally” or even “they don’t think of Duncan at all.”
As for the ones who have already engaged in fights with you and continued to dislike you[1]… well, why would they change their opinions of you? You had an established reputation at that point; part of the role reputation plays in human social interactions is to ensure social punishment for perceived transgressions of norms, regardless of when the purported transgressor starts signaling he is changing his behavior. For all people may wax poetically about accepting change and giving people second chances, in practice that doesn’t really happen, in a way I think is quite justifiable from their POV.
Fallacious black and white thinking, here.[2] Some people manage to never bruise anyone like Nate did, but a heck of a lot more people manage to bruise far fewer people than Nate. If you’ve never hurt anyone, you’re probably too conservative in your speech. If you’ve hurt and turned off too many people, you’re almost certainly insufficiently conservative in your speech.
Not sure what the word “objectively” is meant to accomplish here, more than just signaling “I really really think this is true” and trying to wrap it in a veneer of impartiality to pack a bigger rhetorical punch. Discussions about human social interactions and the proper use of norms are very rarely resolvable in entirely objective ways, and moreover in this case, for reasons given throughout the years on this site, I think your conclusion (about them being “overblown”) is more likely than not wrong, at least as I understand proper norms of interpersonal interaction in such environments.
Might or might not be true.[3] But as I see it, since reality doesn’t grade on a curve, even 90th-percentile-for-humans in terms of accepting criticism is grossly insufficient for actually accepting criticism that you believe distracts from your main points or flows from perspectives you don’t inherently care about.
“You’re trying to argue for X, but your claim is factually false for reason Y” is something a 90th-percentile receiver of feedback can grapple with seriously and incorporate into their thinking process easily, if they fundamentally care about truth-seeking as an end goal in addition to X.
“You’re trying to argue for X, but you should stop for reason Z, which I know you don’t inherently care about but trust me that if we run down a list of all your flaws, you’ll see past the motivated cognition and confirmation bias and realize this is distracting from X” is significantly more difficult for such a person to seriously engage with.[4]
Or who have been told by their in-group that they should dislike you because you’re too confrontational, even if they’ve never interacted with you
Or, more likely, overblown rhetoric distracting from the critical point of discussion (edit: I first mistakenly wrote this as fallacy of gray, which is the complete opposite of what I meant)
I suspect not, but it’s possible
And “seriously” does not mean “performatively”; it’s a substantive descriptor, not a procedural one. There is no ritual of public discourse one can perform, where one uses fancy LW jargon and the vocabulary of “updating” in the face of evidence and an even-keeled tone of voice, that can substitute for the act of actually updating according to impartial rules of evidence and reasoning.
A couple of ways this comment feels like it’s talking past Duncan:
Feels like Duncan said “X didn’t happen, because people aren’t good at it” and you’re saying “indeed, people aren’t good at X, what did you expect?”
Like, do you claim that “reputation fails to update in the face of actual changes in behavior (not just someone announcing their intent to change)” is a good thing?
Feels like you think Duncan thinks the options are “Nate’s amount of bruising” and “no bruising”. I don’t know why you’d think Duncan thinks that.
I’m saying “subconsciously pre-committing to ignoring claims/purported evidence of changed behavior, because usually they’re wrong and it’s not worth the cost of litigating individual cases” is often times the correct thing to do.
No, I don’t believe Duncan thinks this (it’s a pretty dumb thing to believe, and Duncan is smart). I believe Duncan was intentionally using rhetorically dishonest language to distract from the possibility of “reducing” bruising by talking only about “never” bruising another person.
I think this behavior of Nate’s is dumb and annoying and I appreciate you calling it out.
FWIW I very much doubt this is Nate executing a careful strategy to suppress negative information about him (his action was probably counterproductive from that perspective), I think he just has standards according to which it’s fine for him to do this when he thinks people are being dumb and annoying, and he thinks your comment is off-topic because he considers it irrelevant to the main thrust of his post.
After talking to someone about this a little, I’m a bit more sympathetic to Soares’s actions here; I think they were probably a mistake for pragmatic reasons, but I’m also sympathetic to arguments that LessWrong is better off if it’s a space where people enforce whatever commenting policies they like, and I don’t want to be part of social punishment if I don’t endorse the social punishment. So I partially retract the first part of my comment. Idk, I might think more about this.
Does it matter if it’s a conscious strategy? His internal experience might be “this is dumb and annoying”, but unless that’s uncorrelated with how a post reflects on him, the effect is going to be distorting the information people present about him in his posts.
I think it would be bad for every single post that Nate publishes on maybe-sorta-related subjects to turn into a platform for relitigating his past behavior[1]. This would predictably eat dozens of hours of time across a bunch of people. If you think Nate’s advice is bad, maybe because you think that people following it risk behaving more like Nate (in the negative ways that you experienced), then I think you should make an argument to that effect directly, which seems more likely to accomplish (what I think is) your goal.
Which, not having previously expressed an opinion on, I’ll say once—sounds bad to me.
I would share your concern if TurnTrout or others were replying to everything Nate published in this way. But well… the original comment seemed reasonably relevant to the topic of the post and TurnTrout’s reply seemed relevant to the comment. So it seems like there’s likely a limiting principle here that would prevent your concern from being realized.
I totally agree, but I think that the topic of the post was pretty related to the things people have complained about before, so it’s more on topic than it would be on a random Nate post (e.g. it seems more relevant on that post than on most of Nate’s blog posts).
I agree it’s more related than a randomly selected Nate post would be, but the comment itself did not seem particularly aimed at arguing that Nate’s advice was bad or that following it would have undesirable consequences[1]. (I think the comments it was responding to were pretty borderline here.)
I think I am comfortable arguing that it would be bad if every post that Nate made on subjects like “how to communicate with people about AI x-risk” included people leaving comments with argument-free pointers to past Nate-drama.
The most recent post by Nate seemed good to me; I think its advice was more-than-sufficiently hedged and do not think that people moving in that direction on the margin would be bad for the world. If people think otherwise they should say so, and if they want to use Nate’s interpersonal foibles as evidence that the advice is bad that’s fine, though (obviously) I don’t expect I’d find such arguments very convincing.
When keeping in mind its target audience.
It is indeed more related than a randomly selected post would be. The relevant part is not because of the subject matter (as you solely talk about during this comment thread), but because of the nature of the evidence it uses to make its case.
The vast majority[1] of the original post, along with subsequent comments, uses Nate Soares’s personal experience meeting with congressional staffers, elected officials, cold-emailing famous and notorious people to get endorsements for his book, etc, as evidence of how his strategy works out in practice/can succeed for his purposes.
If the post was along the lines of “I, Nate Soares, talked to this expert on PR and this is what he recommended for how AI Safety should handle public communication” or “I, Nate Soares, analyzed these papers and came to this conclusion” or “I, Nate Soares, believe for technical alignment reasons that [X is true]”, then talking about his supposed personal abrasiveness or how he turned off other people would be off-topic and arguably ad hominem.
But if the post is mostly Nate Soares describing his own conversations where he employed this strategy, suppressing descriptions of other conversations of his where he employed these strategies but his interlocutors were turned off/thought he was manipulative/thought he was so abrasive they got scared of him/etc. is entirely inappropriate. He himself has opened the door to this topic by bringing it up in the first place! Allowing the same body of evidence to be used, but only when arguing for one side, is incompatible with principles of truth-seeking.
LessWrong seems to hold local validity in arguing as a core principle, or so I think. The process by which you argue for a conclusion is worth discussing, not just the conclusion itself.
but not the entirety
I don’t think just because you use a personal example in order to communicate (and possible defend) the core thesis of a post, that this hereby opens you up to have all vaguely-relevant personal information about you discussed and dissected in the comment section.
If someone writes “I’ve found this kind of software development timeline forecasting strategy to work well” then that absolutely isn’t a complete blanket invitation for everyone to air all work-related problems they ever had with you on that post, or even all work-related problems they had with your software development project planning.
To be clear, that kind of information can be quite important to share for other reasons (and I have many times in the past written up my concerns with various community leaders both on LW and the EA Forum), but in as much as someone is trying to argue for any kind of generalized principles on a specific post, I think it’s definitely within the bounds of moderatable action if someone brings up a bunch of personal information in an aggressive way.
I do think that kind of stuff is often appropriate for other places on the site.
And to be clear, I think someone can succeed at raising the relevant points in a way that doesn’t predictably derail the whole discussion, and also signals appropriate respect for people’s public/private boundaries, but one should model this as a quite dicey operation that is reasonably likely to fail, and if someone wants to do this, I would expect attempts at cooperating and not letting the discussion fall into one of the standard internet demon thread attractors. If someone doesn’t have that skill, I think they shouldn’t attempt it (and just post the information somewhere else).
It does seem to me like an invitation[1] to say “Actually, I’ve spoken with a few of this guy’s previous managers and all three of them say he used the same strat on his projects at their firms, but his predictions were way off.”
But that’s not quite the crux of the matter; what’s critical (for you, at least) is the capacity to derail convos into off-topic Demon Threads, if there is too much aggression or not enough respect or too many boundaries broken.[2]
That’s not quite so critical for me, but I’m not a mod, and I have written enough about this already, and for that reason I shall stop it here.
Not the word I’d use, but this isn’t the time to litigate such matters
Plus other stuff like authors leaving the site, etc.
This seems like an argument for deleting TurnTrout’s post, but not the original comment, which was on topic.
This doesn’t match my experience of Nate and I wonder if you may hold a bias here
I think it was fine for Nate to delete your comment and block you, and fine for you to repost it as a short form.
“just as valid” [where validity here = topical] seems like an overclaim here. And at the time of your comment, Nate had already commented in other threads, which are now linked in a footnote in the OP:
So it’s a bit of a stretch to say that any AI safety-related discussion or interpersonal interaction that Nate has ever had in any context is automatically topical.
I also think your description of Nate’s decision to delete your comment as “not … allowing people to read negative truths about his own behavior” is somewhat overwrought. Both of the comment threads you linked were widely read and discussed at the time, and this shortform will probably also get lots of eyeballs and attention.
At the very least, there is an alternate interpretation, which is that the comment really was off-topic in Nate’s view, and given the history between the two of you, he chose to block + delete instead of re-litigating or engaging in a back-and-forth that both of you would probably find unpleasant and unproductive. Maybe it would have been more noble or more wise of him to simply let your comment stand without direct engagement, but that can also feel unpleasant (for Nate or others).
Thanks for highlighting this Alex.
I think it’s important information for people considering engaging with or taking communication advice from Nate to know that there has been a long history of people having a range of difficult to unpleasant to harmful experiences engaging with him. My knowledge of this is mostly from my former role as research manager at MIRI and the cases I heard about were all in a professional setting.
The e/acc person’s description is similar to descriptions I heard from these other cases.
Personal note—given lesswrong is specifically about speaking all truths including the uncomfortable, I find it disappointing to see comment deletion happen in a situation like this.
If I’m being honest, I’m much less concerned about the fact that So8res blocked you from commenting than I am by the fact that he deleted your comment.
The block was a reasonable action in my eyes to prevent more drama, but the deletion was demonstrative of being willing to suppress true information that would indicate his plan could fail catastrophically.
I do think there’s something to be said for @RobertM and @habryka’s concerns that it would be a bad thing to set a norm where any sorta-relevant post becomes an area to relitigate past drama, as drama has a tendency to consume everything, but as @GeneSmith had said, this almost certainly has a limiting principle, and I see less of a danger than usual here (though I am partial to @habryka’s solution of having the delete comment UI button be different).
A key part of the reason here is that the 1st footnote demonstrates a pattern of trying to deflect from more serious issues into more safe issue territory, which makes me much more suspicious that the reason for why TurnTrout’s comment was deleted was because of the more sensible reasons that Habryka and RobertM argued.
Let’s just say I’m much less willing to trust Nate’s reasoning without independent confirmation going forward.
Note that the block is not post-specific, but user-specific. Turntrout was banned from all So8res posts, not just this one comment thread with “drama.”
If you’re concerned about deleting negative comments, you should see blocking the people making them as effectively deleting their comments from every future post.