What is the proposition you believe “everyone knows” in this case? (The proposition that seemed ambiguous to me was “Eliezer believes alignment is so unlikely that going for dying with dignity on the mainline is the right approach”).
If someone says X on April Fools, then says “April fools, X is false, Y is true instead!”, and they disbelieve Y (and it’s at least plausible to some parties that they believe Y), that’s still a lie even though it’s April Fools, since they’re claiming to have popped out of the April Fools context by saying “April Fools”.
I think this isn’t the first time I’ve seen the April Fools-April Fools joke, where someone says “True thing, April Fools, Lie!”, but I agree that this is ‘bad form’ in some way.
I had been, midway thru the post, intending to write a comment that was something like “hmm, does posting this on April 1st have more or less dignity than April 2nd?”, and then got to that point. My interpretation is something like: if someone wants to dismiss Eliezer for reasons of their psychological health, Eliezer wants them to have an out, and the best out he could give them was “he posted his main strategic update on April 1st, so it has to be a joke, and he confirmed that in his post.” But of course this out involves some sort of detachment between their beliefs and his beliefs.
In my terminology, it’s a ‘collusion’ instead of a ‘lie’; the sort of thing where I help someone believe that I liked their cooking because they would rather have that conclusion than be correlated with reality. The main difference between them is something like “whose preferences are being satisfied”; lies are typically win-lose to a much larger degree than collusions are. [Or, like, enough people meta-prefer collusions for them to be common, but meta-prefer not lying such that non-collusion lying is relatively rare.]
What is the proposition you believe “everyone knows” in this case? (The proposition that seemed ambiguous to me was “Eliezer believes alignment is so unlikely that going for dying with dignity on the mainline is the right approach”).
If someone says X on April Fools, then says “April fools, X is false, Y is true instead!”, and they disbelieve Y (and it’s at least plausible to some parties that they believe Y), that’s still a lie even though it’s April Fools, since they’re claiming to have popped out of the April Fools context by saying “April Fools”.
I think this isn’t the first time I’ve seen the April Fools-April Fools joke, where someone says “True thing, April Fools, Lie!”, but I agree that this is ‘bad form’ in some way.
I had been, midway thru the post, intending to write a comment that was something like “hmm, does posting this on April 1st have more or less dignity than April 2nd?”, and then got to that point. My interpretation is something like: if someone wants to dismiss Eliezer for reasons of their psychological health, Eliezer wants them to have an out, and the best out he could give them was “he posted his main strategic update on April 1st, so it has to be a joke, and he confirmed that in his post.” But of course this out involves some sort of detachment between their beliefs and his beliefs.
In my terminology, it’s a ‘collusion’ instead of a ‘lie’; the sort of thing where I help someone believe that I liked their cooking because they would rather have that conclusion than be correlated with reality. The main difference between them is something like “whose preferences are being satisfied”; lies are typically win-lose to a much larger degree than collusions are. [Or, like, enough people meta-prefer collusions for them to be common, but meta-prefer not lying such that non-collusion lying is relatively rare.]