> 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
If someone said the “statement of support” you outline, what they are literally saying is meaningless. That statement can only be understood in the context of a political game they’re playing with the rest of society.
If someone said, “I think [IABIED]’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.” — you think that’s meaningless?
I dunno what I’m not understanding. That statement seems extremely meaningful and important to me.
I don’t think LessWrong is the right venue for this, or really, I don’t want it to become that venue. I basically agree with Steven Byrnes here, but generalized to also include rallying others to agree to stuff. I think its reasonable to make a post arguing people should publicly declare their stances on such things.
I’m not sure what we disagree about here? This current post is a place where people can publicly declare their stances. Ideally it would have a poll or aggregation feature in the main post, because I’m not even asking people to put their names on their declaration, I’m happy to just have the community infrastructure aggregate a high fraction of people’s existing views into mutual knowledge.
I’m not clear whether you think your argument generalizes to claiming the CAIS statement was skirting too close to group-think too?
What I liked about the CAIS statement was that it enabled people to know that top academics and industry leaders were significantly agreeing on an extremely important belief. Without that kind of mutual-knowledge-building statement, the natural course of events is that it’s actually quite hard to tell what people think about the most basic claims. Even today, I find myself constantly pointing to the CAIS letter when people on the internet claim that AI x-risk is a totally unserious belief.
I think the situation we find ourselves on LW is that the community hasn’t been polled or aggregated in a meaningful way, on a belief that seems to me about as consensus to us as the CAIS statement was to experts in AI.
The strongest part of the argument to me is that “LW isn’t the place for it”. Fair enough, LW can be whatever people want… I just think it’s sad that no existing place was ever formed for this important missing piece of community mutual-knowledge building, except the place founded by the guy and the idea that currently could have used the support.
Now that political game may be necessary and useful, but I’d rather LessWrong not be a battlefield for such games, and remain the place everyone can go to to think, not fight.
Aggregating people’s existing belief-states into mutual knowledge seems like good “thinking” to me—part of the infrastructure that makes thinking more effective at climbing the tree of knowledge.
Yeah there’s always going to be a gray area when everyone is being asked if their complex belief-state maps to one side of a binary question like endorsing a statement of support.
I’ve updated the first bullet to just use the book’s phrasing. It now says:
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.
Fair enough. I didn’t find a LW poll feature and I dunno how to better achieve mutual knowledge about LW’s level of support for the book.
In principle it makes sense. But in reality right now, the only place where there’s a sizable MIRI-aligned community, is the community that’s entirely going the persnickety route. I’m open to different counterfactual comparisons, I’m just noting that compared to the world where there’s a sizable MIRI-aligned community that shows support for MIRI, this world is disappointing.
I’m in the Twitter thread with Steve. I’ll just note that I don’t think it’s realistic to expect the world’s reaction to be more passionate and supportive than the LW community’s signaled reaction.
I think Eliezer/Nate were deliberately not attempting to make the book some kind of broad thing the whole community could rally behind. They might have done so, but, they didn’t.
IMO they missed their opportunity and now LW is missing its/our opportunity, and either side naturally thinks it’s more the other’s fault.
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).