Shortly before finishing this post, I reread Views on when AGI comes and on strategy to reduce existential risk. @TsviBT notes that there are some difficult confrontation + empathy skills that might help communicating with people doing capabilities research. But, this “goes above what is normally called empathy.”
It may go beyond what’s normally called empathy, understanding, gentleness, wisdom, trustworthiness, neutrality, justness, relatedness, and so on. It may have to incorporate a lot of different, almost contradictory properties; for example, the intervener might have to at the same time be present and active in the most oppositional way (e.g., saying: I’m here, and when all is said and done you’re threatening the lives of everyone I love, and they have a right to exist) while also being almost totally diaphanous (e.g., in fact not interfering with the intervened’s own reflective processes)
He also noted that there are people who are working on similar abilities, but they aren’t pushing themselves enough:
Some people are working on related abilities. E.g. Circlers, authentic relaters, therapists. As far as I know (at least having some substantial experience with Circlers), these groups aren’t challenging themselves enough. Mathematicians constantly challenge themselves: when they answer one sort of question, that sort of question becomes less interesting, and they move on to thinking about more difficult questions. In that way, they encounter each fundamental difficulty eventually, and thus have likely already grappled with the mathematical aspect of a fundamental difficulty that another science encounters.
This isn’t quite the same thing I was looking at in this post, but something about it feels conceptually related. I may have more to say after thinking about it more.
Shortly before finishing this post, I reread Views on when AGI comes and on strategy to reduce existential risk. @TsviBT notes that there are some difficult confrontation + empathy skills that might help communicating with people doing capabilities research. But, this “goes above what is normally called empathy.”
He also noted that there are people who are working on similar abilities, but they aren’t pushing themselves enough:
This isn’t quite the same thing I was looking at in this post, but something about it feels conceptually related. I may have more to say after thinking about it more.