Aside from the usual suspects (people like Tegmark), we mostly sent the book to people following the heuristic “would an endorsement from this person be helpful?”, much more so than “do we know that this person would like the book?”. If you’d asked me individually about Church, Schneier, Bernanke, Shanahan, or Spaulding in advance, I’d have put most of my probability on “this person won’t be persuaded by the book (if they read it at all) and will come away strongly disagreeing and not wanting to endorse”. They seemed worth sharing the book with anyway, and then they ended up liking it (at least enough to blurb it) and some very excited MIRI slack messages ensued.
(I’d have expected Eddy to agree with the book, though I wouldn’t have expected him to give a blurb; and I didn’t know Wolfsthal well enough to have an opinion.)
Nate has a blog post coming out in the next few days that will say a bit more about “How filtered is this evidence?” (along with other topics), but my short answer is that we haven’t sent the book to that many people, we’ve mostly sent it to people whose AI opinions we didn’t know much about (and who we’d guess on priors would be skeptical to some degree), and we haven’t gotten many negative reactions at all. (Though we’ve gotten people who just didn’t answer our inquiries, and some of those might have read the book and disliked it enough to not reply.)
Aside from the usual suspects (people like Tegmark), we mostly sent the book to people following the heuristic “would an endorsement from this person be helpful?”, much more so than “do we know that this person would like the book?”. If you’d asked me individually about Church, Schneier, Bernanke, Shanahan, or Spaulding in advance, I’d have put most of my probability on “this person won’t be persuaded by the book (if they read it at all) and will come away strongly disagreeing and not wanting to endorse”. They seemed worth sharing the book with anyway, and then they ended up liking it (at least enough to blurb it) and some very excited MIRI slack messages ensued.
(I’d have expected Eddy to agree with the book, though I wouldn’t have expected him to give a blurb; and I didn’t know Wolfsthal well enough to have an opinion.)
Nate has a blog post coming out in the next few days that will say a bit more about “How filtered is this evidence?” (along with other topics), but my short answer is that we haven’t sent the book to that many people, we’ve mostly sent it to people whose AI opinions we didn’t know much about (and who we’d guess on priors would be skeptical to some degree), and we haven’t gotten many negative reactions at all. (Though we’ve gotten people who just didn’t answer our inquiries, and some of those might have read the book and disliked it enough to not reply.)