fwiw, I don’t think you should feel obligated to talk about or come to an inside view on AI.
It seems like this post has an implicit point of something like “I feel pressured to have opinions about AI and that sucks”, but I’m not entirely sure of your frame on that.
I definitely support people only thinking much about AI if they want to, and/or it feels tractably useful and psychologically safe. There’s maybe an implicit competing access needs thing of “maybe many EA meetups will have a bunch of people talking about AI, and that makes those meetups feel less friendly”, and if your experience is something like that, that sucks and I’m sad about it but I’m not sure what to change. I do think AI is an important topic for other people to be able to think and discuss in more detail.
But, like, I support you having a social script like “I don’t think much about AI, it’s not my specialization and it doesn’t feel very tractable for me to think about and I find it fairly [distressing?/intense?/difficult-to-think-about?], I’m focused on [areas you’re focused on].” And if someone keeps pressuring you to engage on it, idk, tell them I told them to back off. :P
Thanks very much! I basically agree with you—I’m pretty comfortable telling people I don’t have an opinion, but that’s unusual in my social circles, so I wanted to write up an explanation for why.
fwiw, I don’t think you should feel obligated to talk about or come to an inside view on AI.
It seems like this post has an implicit point of something like “I feel pressured to have opinions about AI and that sucks”, but I’m not entirely sure of your frame on that.
I definitely support people only thinking much about AI if they want to, and/or it feels tractably useful and psychologically safe. There’s maybe an implicit competing access needs thing of “maybe many EA meetups will have a bunch of people talking about AI, and that makes those meetups feel less friendly”, and if your experience is something like that, that sucks and I’m sad about it but I’m not sure what to change. I do think AI is an important topic for other people to be able to think and discuss in more detail.
But, like, I support you having a social script like “I don’t think much about AI, it’s not my specialization and it doesn’t feel very tractable for me to think about and I find it fairly [distressing?/intense?/difficult-to-think-about?], I’m focused on [areas you’re focused on].” And if someone keeps pressuring you to engage on it, idk, tell them I told them to back off. :P
Thanks very much! I basically agree with you—I’m pretty comfortable telling people I don’t have an opinion, but that’s unusual in my social circles, so I wanted to write up an explanation for why.