Thank you for releasing this dialogue—lots of good object-level stuff here.
In addition, I think Scott showcased some excellent conversational moves. He seemed very good at prompting Yudkowsky well, noticing his own confusions, noticing when he needed to pause/reflect before continuing with a thread, and prioritizing between topics.
I hope that some of these skills are learnable. I expect the general discourse around alignment would be more productive if more people tried to emulate some of Scott’s magic.
Some examples that stood out to me:
Acknowledging low familiarity in an area and requesting an explanation at an appropriate level:
Can you expand on sexual recombinant hill-climbing search vs. gradient descent relative to a loss function, keeping in mind that I’m very weak on my understanding of these kinds of algorithms and you might have to explain exactly why they’re different in this way?
Acknowledging when he had made progress and the natural next step would be for him to think more (later) on his own:
Okay, I’m going to have to go over all my thoughts on this and update them manually now that I’ve deconfused that, so I’m going to abandon this topic for now and move on. Do you want to take a break or keep going?
Sending links instead of trying to explain concepts & deciding to move to a new thread (because he wanted to be time-efficient):
How do you feel about me sending you some links later, you can look at them and decide if this is still an interesting discussion, but for now we move on?
Acknowledging the purpose and impact of a “vague question”:
I don’t think it was a very laser-like consequentialist question, more a vague prompt to direct you into an area where I was slightly confused, and I think it succeeded.
Kudos to Scott. I think these strategies made the discussion more efficient and focused. Also impressive that he was able to do this in a context where he had much less domain knowledge than his conversational partner.
Thank you for releasing this dialogue—lots of good object-level stuff here.
In addition, I think Scott showcased some excellent conversational moves. He seemed very good at prompting Yudkowsky well, noticing his own confusions, noticing when he needed to pause/reflect before continuing with a thread, and prioritizing between topics.
I hope that some of these skills are learnable. I expect the general discourse around alignment would be more productive if more people tried to emulate some of Scott’s magic.
Some examples that stood out to me:
Acknowledging low familiarity in an area and requesting an explanation at an appropriate level:
Acknowledging when he had made progress and the natural next step would be for him to think more (later) on his own:
Sending links instead of trying to explain concepts & deciding to move to a new thread (because he wanted to be time-efficient):
Acknowledging the purpose and impact of a “vague question”:
Kudos to Scott. I think these strategies made the discussion more efficient and focused. Also impressive that he was able to do this in a context where he had much less domain knowledge than his conversational partner.