Just to state a personal opinion, I think if it makes you work harder on alignment, I’m fine with that being your subconscious motivation structure. There are places where it diverges, and this sort of comment can be good in that it highlights to such people that any detrimental status seeking will be noticed and punished.
But if we start scaling down how much credit people should get based on purity of subconscious heart, we’re all going to die.
But if we start scaling down how much credit people should get based on purity of subconscious heart, we’re all going to die.
That’s not how I interpreted lc’s comment. I think lc means that people – and maybe especially “ambitious” people (i.e., people with some grandiose traits who enjoy power/influence – are at risk to go astray in their rationality when choosing/updating their path to impact as they’re tempted to pick paths that fit their strengths and lead to recognition. He’s saying “pay close attention whether the described path to impact is indeed positive.”
For instance, Connor seems gifted at ML capabilities work and willing to take action based on inner conviction. Is he in the unfortunate world where the best path to impact says “don’t reap any of the benefits of your ML talents” or in the fortunate one where it says “making money with ML is step one of a sound plan?”
Everyone faces this sort of tradeoff, but since you sometimes see people believe things like “this may not be the most impactful thing I could possibly do, but it’s what suits my strengths,” and Connor doesn’t seem to have beliefs like that, there are specific reasons to pay close attention. Of course, the same goes for carefully watching other people who claim that they know how to have a lot of impact and it happens to be something that really plays to their strengths. (I think we definitely need some people who act ambitiously on some specific vision that plays to their strengths!)
Just to state a personal opinion, I think if it makes you work harder on alignment, I’m fine with that being your subconscious motivation structure. There are places where it diverges, and this sort of comment can be good in that it highlights to such people that any detrimental status seeking will be noticed and punished. But if we start scaling down how much credit people should get based on purity of subconscious heart, we’re all going to die.
That’s not how I interpreted lc’s comment. I think lc means that people – and maybe especially “ambitious” people (i.e., people with some grandiose traits who enjoy power/influence – are at risk to go astray in their rationality when choosing/updating their path to impact as they’re tempted to pick paths that fit their strengths and lead to recognition. He’s saying “pay close attention whether the described path to impact is indeed positive.”
For instance, Connor seems gifted at ML capabilities work and willing to take action based on inner conviction. Is he in the unfortunate world where the best path to impact says “don’t reap any of the benefits of your ML talents” or in the fortunate one where it says “making money with ML is step one of a sound plan?”
Everyone faces this sort of tradeoff, but since you sometimes see people believe things like “this may not be the most impactful thing I could possibly do, but it’s what suits my strengths,” and Connor doesn’t seem to have beliefs like that, there are specific reasons to pay close attention. Of course, the same goes for carefully watching other people who claim that they know how to have a lot of impact and it happens to be something that really plays to their strengths. (I think we definitely need some people who act ambitiously on some specific vision that plays to their strengths!)
This is also how I interpreted lc’s comment.