It does actually help me sharpen my intuitions and arguments. When I’m trying to understand a complicated topic, I find it really helpful to spend a bunch of time talking about it with people. It’s a cheap and easy way of getting some spaced repetition.
I think that despite the pretty bad epistemic problems on LessWrong, it’s still the best place to talk about these issues, and so I feel invested in improving discussion of them. (I’m less pessimistic than Rohin.)
There are a bunch of extremely unreasonable MIRI partisans on LessWrong (as well as some other unreasonable groups), but I think that’s a minority of people who I engage with; a lot of them just vote and don’t comment.
I think that my and Redwood’s engagement on LessWrong has had meaningful effects on how thoughtful LWers think about AI risk.
I feel really triggered by people here being wrong about stuff, so I spend somewhat more time on it than I endorse.
This is partially because I identify strongly with the rationalist community and it hurts me to see the rationalists being unreasonable or wrong.
I do think that on the margin, I wish I felt more intuitively relatively motivated to work on my writing projects that are aimed at other audiences. For example, this weekend I’ve been arguing on LessWrong substantially as procrastination for writing a piece about AI control aimed at computer security experts, particularly those at AI companies. I think that post will be really valuable because I think that a lot of people in that audience are pretty persuadable, and I think it’s a really important point. But it’s less motivating because the feedback loops are longer and the audience doesn’t include many of my friends and my broader social community.
it’s still the best place to talk about these issues
You surely mean “best public place” (which I’d agree with)?
I guess private conversations have more latency and are less rewarding in a variety of ways, but it would feel so surprising if this wasn’t addressable with small amounts of agency and/or money (e.g. set up Slack channels to strike up spur-of-the-moment conversations with people on different topics, give your planned post as a Constellation talk, set up regular video calls with thoughtful people, etc).
FWIW, I get a bunch of value from reading Buck’s and Ryan’s public comments here, and I think many people do. It’s possible that Buck and Ryan should spend less time commenting because they have high opportunity cost, but I think it would be pretty sad if their commenting moved to private channels.
Note I am thinking of a pretty specific subset of comments where Buck is engaging with people who he views as “extremely unreasonable MIRI partisans”. I’m not primarily recommending that Buck move those comments to private channels, usually my recommendation is to not bother commenting on that at all. If there does happen to be some useful kernel to discuss, then I’d recommend he do that elsewhere and then write something public with the actually useful stuff.
FYI I got value from the last round of arguments between Buck/Ryan and Eliezer (in The Problem), where I definitely agree Eliezer was being obtuse/annoying. I learned more useful things about Buck’s worldview from that one than Eliezer’s (nonzero from Eliezer’s tho), and I think that was good for the commons more broadly.
I don’t know if it was a better use of time than whatever else Buck would have done that day, but, I appreciated it.
(I’m not sure what to do about the fact that Being Triggered is such a powerful catalyst for arguing, it does distort what conversations we find ourselves having, but, I think it increases the total amount of public argumentation that exists, fairly significantly)
I engage on LessWrong because:
It does actually help me sharpen my intuitions and arguments. When I’m trying to understand a complicated topic, I find it really helpful to spend a bunch of time talking about it with people. It’s a cheap and easy way of getting some spaced repetition.
I think that despite the pretty bad epistemic problems on LessWrong, it’s still the best place to talk about these issues, and so I feel invested in improving discussion of them. (I’m less pessimistic than Rohin.)
There are a bunch of extremely unreasonable MIRI partisans on LessWrong (as well as some other unreasonable groups), but I think that’s a minority of people who I engage with; a lot of them just vote and don’t comment.
I think that my and Redwood’s engagement on LessWrong has had meaningful effects on how thoughtful LWers think about AI risk.
I feel really triggered by people here being wrong about stuff, so I spend somewhat more time on it than I endorse.
This is partially because I identify strongly with the rationalist community and it hurts me to see the rationalists being unreasonable or wrong.
I do think that on the margin, I wish I felt more intuitively relatively motivated to work on my writing projects that are aimed at other audiences. For example, this weekend I’ve been arguing on LessWrong substantially as procrastination for writing a piece about AI control aimed at computer security experts, particularly those at AI companies. I think that post will be really valuable because I think that a lot of people in that audience are pretty persuadable, and I think it’s a really important point. But it’s less motivating because the feedback loops are longer and the audience doesn’t include many of my friends and my broader social community.
You surely mean “best public place” (which I’d agree with)?
I guess private conversations have more latency and are less rewarding in a variety of ways, but it would feel so surprising if this wasn’t addressable with small amounts of agency and/or money (e.g. set up Slack channels to strike up spur-of-the-moment conversations with people on different topics, give your planned post as a Constellation talk, set up regular video calls with thoughtful people, etc).
FWIW, I get a bunch of value from reading Buck’s and Ryan’s public comments here, and I think many people do. It’s possible that Buck and Ryan should spend less time commenting because they have high opportunity cost, but I think it would be pretty sad if their commenting moved to private channels.
Note I am thinking of a pretty specific subset of comments where Buck is engaging with people who he views as “extremely unreasonable MIRI partisans”. I’m not primarily recommending that Buck move those comments to private channels, usually my recommendation is to not bother commenting on that at all. If there does happen to be some useful kernel to discuss, then I’d recommend he do that elsewhere and then write something public with the actually useful stuff.
FYI I got value from the last round of arguments between Buck/Ryan and Eliezer (in The Problem), where I definitely agree Eliezer was being obtuse/annoying. I learned more useful things about Buck’s worldview from that one than Eliezer’s (nonzero from Eliezer’s tho), and I think that was good for the commons more broadly.
I don’t know if it was a better use of time than whatever else Buck would have done that day, but, I appreciated it.
(I’m not sure what to do about the fact that Being Triggered is such a powerful catalyst for arguing, it does distort what conversations we find ourselves having, but, I think it increases the total amount of public argumentation that exists, fairly significantly)