fwiw this seems basically what’s happening to me. (the comment reads kinda defeatist about it, but, not entirely sure what you were going for, and the model seems right, if incomplete. [edit: I agree that several of the statements about entire groups are not literally true for the entire group, when I say ‘basically right’ I mean “the overall dynamic is an important gear, and I think among each group there’s a substantial chunk of people who are tired in the way Thomas depicts”])
On my own end, when I’m feeling most tribal-ish or triggered, it’s when someone/people are looking to me like they are “willfully not getting it”. And, I’ve noticed a few times on my end where I’m sort of willfully not getting it (sometimes while trying to do some kind of intellectual bridging, which I bet is particularly annoying).
I’m not currently optimistic about solving twitter.
The angle I felt most optimistic about on LW is aiming for a state where a few prominent-ish* people… feel like they get understood by each other at the same time, and can chill out at the same time. This maybe works IFF there are some people who:
a) aren’t completely burned out on the “try to communicate / actually have a good group epistemic culture about AI” project.
b) are prominent / intellectually-leader-y enough that, if they (a few people on multiple sides/angles of the AI-situation-issue), all chilled out at the same time, it’d meaningfully radiate out and give people more of a sense of “okay things are more chill now.”
c) they are willing to actually seriously doublecrux about it (i.e. having some actual open curiosity, both people trying to paraphrase/pass ITTs, both people trying to locate and articulate the cruxes beneath their cruxes, both people making an earnest effort to be open to changing their mind)
Shoulder Eliezer/Nate/JohnW/Rohin/Paul pop up to say “this has been tried, dude, for hundreds of hours”, and my response is
has it, really? The only person I ever saw seeming like they were trying to do the curious/actually-maybe-learn move was Richard Ngo in the MIRI Dialogues. (Probably there have been some other attempts in sporadic LW convos, but, not in a really focused-effort way, and not that I recall where at least one participant wasn’t sort of radiating “ugh I hope we can get this over with”)
I dunno dude I think we’ve actually made progress, at both articulating subtle underlying intellectual cruxes, and at improving our conversational technology.
(Maybe @Eli Tyre can say if he thinks True Doublecrux has ever been tried on this cluster of topics)
–––
...that was my angle something like 3 months ago. Since then, someone argued another key piece of the model:
There is something in the ecosystem that is going to keep generating prominent Things-Are-Probably-Okay people, no matter how much doublecruxing and changing minds happens. People in fact really want things to be okay, so whenever someone shows up with some kind of sophisticated sounding reasoning for why maybe things are okay, some kind of egregore will re-orient and elevate them to the position of “Things-Are-Probably-Okay-ish intellectual leader”. (There might separately be something that keeps generating Things-Probably-Aren’t-Okay people, maybe a la Val’s model here. I don’t think it tends to generate intellectual thought leaders, but, might be wrong).
If the true underlying reality turns out to be “actually, one should be more optimistic about alignment difficulty, or whether leading companies will do reasonable things by default”, then, hypothetically, it could resolve in the other direction. But, if there’s not a part of a plan that somehow deals with it, it makes sense for Not-Okay-ists to be less invested in actually trying.
–––
Relatedly: new people are going to keep showing up, who haven’t been through 100 hours of attempted nuanced arguing, who don’t get all the points, and people will keep being annoyed at them.
And there’s something like… intergenerational trauma, where the earlier generation of people who have attempted to communicate and are just completely fed up with people not listening, are often rude/dismissive of people who are still in the process of thinking through the issue (though, notably, sometimes while also still kinda willfully not listening), and then the newer generation is like “christ why was that guy so dismissive?”
In particular, the newer person might totally have a valid nontrivial point they are making, but it’s entangled with some other point the other person thinks is obviously dumb, so older Not-Okay-ists end up dismissing the whole thing.
–––
Originally this used “pessimist” and “optimist” as the shorthand, but, I decided I didn’t like that because it is easier to interpret as “optimism/pessimism as a disposition, rather than a property of your current beliefs”, which seemed to do more bad reifying)
fwiw this seems basically what’s happening to me. (the comment reads kinda defeatist about it, but, not entirely sure what you were going for, and the model seems right, if incomplete. [edit: I agree that several of the statements about entire groups are not literally true for the entire group, when I say ‘basically right’ I mean “the overall dynamic is an important gear, and I think among each group there’s a substantial chunk of people who are tired in the way Thomas depicts”])
On my own end, when I’m feeling most tribal-ish or triggered, it’s when someone/people are looking to me like they are “willfully not getting it”. And, I’ve noticed a few times on my end where I’m sort of willfully not getting it (sometimes while trying to do some kind of intellectual bridging, which I bet is particularly annoying).
I’m not currently optimistic about solving twitter.
The angle I felt most optimistic about on LW is aiming for a state where a few prominent-ish* people… feel like they get understood by each other at the same time, and can chill out at the same time. This maybe works IFF there are some people who:
a) aren’t completely burned out on the “try to communicate / actually have a good group epistemic culture about AI” project.
b) are prominent / intellectually-leader-y enough that, if they (a few people on multiple sides/angles of the AI-situation-issue), all chilled out at the same time, it’d meaningfully radiate out and give people more of a sense of “okay things are more chill now.”
c) they are willing to actually seriously doublecrux about it (i.e. having some actual open curiosity, both people trying to paraphrase/pass ITTs, both people trying to locate and articulate the cruxes beneath their cruxes, both people making an earnest effort to be open to changing their mind)
Shoulder Eliezer/Nate/JohnW/Rohin/Paul pop up to say “this has been tried, dude, for hundreds of hours”, and my response is
has it, really? The only person I ever saw seeming like they were trying to do the curious/actually-maybe-learn move was Richard Ngo in the MIRI Dialogues. (Probably there have been some other attempts in sporadic LW convos, but, not in a really focused-effort way, and not that I recall where at least one participant wasn’t sort of radiating “ugh I hope we can get this over with”)
I dunno dude I think we’ve actually made progress, at both articulating subtle underlying intellectual cruxes, and at improving our conversational technology.
(Maybe @Eli Tyre can say if he thinks True Doublecrux has ever been tried on this cluster of topics)
–––
...that was my angle something like 3 months ago. Since then, someone argued another key piece of the model:
There is something in the ecosystem that is going to keep generating prominent Things-Are-Probably-Okay people, no matter how much doublecruxing and changing minds happens. People in fact really want things to be okay, so whenever someone shows up with some kind of sophisticated sounding reasoning for why maybe things are okay, some kind of egregore will re-orient and elevate them to the position of “Things-Are-Probably-Okay-ish intellectual leader”. (There might separately be something that keeps generating Things-Probably-Aren’t-Okay people, maybe a la Val’s model here. I don’t think it tends to generate intellectual thought leaders, but, might be wrong).
If the true underlying reality turns out to be “actually, one should be more optimistic about alignment difficulty, or whether leading companies will do reasonable things by default”, then, hypothetically, it could resolve in the other direction. But, if there’s not a part of a plan that somehow deals with it, it makes sense for Not-Okay-ists to be less invested in actually trying.
–––
Relatedly: new people are going to keep showing up, who haven’t been through 100 hours of attempted nuanced arguing, who don’t get all the points, and people will keep being annoyed at them.
And there’s something like… intergenerational trauma, where the earlier generation of people who have attempted to communicate and are just completely fed up with people not listening, are often rude/dismissive of people who are still in the process of thinking through the issue (though, notably, sometimes while also still kinda willfully not listening), and then the newer generation is like “christ why was that guy so dismissive?”
In particular, the newer person might totally have a valid nontrivial point they are making, but it’s entangled with some other point the other person thinks is obviously dumb, so older Not-Okay-ists end up dismissing the whole thing.
–––
Originally this used “pessimist” and “optimist” as the shorthand, but, I decided I didn’t like that because it is easier to interpret as “optimism/pessimism as a disposition, rather than a property of your current beliefs”, which seemed to do more bad reifying)