Noting out loud that I’m starting to feel a bit worried about the culture-war-like tribal conflict dynamic between AIS/LW/EA and e/acc circles that I feel is slowly beginning to set in on our end as well, centered on Twitter but also present to an extent on other sites and in real life. The potential sanity damage to our own community and possibly future AI policy from this should it intensify is what concerns me most here.
People have tried to suck the rationalist diaspora into culture-war-like debates before, and I think the diaspora has done a reasonable enough job of surviving intact by not taking the bait much. But on this topic, many of us actually really care about both the content of the debate itself and what people outside the community think of it, and I fear it is making us more vulnerable to the algorithms’ attempts to infect us than we have been in the past.
I think us going out of our way to keep standards high in memetic public spaces might possibly help some in keeping our own sanity from deteriorating. If we engage on Twitter, maybe we don’t just refrain from lowering the level of debate and using arguments as soldiers but try to have a policy of actively commenting to correct the record when people of any affiliation make locally-invalid arguments against our opposition if we would counterfactually also correct the record were such a locally-invalid argument directed against us or our in-group. I think high status and high Twitter/Youtube-visible community members’ behavior might end up having a particularly high impact on the eventual outcome here.
First, I suggest that people pay heed to what happened in the movie “Don’t Look Up.” I don’t remember the character names, but the punk female scientist, when confronted during an interview by unserious journalists, went absolutely bonkers on television and contributed significantly to doom. The lesson I got from this is if you do not present serious existential threats in a cogent, sober manner, the public will polarize based on vibes and priors and then lock in. Only the best, most unflappable, polished spokespeople should be put forward, and even then, it might be no use.
Second, you cannot have a meaningful exchange on Twitter. Twitter encourages the generation of poorly reasoned emotional responses that are then used to undermine better reasoned future arguments. I would recommend people just avoid that platform entirely because the temptation to respond to raconteurs like Jezos is too high.
In the spirit of pointing out local invalidities, the first paragraph (while perhaps true) is a display of learning from fictional evidence, which is usually regarded as fallacious.
Therefore I have weak-downvoted your comment. It would be much improved by trying to learn from real-world cases (which might as well support the position).
Noting out loud that I’m starting to feel a bit worried about the culture-war-like tribal conflict dynamic between AIS/LW/EA and e/acc circles that I feel is slowly beginning to set in on our end as well, centered on Twitter but also present to an extent on other sites and in real life. The potential sanity damage to our own community and possibly future AI policy from this should it intensify is what concerns me most here.
People have tried to suck the rationalist diaspora into culture-war-like debates before, and I think the diaspora has done a reasonable enough job of surviving intact by not taking the bait much. But on this topic, many of us actually really care about both the content of the debate itself and what people outside the community think of it, and I fear it is making us more vulnerable to the algorithms’ attempts to infect us than we have been in the past.
I think us going out of our way to keep standards high in memetic public spaces might possibly help some in keeping our own sanity from deteriorating. If we engage on Twitter, maybe we don’t just refrain from lowering the level of debate and using arguments as soldiers but try to have a policy of actively commenting to correct the record when people of any affiliation make locally-invalid arguments against our opposition if we would counterfactually also correct the record were such a locally-invalid argument directed against us or our in-group. I think high status and high Twitter/Youtube-visible community members’ behavior might end up having a particularly high impact on the eventual outcome here.
First, I suggest that people pay heed to what happened in the movie “Don’t Look Up.” I don’t remember the character names, but the punk female scientist, when confronted during an interview by unserious journalists, went absolutely bonkers on television and contributed significantly to doom. The lesson I got from this is if you do not present serious existential threats in a cogent, sober manner, the public will polarize based on vibes and priors and then lock in. Only the best, most unflappable, polished spokespeople should be put forward, and even then, it might be no use.
Second, you cannot have a meaningful exchange on Twitter. Twitter encourages the generation of poorly reasoned emotional responses that are then used to undermine better reasoned future arguments. I would recommend people just avoid that platform entirely because the temptation to respond to raconteurs like Jezos is too high.
In the spirit of pointing out local invalidities, the first paragraph (while perhaps true) is a display of learning from fictional evidence, which is usually regarded as fallacious.
Therefore I have weak-downvoted your comment. It would be much improved by trying to learn from real-world cases (which might as well support the position).