[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.
[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.