Can you not be close friends with someone while also expecting them to be bad at self-control when it comes to alcohol? Or perhaps they are great at technical stuff like research but pretty bad at negotiation, especially when dealing with experienced adverserial situations such as when talking to VCs?
If you think someone’s decisionmaking is actively bad, i.e. you’d better off reversing any advice from them, then maybe you should keep them around so you can do that!
It is not that people people’s decision-making skill is optimized such that you can consistently reverse someone’s opinion to get something that accurately tracks reality. If that was the case then they are implicitly tracking reality very well already. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
But more realistically, someone who’s fucked up in a big way will probably have learned from that, and functional cultures don’t throw away hard-won knowledge.
Again you seem to not be trying to track the context of our discussion here. This advice again is usually said when it comes to junior people embedded in an institution, because the ability to blame someone and / or hold them responsible is a power that senior / executive people hold. This attitude you describe makes a lot of sense when it comes to people who are learning things, yes. I don’t know if you can plainly bring it into this domain, and you even acknowledge this in the next few lines.
Imagine a world where AI is just an inherently treacherous domain, and we throw out the leadership whenever they make a mistake.
I think it is incredibly unlikely that the rationalist community has an ability to ‘throw out’ the ‘leadership’ involved here. I find this notion incredibly silly, given the amount of influence OpenPhil has over the alignment community, especially through their funding (including the pipeline, such as MATS).
It is not that people people’s decision-making skill is optimized such that you can consistently reverse someone’s opinion to get something that accurately tracks reality. If that was the case then they are implicitly tracking reality very well already. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Sure, I think this helps tease out the moral valence point I was trying to make. “Don’t allow them near” implies their advice is actively harmful, which in turn suggests that reversing it could be a good idea. But as you say, this is implausible. A more plausible statement is that their advice is basically noise—you shouldn’t pay too much attention to it. I expect OP would’ve said something like that if they were focused on descriptive accuracy rather than scapegoating.
Another way to illuminate the moral dimension of this conversation: If we’re talking about poor decision-making, perhaps MIRI and FHI should also be discussed? They did a lot to create interest in AGI, and MIRI failed to create good alignment researchers by its own lights. Now after doing advocacy off and on for years, and creating this situation, they’re pivoting to 100% advocacy.
Could MIRI be made up of good people who are “great at technical stuff”, yet apt to shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to communicating with the public? It’s hard for me to imagine an upvoted post on this forum saying “MIRI shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near AI safety communications”.
Can you not be close friends with someone while also expecting them to be bad at self-control when it comes to alcohol? Or perhaps they are great at technical stuff like research but pretty bad at negotiation, especially when dealing with experienced adverserial situations such as when talking to VCs?
It is not that people people’s decision-making skill is optimized such that you can consistently reverse someone’s opinion to get something that accurately tracks reality. If that was the case then they are implicitly tracking reality very well already. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Again you seem to not be trying to track the context of our discussion here. This advice again is usually said when it comes to junior people embedded in an institution, because the ability to blame someone and / or hold them responsible is a power that senior / executive people hold. This attitude you describe makes a lot of sense when it comes to people who are learning things, yes. I don’t know if you can plainly bring it into this domain, and you even acknowledge this in the next few lines.
I think it is incredibly unlikely that the rationalist community has an ability to ‘throw out’ the ‘leadership’ involved here. I find this notion incredibly silly, given the amount of influence OpenPhil has over the alignment community, especially through their funding (including the pipeline, such as MATS).
Sure, I think this helps tease out the moral valence point I was trying to make. “Don’t allow them near” implies their advice is actively harmful, which in turn suggests that reversing it could be a good idea. But as you say, this is implausible. A more plausible statement is that their advice is basically noise—you shouldn’t pay too much attention to it. I expect OP would’ve said something like that if they were focused on descriptive accuracy rather than scapegoating.
Another way to illuminate the moral dimension of this conversation: If we’re talking about poor decision-making, perhaps MIRI and FHI should also be discussed? They did a lot to create interest in AGI, and MIRI failed to create good alignment researchers by its own lights. Now after doing advocacy off and on for years, and creating this situation, they’re pivoting to 100% advocacy.
Could MIRI be made up of good people who are “great at technical stuff”, yet apt to shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to communicating with the public? It’s hard for me to imagine an upvoted post on this forum saying “MIRI shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near AI safety communications”.