Hi,
Thank you for your long and detailed answer. I’m amazed that you were able to do it so quickly after the post’s publication. Especially since you sent me your answer by email while I just published my post on LW without showing it to anyone first.
Arthur reports a variety of people in this post as saying things that I think are somewhat misinterpreted, and I disagree with several of the things he describes them as saying.
I added a link to this comment in the top of the post. I am not surprised to learn that I misunderstood some things which were said during the workshop honestly. Those were 5 pretty intense days, and there was no way for me to have perfect memory of everything. However, I won’t correct the post; this is a text explaining as honestly as possible how I felt about the event. Those kinds of misunderstanding are parts of the events too. I really hope that people reading this kind of posts do understand that it’s a personal text and that they should form their own view. Given that it’s a LW blog post and not a newspaper/research article, I feel like it’s okay.
It’s considered good practice to pay people to do work for trials; we paid Arthur a rate which is lower than you’d pay a Bay Area software engineer as a contractor, and I was getting Arthur to do somewhat unusually difficult (though unusually interesting) work.
I do confirm that it was interesting.
I guess that I do not know what is good practice in California or not. I spent hundreds of euros for job interviews in France, when I had to pay for train/plane/hotel to go meet a potential employer, and I kind of assume that looking for a job is an expensive task.
I think this is a substantial misunderstanding of what Anna said. I don’t think she was trying to propose a rule that people should follow, and she definitely wasn’t explaining a rule of the AIRCS workshop or something; I think she was doing something a lot more like talking about something she thought about how people should relate to AI risk. I might come back and edit this comment later to say more.
I mostly understand it as a common rule, not as an AIRCS rule. This rule seems similar to the rule “do not show pictures of slaughterhouse to people who didn’t decide by themselves to check how slaughterhouse are”. On the one hand, it can be argued that if people knew how badly animals were treated, things would get better for them. It remains that, even if you believe that, showing slaughterhouse’s picture to random people who were not prepared would be an extremely mean thing to do to them.
AFAICT, my level of transparency with applicants is quite unusual. This often isn’t sufficient to make everything okay.
Would it be a LW post if I didn’t mention a single biais ? I wonder whether there is an illusion of transparency here. There are some informations you write there that would have been helpful to have beforehand, and that I don’t recall hearing. For example, “my best guess before the AIRCS workshop was that he wouldn’t be a good fit at MIRI immediately because of his insufficient background in AI safety”. On the one hand, it could be expected that I understand that I would not be a good fit, given that I don’t have AI safety background. That would makes sens in most companies actually. On the other hand, the way I perceive MIRI is that you’re quite unusual, so I could assume that you mainly are looking for devs’ wanting to work with rationalist, and that it would be okay if those people needs some time to teach themselves everything they need to learn.
Given that both hypothesis are possible, I see how it can seem more transparent to you than it actually was for me. However, I must admit that on my side, I was not totally transparent, since I didn’t ask you to clarify immediately. More generally, the point I want to make here is that my goal is not to blame you, nor the MIRI, nor AIRCS, nor myself. I would hate if this post or comment was read as me wanting to complain. When I wrote the post, I thought about what I would have wanted to read before going to AIRCS; and tried to write it. While I do have some negative remarks, I hope that it globally appears as a positive post. I did state it, and I repeat it: I did appreciate coming to AIRCS.
First: they could mention people coming to AIRCS for a future job interview that some things will be awkward for them; but that they have the same workshop as everyone else so they’ll have to deal with it. I think I do mention this (and am somewhat surprised that it was a surprise for Arthur)
I may have forgotten then. I don’t claim my memory is perfect. It’s entirely possible that I did not take this warning seriously enough. If at some point someone read this post before going to AIRCS, I hope it’ll help them take this into account. Even if I do not think that what was important for me will actually be important for them, so maybe that’ll be useless in the end.
I don’t quite understand what Arthur’s complaint is here, though I agree that it’s awkward having people be at events with people who are considering hiring them.
I honestly can’t state exactly what felt wrong. This is actually a paragraph I spent a lot of time, because I didn’t find an exact answer. I finally decided to state what I felt, without being able to explain the reason behind it. Which by the way seems a lot what I understood about circling the way it was presented to my group the first day.
Arthur is really smart and it seemed worth getting him more involved in all this stuff.
Thank you.
Have you any idea about how to test your hypothesis ? How to test for difference between past and present ?
I am entirely convinced that some people don’t try to go and steal other good idea from the outgroup. Even people from «progessive» group. I can easily imagine that it is a general tendency, and not just something I see in the people in my neighborhood.
However, I don’t see anything convincing that it is actually getting worse. I’m not an historian, from what I have heard and understood of the past centuries, open-mindness was not generally an adjective which could describe most of the people who had to live in those time, even if they were some great exceptions. The time it took to switch from roman number to arabic number seems to show that “stealing good ideas” was not an applied ideal. Thus, I must admit I’m kind of sceptic about the content of this blog post. Or, to say it in an other way, it’s strangely looking similar to an article in the recent trend about “how internet is creating a bubble around you”, but rewritten with rationalist wording.
By the way, if there is an easy way to distinguish good idea from bad idea, I’d love to have a pointer to it. Which would be mandatory to know what idea to actually steal.