I suspect the real disagreement between you and Anthropic-blamers like me is downstream of a P(Doom) disagreement (where yours is pretty low and others’ is high), since I’ve seen this is often the case with various cases of smart people disagreeing.
Realistically/pragmatically balanced moves in a lowish-P(Doom) world are unacceptable in a high-P(Doom) world.
I just noticed the LessWrong site loads a lot faster than it used to. Very cool!
Makes sense. Only problem is, bear fat + sugar + salt seems qualitatively pretty similar to ice cream. It doesn’t seem like it neglected the qualitative spirit of why ice cream is good, which just adds to the fine parsing needed to get value out of this.
The fact still stands that ice cream is what we mass produce and send to grocery stores.
Yeah, I guess this exact observation is critical to making Eliezer’s analogy accurate.
IMO “predicting that bear fat with honey and salt tastes good” is analogous to “predicting that harnessing a star’s power will be an optimization target” — something we probably can successfully do.
And “predicting bear fat (or some kind of rendered animal fat) with honey and salt will be a popular treat”—the thing we couldn’t have done a-priori—is analogous to “predicting solar-to-electricity generator panels will be a popular fixture on many planets” (since the details probably will turn out to have some unpredictable twists), and also to “predicting that making humans satisfied with outcomes will be an optimization target for AIs in the production environment as a result of their training”.
I think this analogy is probably right, but the sense in which it’s right seems sufficiently non-obvious/detailed/finicky that I don’t think we can expect most people to get it?
Plus IMO it further undermines the pedagogical value of this example to observe that a drinkable form of ice cream (shakes) is also popular, plus there’s gelato / frozen yogurt / soft serve, and then thick sweet yogurts and popsicles… it’s a pretty continuous treat-fitness landscape.
I do think Eliezer is importantly right that the exact peak market-winning point in this landscape, would be hard to predict a-priori. But is the hardness also explained by the peak being dependent on chaotic historical/cultural forces?
And that’s why I personally don’t bring up the bear fat thing in my AI danger explanations.
Seems like the rapid-fire nature of an InkHaven writing sprint is a poor fit for a public post under a personally-charged summary bullet like “Oliver puts personal conflict ahead of shared goals”.
High-quality discourse means making an effort to give people the benefit of the doubt when making claims about their character. It’s worth taking time to carefully follow our rationalist norms of epistemic rigor, productive discourse, and personal charity.
I’d expect a high-evidence post about a very non-consensus topic like this to start out in a more norm-calibrated and self-aware epistemic tone, e.g. “I have concerns about Oliver’s decisionmaking as leader of Lightcone based on a pattern of incidents I’ve witnessed in his personal conflicts (detailed below)”.
Maybe Lightcone Infrastructure can just allow earmarking donations for LessWrong, if enough people care about that criticism.
Thanks. The reactions to such a post would constitute a stronger common knowledge signal of community agreement with the book (to the degree that such agreement is in fact present in the community).
I wonder if it would be better to make the agree-voting anonymous (like LW post voting) or with people’s names attached to their votes (like react-voting).
I’m sure this is going too far for you, but I also personally wish LW could go even further toward turning a sufficient amount of mutual support expressed in that form (if it turns out to exist) into a frontpage that actually looks like what most humans expect a supportive front page around a big event to look like (moreso than having a banner mentioning it and discussion mentioning it).
> nor is my argument even “mutual knowledge is bad”.
For example, I really like the LessWrong surveys! I take those every year!
What’s the minimally modified version of posting this “Statement of Support for IABIED” you’d feel good about? Presumably the upper bound for your desired level of modification would be if we included a yearly survey question about whether people agree with the quoted central claim from the book?
Again, the separate tweet about LW crab-bucketing in my Twitter thread wasn’t meant as a response to to you in this LW thread.
I agree that “room for disagreement does not imply any disagreement is valid”, and am not seeing anything left to respond to on that point.
Ah yeah that’d probably be better
What’s the issue with my Twitter post? It just says I see your comment as representative of many LWers, and the same thing I said in my previous reply, that aggregating people’s belief-states into mutual knowledge is actually part of “thinking” rather than “fighting”.
I find the criticism for my quality of engagement in this thread distasteful, as I’ve provided substantive object-level engagement with each of your comments so far. I could equally criticize you for bringing up multiple sub-points per post that leave me no way to respond in a time-efficient way without being called “minimal”, but I won’t, because I don’t see either of our behaviors so far as breaking out of the boundaries of productive LessWrong discourse. My claim about this community’s “crab-bucketing” was a separate tweet not intended as a reply to you.
I have argued both that your argument for why “The goal of LessWrong [...] is to lead the world on having correct opinions about important topics” is false
Ok, I’ll pick this sub-argument to expand on. You correctly point out that what I wrote does not text-match the “What LessWrong is about” section. My argument would be that this cited quote:
[Aspiring] rationalists should win [at life, their goals, etc]. You know a rationalist because they’re sitting atop a pile of utility. – Rationality is systematized winning
As well as Eliezer’s post about “Something to protect”—imply that a community that practices rationality ought to somehow optimize the causal connection between their practice of rationality and the impact that it has.
This obviously leaves room for people to have disagreeing interpretations of what LessWrong ought to do, as you and I currently do.
I’m happy to agree on the crux that if one accepts “the only people who care what LessWrongers have to say are other LessWrongers” (which I currently don’t), then that would weaken the case for mutual knowledge — I would say by about half. The other half of my claim is that building mutual knowledge benefits other LessWrongers.
The only people who care what LessWrongers have to say are other LessWrongers!
I disagree with that premise. The goal of LessWrong, as I understand it, is to lead the world on having correct opinions about important topics. I would never assume away the possibility of that goal.
I’m open to other shorthands.
If you don’t know whether the book’s thesis being “all-too-plausibly” or “not all-too-plausibly” right describes your position better, you can just go ahead and not count yourself as a supporter of IABIED (or flip a coin, or don’t participate in the aggregation effort). The mutual-knowledge I’m hoping to build is among people who don’t see this as a gray-area question, because I think that’s already a pretty high fraction (maybe majority) of LWers.
Oh ok, but I’m just using it as a shorthand for the longer statement I wrote write under it, which I guess you agree is clear.
Use the agree/disagree react buttons on this poll-comment to build mutual knowledge about what LWers believe!
I support IABIED: I think the book’s thesis is likely, or at least all-too-plausibly right: That building an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, will cause human extinction.
Ah thx I didn’t know about that. A poll in the top-level post seems like a potentially useful feature. At least in special cases like right now where it seems like many/most people hold an important shared position, and building mutual knowledge about that seems valuable, a poll can do that. I’ll try a comment poll. Edit: here it is
Here’s my recent interview with Tsvi about Berkeley Genomics project. I asked him what I think are cruxy questions about whether it’s worth supporting, and I think the conclusion is yes!