I primarily upvoted it because I like the push to ‘just candidly talk about your models of stuff’:
I think we die with slightly more dignity—come closer to surviving, as we die—if we are allowed to talk about these matters plainly. Even given that people may then do unhelpful things, after being driven mad by overhearing sane conversations. I think we die with more dignity that way, than if we go down silent and frozen and never talking about our impending death for fear of being overheard by people less sane than ourselves.
I think that in the last surviving possible worlds with any significant shred of subjective probability, people survived in part because they talked about it; even if that meant other people, the story’s antagonists, might possibly hypothetically panic.
Also because I think Eliezer’s framing will be helpful for a bunch of people working on x-risk. Possibly a minority of people, but not a tiny minority. Per my reply to AI_WAIFU, I think there are lots of people who make the two specific mistakes Eliezer is warning about in this post (‘making a habit of strategically saying falsehoods’ and/or ‘making a habit of adopting optimistic assumptions on the premise that the pessimistic view says we’re screwed anyway’).
The latter, especially, is something I’ve seen in EA a lot, and I think the arguments against it here are correct (and haven’t been talked about much).
Given how long it took me to conclude whether these were Eliezer’s true thoughts or a representation of his predicted thoughts in a somewhat probable future, I’m not sure whether I’d use the label “candid” to describe the post, at least without qualification.
While the post does contain a genuinely useful way of framing near-hopeless situations and a nuanced and relatively terse lesson in practical ethics, I would describe the post as an extremely next-level play in terms of its broader purpose (and leave it at that).
I primarily upvoted it because I like the push to ‘just candidly talk about your models of stuff’:
Also because I think Eliezer’s framing will be helpful for a bunch of people working on x-risk. Possibly a minority of people, but not a tiny minority. Per my reply to AI_WAIFU, I think there are lots of people who make the two specific mistakes Eliezer is warning about in this post (‘making a habit of strategically saying falsehoods’ and/or ‘making a habit of adopting optimistic assumptions on the premise that the pessimistic view says we’re screwed anyway’).
The latter, especially, is something I’ve seen in EA a lot, and I think the arguments against it here are correct (and haven’t been talked about much).
Given how long it took me to conclude whether these were Eliezer’s true thoughts or a representation of his predicted thoughts in a somewhat probable future, I’m not sure whether I’d use the label “candid” to describe the post, at least without qualification.
While the post does contain a genuinely useful way of framing near-hopeless situations and a nuanced and relatively terse lesson in practical ethics, I would describe the post as an extremely next-level play in terms of its broader purpose (and leave it at that).