I think it’s important to distinguish between factual disagreements and moral disagreements. My understanding is that eg Jaime is sincerely motivated by reducing x risk (though not 100% motivated by it), just disagrees with me (and presumably you) about various empirical questions about how to go about it, what risks are most likely, what timelines are, etc. I’m much less sure the founders of Mechanize care.
And to whatever degree you trust my judgement/honesty, I work at DeepMind and reducing existential risk is a fairly large part of my motivation (though far from all of it), and I try to regularly think about how my team’s strategy can be better targeted towards this.
And I know a lot of safety people at deepmind and other AGI labs who I’m very confident also sincerely care about reducing existential risks. This is one of their primary motivations, they often got into the field due to being convinced by arguments about ai risk, they will often raise in conversation concerns that their current work or the team’s current strategy is not focused on it enough, some are extremely hard-working or admirably willing to forgo credits so long as they think that their work is actually mattering for X-Risk, some dedicate a bunch of time to forming detailed mental models of how AI leads to bad outcomes and how this could be prevented and how their work fit in, etc. If people just wanted to do fun ml work, there’s a lot of other places Obviously people are complex. People are largely not motivated by a single thing and the various conflicts of interest you note seem real. I expect some of the people I’m thinking of. I’ve misjudged or say they care about X-Risk but actually don’t. But I would just be completely shocked if say half of them were not highly motivated by reducing x-. It’s generally more reasonable to be skeptical of the motivations of senior leadership, who have much messier incentives and constraints on their communication.
Regarding the missing mood thing, I think there’s something to what you’re saying, but also that it’s really psychologically unhealthy to work in a field which is constantly advancing like AI and every time there is an advance feel the true emotional magnitudes of what it would mean if existential risk has now slightly increased. If anyone did, I think they would burn out pretty fast, so the people left in the field largely don’t. I also think you should reserve those emotions for times when a trend is deviated from rather than when a trend is continued. In my opinion, the reason people were excited about the metr work was that it was measuring a thing that was already happening much more precisely, it was a really important question and reducing our confusion about that is high value. It wasn’t really capabilities work in my opinion
unjustified even on P(doom) = 1e-6, unless you assign ~zero value to people who are not yet born
Is this implicitly assuming total utilitarianism? I certainly care about the future of humanity, but I reject moral views that say it is overwhelmingly the thing that matters and present day concerns round down to zero. I think many people have intuitions aligning with this.
My understanding is that eg Jaime is sincerely motivated by reducing x risk (though not 100% motivated by it), just disagrees with me (and presumably you) about various empirical questions about how to go about it, what risks are most likely
I don’t think this is true. My sense is he views his current work as largely being good on non x-risk grounds, and thinks that even if it might slightly increase x-risk, he wouldn’t think it would be worth it for him to stop working on it, since he thinks it’s unfair to force the current generation to accept a slightly higher risk of not achieving longevity escape velocity and more material wealth in exchange for a small increase in existential risk.
He says it so plainly that it seems as straightforwardly of a rejection of AI x-risk concerns that I’ve heard:
I selfishly care about me, my friends and family benefitting from AI. For some of my older relatives, it might make a big difference to their health and wellbeing whether AI-fueled explosive growth happens in 10 vs 20 years.
[...]
I wont endanger the life of my family, myself and the current generation for a small decrease of the chances of AI going extremely badly in the long term.
And I don’t think it’s fair of anyone to ask me to do that. Not that it should be my place to unilaterally make such a decision anyway.
It seems very clear that Jaime thinks that AI x-risk, is unimportant relative to almost any other issue, given his non-interest in trading off x-risk against those other issues.
It is true that Jaime might think that AI x-risk could hypothetically be motivating to him, but at least my best interpretations of what is going on, suggest to me he de-facto does not consider it as an important input into his current strategic choices, or the choices of Epoch.
It seems very clear that Jaime thinks that AI x-risk, is unimportant relative to almost any other issue, given his non-interest in trading off x-risk against those other issues.
Does not seem a fair description of
I wont endanger the life of my family, myself and the current generation for a small decrease of the chances of AI going extremely badly in the long term
People are allowed to have multiple values! If someone would trade a small amount of value A for a large amount of value B, this is entirely consistent with them thinking both are important.
Like, if you offer people the option to commit suicide in exchange for reducing x-risk by x%, what value of x do you think they would require? And would you say they are not x risk motivated if they eg aren’t willing to do it at 1e-6?
In practice this doesn’t really come up, so it’s not that relevant. Similarly for Jaime’s position, how much he believes himself to be in situations where he’s trading off meaningful harm to today and meaningful harm to the present generation seems very important.
I did a bit of digging, because these quotes seemed narrow to me. Here’s the original tweet of that tweet thread.
Full state dump of my AI risk related beliefs:
- I currently think that we will see ~full automation of society by Median 2045, with already very significant benefits by 2030 - I am not very concerned about violent AI takeover. I am concerned about concentration of power and gradual disempowerment. I put the probability that ai ends up being net bad for humans at 15%. - I support treating ai as a general purpose tech and distributed development. I oppose stuff like export controls and treating AI like military tech. My sense is that AI goes better in worlds where we gradually adopt it and it’s seen as a beneficial general purpose tech, rather than a key strategic tech only controlled by a small group of people— I think alignment is unlikely to happen in a robust way, though companies could have a lot of sway on AI culture in the short term. - on net I support faster development of AI, so we can benefit earlier from it.
It’s a hard problem, and I respect people trying their hardest to make it go well.
Then right after:
All said, this specific chain doesn’t give us a huge amount of information. It totals something like 10-20 sentences.
> He says it so plainly that it seems as straightforwardly of a rejection of AI x-risk concerns that I’ve heard:
This seems like a major oversimplification to me. He says “I am concerned about concentration of power and gradual disempowerment. I put the probability that ai ends up being net bad for humans at 15%.” There is a cluster in the rationalist/EA community that believes that “gradual disempowerment” is an x-risk. Perhaps you wouldn’t define “concentration of power and gradual disempowerment” as technically an x-risk, but if so, that seems a bit like a technicality to me. It can clearly be a very major deal.
It sounds a lot to me that Jaime is very concerned about some aspects of AI risk but not others.
In the quote you reference, he clearly says, “Not that it should be my place to unilaterally make such a decision anyway.”. I hear him saying, “I disagree with the x-risk community about the issue of slowing down AI, specifically. However, I don’t think this disagreement a big concern, given that I also feel like it’s not right for me to personally push for AI to be sped up, and thus I won’t do it.”
I am not saying Jaime in-principle could not be motivated by existential risk from AI, but I do think the evidence suggests to me strongly that concerns about existential risk from AI are not among the primary motivations for his work on Epoch (which is what I understood Neel to be saying).
Maybe it is because he sees the risk as irreducible, maybe it is because the only ways of improving things would cause collateral damage for other things he cares about. I also think it should be our dominant prior that someone is not motivated by reducing x-risk unless they directly claim they do.
My sense is that Jaime’s view (and Epoch’s view more generally) is more like: “making people better informed about AI in a way that is useful to them seems heuristically good (given that AI is a big deal), it doesn’t seem that useful or important to have a very specific theory of change beyond this”. From this perspective, saying “concerns about existential risk from AI are not among the primary motivations” is partially slightly confused as the heuristic isn’t necessarily back chained from any more specific justification. Like there is no specific terminal motivation.
Like consider someone who donates to Give Directly due to “idk, seems heuristically good to empower the worst off people” and someone who generally funds global health and well being due to specifically caring about ongoing human welfare (putting aside AI for now). This heuristic is partially motived via flow through from caring about something like welfare even though it doesn’t directly show up. These people seem like natural allies to me except in surprising circumstances (e.g., it turns out the worst off people use marginal money/power in a way that is net negative for human welfare).
I agree that there is some ontological mismatch here, but I think your position is still in pretty clear conflict to what Neel said, which is what I was objecting to:
My understanding is that eg Jaime is sincerely motivated by reducing x risk (though not 100% motivated by it), just disagrees with me (and presumably you) about various empirical questions about how to go about it, what risks are most likely, what timelines are, etc.
“Not 100% motivated by it” IMO sounds like an implication that “being motivated by reducing x-risk would make up something like 30%-70% of the motivation”. I don’t think that’s true, and I think various things that Jaime has said make that relatively clear.
I think you’re conflating “does not think that slowing down AI obviously reduces x-risk” with “reducing x risk is not a meaningful motivation for his work”. Jaime has clearly said that he believes x risk is a real and >=15% (though via different mechanisms to loss of control). I think that the public being well informed about AI generally reduces risk, and I think that Epoch is doing good work on this front, and that increasing the probability that AI goes well is part of why Jaime works on this. I think it’s much less clear if Frontier Math was good, but Jaime wasn’t very involved anyway, so doesn’t seem super relevant.
I basically think the only thing he’s said that you could consider objectionable is that he’s reluctant to push for a substantial pause for AI since x risk is not the only thing he cares about. But he also (sincerely, imo) expresses uncertainty about whether such a pause WOULD be good for x risk
1. Do Jaime’s writings that that he cares about x-risk or not? → I think he fairly clearly states that cares.
2. Does all the evidence, when put together, imply that actually, Jaime doesn’t care about x-risk? → This is a much more speculative question. We have to assess how honest he is in his writing. I’d bet money that Jaime at least believes that he cares and is taking corresponding actions. This of course doesn’t absolve him of full responsibility—there are many people who believe they do things for good reasons, but causally actually do things for selfish reasons. But now we’re getting to a particularly speculative area.
“I also think it should be our dominant prior that someone is not motivated by reducing x-risk unless they directly claim they do.” → Again, to me, I regard him as basically claiming that he does care. I’d bet money that if we ask him to clarify, he’d claim that he cares. (Happy to bet on this, if that would help)
At the same time, I doubt that this is your actual crux. I’d expect that even if he claimed (more precisely) to care, you’d still be skeptical of some aspect of this.
---
Personally, I have both positive and skeptical feelings about Epoch, as I do other evals orgs. I think they’re doing some good work, but I really wish they’d lean a lot more on [clearly useful for x-risk] work. If I had a lot of money to donate, I could picture donating some to Epoch, but only if I could get a lot of assurances on which projects it would go to.
But while I have reservations about the org, I think some of the specific attacks against them (and defenses or them) are not accurate.
People’s “deep down motivations” and “endorsed upon reflection values,” etc, are not the only determiners of what they end up doing in practice re influencing x-risk.
In that case I think your response is a non sequitur, since clearly “really care” in this context means “determiners of what they end up doing in practice re influencing x-risk”.
I personally define “really care” as “the thing they actually care about and meaningfully drives their actions (potentially among other things) is X”. If you want to define it as eg “the actions they take, in practice, effectively select for X, even if that’s not their intent” then I agree my post does not refute the point, and we have more of a semantic disagreement over what the phrase means.
I interpret the post as saying “there are several examples of people in the AI safety community taking actions that made things worse. THEREFORE these people are actively malicious or otherwise insincere about their claims to care about safety and it’s largely an afterthought put to the side as other considerations dominate”. I personally agree with some examples, disagree with others, but think this is explained by a mix of strategic disagreements about how to optimise for safety, and SOME fraction of the alleged community really not caring about safety
People are often incompetent at achieving their intended outcome, so pointing towards failure to achieve an outcome does not mean this was what they intended. ESPECIALLY if there’s no ground truth and you have strategic disagreements with those people, so you think they failed and they think they succeeded
I don’t think “not really caring” necessarily means someone is being deceptive. I hadn’t really thought through the terminology before I wrote my original post, but I would maybe define 3 categories:
claims to care about x-risk, but is being insincere
genuinely cares about x-risk, but also cares about other things (making money etc.), so they take actions that fit their non-x-risk motivations and then come up with rationalizations for why those actions are good for x-risk
genuinely cares about x-risk, and has pure motivations, but sometimes make mistakes and end up increasing x-risk
I would consider #1 and #2 to be “not really caring”. #3 really cares. But from the outside it can be hard to tell the difference between the three. (And in fact, from the inside, it’s hard to tell whether you’re a #2 or a #3.)
On a more personal note, I think in the past I was too credulous about ascribing pure motivations to people when I had disagreements with them, when in fact the reason for the disagreement was that I care about x-risk and they’re either insincere or rationalizing. My original post is something I think Michael!2018 would benefit from reading.
Does 3 include “cares about x risk and other things, does a good job of evaluating the trade off of each action according to their values, but is sometimes willing to do things that are great according to their other values but slightly negative results x risk”?
Also, from the outside, can you describe how an observer would distinguish between [any of the items on the list] and the situation you lay out in your comment / what the downsides are to treating them similarly? I think Michael’s point is that it’s not useful/worth it to distinguish.
Whether someone is dishonest, incompetent, or underweighting x-risk (by my lights) mostly doesn’t matter for how I interface with them, or how I think the field ought to regard them, since I don’t think we should brow beat people or treat them punitively. Bottom line is I’ll rely (as an unvalenced substitute for ‘trust’) on them a little less.
I think you’re right to point out the valence of the initial wording, fwiw. I just think taxonomizing apparent defection isn’t necessary if we take as a given that we ought to treat people well and avoid claiming special knowledge of their internals, while maintaining the integrity of our personal and professional circles of trust.
if we take as a given that we ought to treat people well and avoid claiming special knowledge of their internals, while maintaining the integrity of our personal and professional circles of trust.
If we take this as a given, I’m happy for people to categorise others however they’d like! I haven’t noticed people other than you taking that perspective in this thread
My read is that in practice many people in the online LW community are fairly hostile, and many people in the labs think the community doesn’t know what they’re talking about and totally ignores them/doesn’t really care if they’re made to walk the metaphorical plank.
At the risk of seeming quite combative, when you say
And I know a lot of safety people at deepmind and other AGI labs who I’m very confident also sincerely care about reducing existential risks. This is one of their primary motivations, they often got into the field due to being convinced by arguments about ai risk, they will often raise in conversation concerns that their current work or the team’s current strategy is not focused on it enough, some are extremely hard-working or admirably willing to forgo credits so long as they think that their work is actually mattering for X-Risk, some dedicate a bunch of time to forming detailed mental models of how AI leads to bad outcomes and how this could be prevented and how their work fit in, etc.
That’s basically what I mean when I said in my comment
AI safety, by its nature, resists the idea of creating powerful new information technologies to exploit mercilessly for revenue without care for downstream consequences. However, many actors in the AI safety movement are themselves tied to the digital economy, and depend on it for their power, status, and livelihoods. Thus, it is not that there are no genuine concerns being expressed, but that at every turn these concerns must be resolved in a way that keeps the massive tech machine going. Those who don’t agree with this approach are efficiently selected against. [examples follow]
And, after thinking about it, I don’t see your statement conflicting with mine.
I think it’s important to distinguish between factual disagreements and moral disagreements. My understanding is that eg Jaime is sincerely motivated by reducing x risk (though not 100% motivated by it), just disagrees with me (and presumably you) about various empirical questions about how to go about it, what risks are most likely, what timelines are, etc. I’m much less sure the founders of Mechanize care.
And to whatever degree you trust my judgement/honesty, I work at DeepMind and reducing existential risk is a fairly large part of my motivation (though far from all of it), and I try to regularly think about how my team’s strategy can be better targeted towards this.
And I know a lot of safety people at deepmind and other AGI labs who I’m very confident also sincerely care about reducing existential risks. This is one of their primary motivations, they often got into the field due to being convinced by arguments about ai risk, they will often raise in conversation concerns that their current work or the team’s current strategy is not focused on it enough, some are extremely hard-working or admirably willing to forgo credits so long as they think that their work is actually mattering for X-Risk, some dedicate a bunch of time to forming detailed mental models of how AI leads to bad outcomes and how this could be prevented and how their work fit in, etc. If people just wanted to do fun ml work, there’s a lot of other places Obviously people are complex. People are largely not motivated by a single thing and the various conflicts of interest you note seem real. I expect some of the people I’m thinking of. I’ve misjudged or say they care about X-Risk but actually don’t. But I would just be completely shocked if say half of them were not highly motivated by reducing x-. It’s generally more reasonable to be skeptical of the motivations of senior leadership, who have much messier incentives and constraints on their communication.
Regarding the missing mood thing, I think there’s something to what you’re saying, but also that it’s really psychologically unhealthy to work in a field which is constantly advancing like AI and every time there is an advance feel the true emotional magnitudes of what it would mean if existential risk has now slightly increased. If anyone did, I think they would burn out pretty fast, so the people left in the field largely don’t. I also think you should reserve those emotions for times when a trend is deviated from rather than when a trend is continued. In my opinion, the reason people were excited about the metr work was that it was measuring a thing that was already happening much more precisely, it was a really important question and reducing our confusion about that is high value. It wasn’t really capabilities work in my opinion
Is this implicitly assuming total utilitarianism? I certainly care about the future of humanity, but I reject moral views that say it is overwhelmingly the thing that matters and present day concerns round down to zero. I think many people have intuitions aligning with this.
I don’t think this is true. My sense is he views his current work as largely being good on non x-risk grounds, and thinks that even if it might slightly increase x-risk, he wouldn’t think it would be worth it for him to stop working on it, since he thinks it’s unfair to force the current generation to accept a slightly higher risk of not achieving longevity escape velocity and more material wealth in exchange for a small increase in existential risk.
He says it so plainly that it seems as straightforwardly of a rejection of AI x-risk concerns that I’ve heard:
It seems very clear that Jaime thinks that AI x-risk, is unimportant relative to almost any other issue, given his non-interest in trading off x-risk against those other issues.
It is true that Jaime might think that AI x-risk could hypothetically be motivating to him, but at least my best interpretations of what is going on, suggest to me he de-facto does not consider it as an important input into his current strategic choices, or the choices of Epoch.
I think you’re strawmanning him somewhat
Does not seem a fair description of
People are allowed to have multiple values! If someone would trade a small amount of value A for a large amount of value B, this is entirely consistent with them thinking both are important.
Like, if you offer people the option to commit suicide in exchange for reducing x-risk by x%, what value of x do you think they would require? And would you say they are not x risk motivated if they eg aren’t willing to do it at 1e-6?
In practice this doesn’t really come up, so it’s not that relevant. Similarly for Jaime’s position, how much he believes himself to be in situations where he’s trading off meaningful harm to today and meaningful harm to the present generation seems very important.
I did a bit of digging, because these quotes seemed narrow to me. Here’s the original tweet of that tweet thread.
Then right after:
All said, this specific chain doesn’t give us a huge amount of information. It totals something like 10-20 sentences.
> He says it so plainly that it seems as straightforwardly of a rejection of AI x-risk concerns that I’ve heard:
This seems like a major oversimplification to me. He says “I am concerned about concentration of power and gradual disempowerment. I put the probability that ai ends up being net bad for humans at 15%.” There is a cluster in the rationalist/EA community that believes that “gradual disempowerment” is an x-risk. Perhaps you wouldn’t define “concentration of power and gradual disempowerment” as technically an x-risk, but if so, that seems a bit like a technicality to me. It can clearly be a very major deal.
It sounds a lot to me that Jaime is very concerned about some aspects of AI risk but not others.
In the quote you reference, he clearly says, “Not that it should be my place to unilaterally make such a decision anyway.”. I hear him saying, “I disagree with the x-risk community about the issue of slowing down AI, specifically. However, I don’t think this disagreement a big concern, given that I also feel like it’s not right for me to personally push for AI to be sped up, and thus I won’t do it.”
I am not saying Jaime in-principle could not be motivated by existential risk from AI, but I do think the evidence suggests to me strongly that concerns about existential risk from AI are not among the primary motivations for his work on Epoch (which is what I understood Neel to be saying).
Maybe it is because he sees the risk as irreducible, maybe it is because the only ways of improving things would cause collateral damage for other things he cares about. I also think it should be our dominant prior that someone is not motivated by reducing x-risk unless they directly claim they do.
My sense is that Jaime’s view (and Epoch’s view more generally) is more like: “making people better informed about AI in a way that is useful to them seems heuristically good (given that AI is a big deal), it doesn’t seem that useful or important to have a very specific theory of change beyond this”. From this perspective, saying “concerns about existential risk from AI are not among the primary motivations” is partially slightly confused as the heuristic isn’t necessarily back chained from any more specific justification. Like there is no specific terminal motivation.
Like consider someone who donates to Give Directly due to “idk, seems heuristically good to empower the worst off people” and someone who generally funds global health and well being due to specifically caring about ongoing human welfare (putting aside AI for now). This heuristic is partially motived via flow through from caring about something like welfare even though it doesn’t directly show up. These people seem like natural allies to me except in surprising circumstances (e.g., it turns out the worst off people use marginal money/power in a way that is net negative for human welfare).
I agree that there is some ontological mismatch here, but I think your position is still in pretty clear conflict to what Neel said, which is what I was objecting to:
“Not 100% motivated by it” IMO sounds like an implication that “being motivated by reducing x-risk would make up something like 30%-70% of the motivation”. I don’t think that’s true, and I think various things that Jaime has said make that relatively clear.
I think you’re conflating “does not think that slowing down AI obviously reduces x-risk” with “reducing x risk is not a meaningful motivation for his work”. Jaime has clearly said that he believes x risk is a real and >=15% (though via different mechanisms to loss of control). I think that the public being well informed about AI generally reduces risk, and I think that Epoch is doing good work on this front, and that increasing the probability that AI goes well is part of why Jaime works on this. I think it’s much less clear if Frontier Math was good, but Jaime wasn’t very involved anyway, so doesn’t seem super relevant.
I basically think the only thing he’s said that you could consider objectionable is that he’s reluctant to push for a substantial pause for AI since x risk is not the only thing he cares about. But he also (sincerely, imo) expresses uncertainty about whether such a pause WOULD be good for x risk
There are a few questions here.
1. Do Jaime’s writings that that he cares about x-risk or not?
→ I think he fairly clearly states that cares.
2. Does all the evidence, when put together, imply that actually, Jaime doesn’t care about x-risk?
→ This is a much more speculative question. We have to assess how honest he is in his writing. I’d bet money that Jaime at least believes that he cares and is taking corresponding actions. This of course doesn’t absolve him of full responsibility—there are many people who believe they do things for good reasons, but causally actually do things for selfish reasons. But now we’re getting to a particularly speculative area.
“I also think it should be our dominant prior that someone is not motivated by reducing x-risk unless they directly claim they do.” → Again, to me, I regard him as basically claiming that he does care. I’d bet money that if we ask him to clarify, he’d claim that he cares. (Happy to bet on this, if that would help)
At the same time, I doubt that this is your actual crux. I’d expect that even if he claimed (more precisely) to care, you’d still be skeptical of some aspect of this.
---
Personally, I have both positive and skeptical feelings about Epoch, as I do other evals orgs. I think they’re doing some good work, but I really wish they’d lean a lot more on [clearly useful for x-risk] work. If I had a lot of money to donate, I could picture donating some to Epoch, but only if I could get a lot of assurances on which projects it would go to.
But while I have reservations about the org, I think some of the specific attacks against them (and defenses or them) are not accurate.
People’s “deep down motivations” and “endorsed upon reflection values,” etc, are not the only determiners of what they end up doing in practice re influencing x-risk.
I agree with that. I was responding specifically to this:
In that case I think your response is a non sequitur, since clearly “really care” in this context means “determiners of what they end up doing in practice re influencing x-risk”.
I personally define “really care” as “the thing they actually care about and meaningfully drives their actions (potentially among other things) is X”. If you want to define it as eg “the actions they take, in practice, effectively select for X, even if that’s not their intent” then I agree my post does not refute the point, and we have more of a semantic disagreement over what the phrase means.
I interpret the post as saying “there are several examples of people in the AI safety community taking actions that made things worse. THEREFORE these people are actively malicious or otherwise insincere about their claims to care about safety and it’s largely an afterthought put to the side as other considerations dominate”. I personally agree with some examples, disagree with others, but think this is explained by a mix of strategic disagreements about how to optimise for safety, and SOME fraction of the alleged community really not caring about safety
People are often incompetent at achieving their intended outcome, so pointing towards failure to achieve an outcome does not mean this was what they intended. ESPECIALLY if there’s no ground truth and you have strategic disagreements with those people, so you think they failed and they think they succeeded
I don’t think “not really caring” necessarily means someone is being deceptive. I hadn’t really thought through the terminology before I wrote my original post, but I would maybe define 3 categories:
claims to care about x-risk, but is being insincere
genuinely cares about x-risk, but also cares about other things (making money etc.), so they take actions that fit their non-x-risk motivations and then come up with rationalizations for why those actions are good for x-risk
genuinely cares about x-risk, and has pure motivations, but sometimes make mistakes and end up increasing x-risk
I would consider #1 and #2 to be “not really caring”. #3 really cares. But from the outside it can be hard to tell the difference between the three. (And in fact, from the inside, it’s hard to tell whether you’re a #2 or a #3.)
On a more personal note, I think in the past I was too credulous about ascribing pure motivations to people when I had disagreements with them, when in fact the reason for the disagreement was that I care about x-risk and they’re either insincere or rationalizing. My original post is something I think Michael!2018 would benefit from reading.
Does 3 include “cares about x risk and other things, does a good job of evaluating the trade off of each action according to their values, but is sometimes willing to do things that are great according to their other values but slightly negative results x risk”?
This looks closer to 2 to me?
Also, from the outside, can you describe how an observer would distinguish between [any of the items on the list] and the situation you lay out in your comment / what the downsides are to treating them similarly? I think Michael’s point is that it’s not useful/worth it to distinguish.
Whether someone is dishonest, incompetent, or underweighting x-risk (by my lights) mostly doesn’t matter for how I interface with them, or how I think the field ought to regard them, since I don’t think we should brow beat people or treat them punitively. Bottom line is I’ll rely (as an unvalenced substitute for ‘trust’) on them a little less.
I think you’re right to point out the valence of the initial wording, fwiw. I just think taxonomizing apparent defection isn’t necessary if we take as a given that we ought to treat people well and avoid claiming special knowledge of their internals, while maintaining the integrity of our personal and professional circles of trust.
If we take this as a given, I’m happy for people to categorise others however they’d like! I haven’t noticed people other than you taking that perspective in this thread
Oh man — I sure hope making ‘defectors’ and lab safety staff walk the metaphorical plank isn’t on the table. Then we’re really in trouble.
My read is that in practice many people in the online LW community are fairly hostile, and many people in the labs think the community doesn’t know what they’re talking about and totally ignores them/doesn’t really care if they’re made to walk the metaphorical plank.
At the risk of seeming quite combative, when you say
That’s basically what I mean when I said in my comment
And, after thinking about it, I don’t see your statement conflicting with mine.