I’ve seen pretty uniform praise from rationalist audiences, so I thought it worth mentioning that the prevailing response I’ve seen from within a leading lab working on AGI is that Eliezer came off as an unhinged lunatic.
For lack of a better way of saying it, folks not enmeshed within the rat tradition—i.e., normies—do not typically respond well to calls to drop bombs on things, even if such a call is a perfectly rational deduction from the underlying premises of the argument. Eliezer either knew that the entire response to the essay would be dominated by people decrying his call for violence, and this was tactical for 15 dimensional chess reasons, or he severely underestimated people’s ability to identify that the actual point of disagreement is around p(doom), and not with how governments should respond to incredibly high p(doom).
This strikes me as a pretty clear failure to communicate.
Is anything uniformly praised in the rationalist community? IME having over half the community think something is between “awesome” and “probably correct” is about as uniform as it gets.
That answer is arguably no as to uniform praise or booing, but while the majority of the community is supporting it, there’s still some significant factions, though the rationalist community is tentatively semi united here.
I’ve seen pretty uniform praise from rationalist audiences, so I thought it worth mentioning that the prevailing response I’ve seen from within a leading lab working on AGI is that Eliezer came off as an unhinged lunatic.
For lack of a better way of saying it, folks not enmeshed within the rat tradition—i.e., normies—do not typically respond well to calls to drop bombs on things, even if such a call is a perfectly rational deduction from the underlying premises of the argument. Eliezer either knew that the entire response to the essay would be dominated by people decrying his call for violence, and this was tactical for 15 dimensional chess reasons, or he severely underestimated people’s ability to identify that the actual point of disagreement is around p(doom), and not with how governments should respond to incredibly high p(doom).
This strikes me as a pretty clear failure to communicate.
I actually disagree with the uniform praise idea, because the responses from the rationalist community was also pretty divided in it’s acceptance.
Is anything uniformly praised in the rationalist community? IME having over half the community think something is between “awesome” and “probably correct” is about as uniform as it gets.
That answer is arguably no as to uniform praise or booing, but while the majority of the community is supporting it, there’s still some significant factions, though the rationalist community is tentatively semi united here.