Person gives up working on AI alignment. (This is probably a good move, when it’s not your fit, as is your case.)
Danger zone: In ways that sort-of-rationalize-around their existing decision to give up working on AI alignment, the person starts renovating their belief system around what feels helpful to their mental health. (I don’t know if people are usually doing this after having already tried standard medical-type treatments, or instead of trying those treatments.)
Danger zone: Person announces this shift to others, in a way that’s maybe and/or implicitly prescriptive (example).
That makes sense to me, though I feel unclear about whether you think this post is an example of that pattern / whether your comment has some intent aimed at me?
Giving up on transhumanism as a useful idea of what-to-aim-for or identify as, separate from how much you personally can contribute to it.
More directly: avoiding “pinning your hopes on AI” (which, depending on how I’m supposed to interpret this, could mean “avoiding solutions that ever lead to aligned AI occurring” or “avoiding near-term AI, period” or “believing that something other than AI is likely to be the most important near-future thing”, which are pretty different from each other, even if the end prescription for you personally is (or seems, on first pass, to be) the same.), separate from how much you personally can do to positively affect AI development.
Then again, I might’ve misread/misinterpreted what you wrote. (I’m unlikely to reply to further object-level explanation of this, sorry. I mainly wanted to point out the pattern. It’d be nice if your reasoning did turn out correct, but my point is that its starting-place seems/seemed to be rationalization as per the pattern.)
I’m unlikely to reply to further object-level explanation of this, sorry.
No worries! I’ll reply anyway for anyone else reading this, but it’s fine if you don’t respond further.
Giving up on transhumanism as a useful idea of what-to-aim-for or identify as, separate from how much you personally can contribute to it.
It sounds like we have different ideas of what it means to identify as something. For me, one of the important functions of identity is as a model of what I am, and as what distinguishes me from other people. For instance, I identify as Finnish because of reasons like having a Finnish citizenship, having lived in Finland for my whole life, Finnish being my native language etc.; these are facts about what I am, and they’re also important for predicting my future behavior.
For me, it would feel more like rationalization if I stopped contributing to something like transhumanism but nevertheless continued identifying as a transhumanist. My identity is something that should track what I am and do, and if I don’t do anything that would meaningfully set me apart from people who don’t identify as transhumanists… then that would feel like the label was incorrect and imply wrong kinds of predictions. Rather, I should just update on the evidence and drop the label.
As for transhumanism as a useful idea of what to aim for, I’m not sure of what exactly you mean by that, but I haven’t started thinking “transhumanism bad” or anything like that. I still think that a lot of the transhumanist ideals are good and worthy ones and that it’s great if people pursue them. (But there are a lot of ideals I think are good and worthy ones without identifying with them. For example, I like that museums exist and that there are people running them. But I don’t do anything about this other than occasionally visit one, so I don’t identify as a museum-ologist despite approving of them.)
More directly: avoiding “pinning your hopes on AI” (which, depending on how I’m supposed to interpret this, could mean “avoiding solutions that ever lead to aligned AI occurring” or “avoiding near-term AI, period” or “believing that something other than AI is likely to be the most important near-future thing”
Hmm, none of these. I’m not sure of what the first one means but I’d gladly have a solution that led to aligned AI, I use LLMs quite a bit, and AI clearly does seem like the most important near-future thing.
“Pinning my hopes on AI” meant something like “(subconsciously) hoping to get AI here sooner so that it would fix the things that were making me anxious”, and avoiding that just means “noticing that therapy and conventional things like that work better for fixing my anxieties than waiting for AI to come and fix them”. This too feels to me like actually updating on the evidence (noticing that there’s something better that I can do already and I don’t need to wait for AI to feel better) rather than like rationalizing something.
Person tries to work on AI alignment.
Person fails due to various factors.
Person gives up working on AI alignment. (This is probably a good move, when it’s not your fit, as is your case.)
Danger zone: In ways that sort-of-rationalize-around their existing decision to give up working on AI alignment, the person starts renovating their belief system around what feels helpful to their mental health. (I don’t know if people are usually doing this after having already tried standard medical-type treatments, or instead of trying those treatments.)
Danger zone: Person announces this shift to others, in a way that’s maybe and/or implicitly prescriptive (example).
There are, depressingly, many such cases of this pattern. (Related post with more details on this pattern.)
That makes sense to me, though I feel unclear about whether you think this post is an example of that pattern / whether your comment has some intent aimed at me?
Yes, I think this post / your story behind it, is likely an example of this pattern.
Okay! It wasn’t intended as prescriptive but I can see it as being implicitly that.
What do you think I’m rationalizing?
Giving up on transhumanism as a useful idea of what-to-aim-for or identify as, separate from how much you personally can contribute to it.
More directly: avoiding “pinning your hopes on AI” (which, depending on how I’m supposed to interpret this, could mean “avoiding solutions that ever lead to aligned AI occurring” or “avoiding near-term AI, period” or “believing that something other than AI is likely to be the most important near-future thing”, which are pretty different from each other, even if the end prescription for you personally is (or seems, on first pass, to be) the same.), separate from how much you personally can do to positively affect AI development.
Then again, I might’ve misread/misinterpreted what you wrote. (I’m unlikely to reply to further object-level explanation of this, sorry. I mainly wanted to point out the pattern. It’d be nice if your reasoning did turn out correct, but my point is that its starting-place seems/seemed to be rationalization as per the pattern.)
No worries! I’ll reply anyway for anyone else reading this, but it’s fine if you don’t respond further.
It sounds like we have different ideas of what it means to identify as something. For me, one of the important functions of identity is as a model of what I am, and as what distinguishes me from other people. For instance, I identify as Finnish because of reasons like having a Finnish citizenship, having lived in Finland for my whole life, Finnish being my native language etc.; these are facts about what I am, and they’re also important for predicting my future behavior.
For me, it would feel more like rationalization if I stopped contributing to something like transhumanism but nevertheless continued identifying as a transhumanist. My identity is something that should track what I am and do, and if I don’t do anything that would meaningfully set me apart from people who don’t identify as transhumanists… then that would feel like the label was incorrect and imply wrong kinds of predictions. Rather, I should just update on the evidence and drop the label.
As for transhumanism as a useful idea of what to aim for, I’m not sure of what exactly you mean by that, but I haven’t started thinking “transhumanism bad” or anything like that. I still think that a lot of the transhumanist ideals are good and worthy ones and that it’s great if people pursue them. (But there are a lot of ideals I think are good and worthy ones without identifying with them. For example, I like that museums exist and that there are people running them. But I don’t do anything about this other than occasionally visit one, so I don’t identify as a museum-ologist despite approving of them.)
Hmm, none of these. I’m not sure of what the first one means but I’d gladly have a solution that led to aligned AI, I use LLMs quite a bit, and AI clearly does seem like the most important near-future thing.
“Pinning my hopes on AI” meant something like “(subconsciously) hoping to get AI here sooner so that it would fix the things that were making me anxious”, and avoiding that just means “noticing that therapy and conventional things like that work better for fixing my anxieties than waiting for AI to come and fix them”. This too feels to me like actually updating on the evidence (noticing that there’s something better that I can do already and I don’t need to wait for AI to feel better) rather than like rationalizing something.