Ah I see. Hmm, if I say “Yesterday I said X,” people-who-talk-like-me will interpret contextless disagreement with that claim as “Yesterday I didn’t say X” and not as “X is not true.” Perhaps this is a different communication norm from LW standards, in which case I’ll try to interpret future agree/disagree comments in that light.
I agree from quickly looking at Beren’s LinkedIn page that he seems like a technical expert (I don’t know enough about ML to have a particularly relevant inside-view about ML technical expertise).
BTW, from the comment to the EA forum cross-post, I discovered that Beren reportedly left Conjecture very recently. That’s indeed a negative update on Conjecture for me (maybe not as much as he specifically left but rather that this indicates a high turnover rate), but regardless, this doesn’t apply to the inference made by Omega in this report, along the lines that “Conjecture’s research is iffy because they don’t have senior technical experts and don’t know what are they doing”, because this wasn’t true until very recently and probably still isn’t true (overwhelmingly likely there are other technical experts who are still working at Conjecture), so this doesn’t invalidate or stain the research that has been done and published previously.
Ah I see. Hmm, if I say “Yesterday I said X,” people-who-talk-like-me will interpret contextless disagreement with that claim as “Yesterday I didn’t say X” and not as “X is not true.” Perhaps this is a different communication norm from LW standards, in which case I’ll try to interpret future agree/disagree comments in that light.
I agree from quickly looking at Beren’s LinkedIn page that he seems like a technical expert (I don’t know enough about ML to have a particularly relevant inside-view about ML technical expertise).
I think the (perhaps annoying) fact is that LW readers aren’t a monolith and different people interpret disagreement votes differently.
BTW, from the comment to the EA forum cross-post, I discovered that Beren reportedly left Conjecture very recently. That’s indeed a negative update on Conjecture for me (maybe not as much as he specifically left but rather that this indicates a high turnover rate), but regardless, this doesn’t apply to the inference made by Omega in this report, along the lines that “Conjecture’s research is iffy because they don’t have senior technical experts and don’t know what are they doing”, because this wasn’t true until very recently and probably still isn’t true (overwhelmingly likely there are other technical experts who are still working at Conjecture), so this doesn’t invalidate or stain the research that has been done and published previously.