This article is very heavy with Yudkosky-isms, repeats of stuff he’s posted before, and it needs a good summary, and editing to pare it down. I’m surprised they posted it to the MIRI blog in its current form.
Edit: As stated below, I agree with all the points of the article, and consider it an important message.
I’ll agree that it’s more than a little redundant, especially when I understood the point he was getting at in the first part. But how much of that is the fault of his writing here and how much of it is the fault of the fact that he’s written about the issue before? And, more importantly, if you were to hand this article to someone who knows nothing about Yudkowsky or Less Wrong, would that extra length help them? I’d argue that a lot of the article’s length comes from trying to avoid some of his most common problems—instead of referencing a post where he’d said something before, he would explain the concept from the ground up using a different metaphor. (which is good for those of us who don’t want to scrape through old Facebook rants)
Either way, in its current form it is definitely not out of place for rhetoric, and more than enough for Less Wrong.
There is constructive criticism, and there is non-constructive criticism. My personal heuristic for determining whether a given critic is being constructive is to look at (a) how specific they are about the issues they perceive, and (b) whether they provide any specific suggestions as to how to address those issues. The parent comment does poorly on both fronts, and that in conjunction with the heavily aggressive tone therein are sufficient to convince me that it was very much written in bad faith. Please strive to do better.
Tangent: “bad faith” can mean a lot of different things to different people (or in different contexts), ranging from “medium-severity dissimulation” to “deliberate cruelty/malice/malevolence” to “less-than-ideal self-awareness and candor”. My personal suggestion would be to taboo it wherever possible and be more concrete/precise about what you think is happening.
I’m generally leery of ascribing motives to people who I don’t know on the Internet, since I could very well be mistaken. By “bad faith”, I simply meant a comment that was not (primarily) written for the purpose of accelerating progress along some axis generally agreed to be positive, e.g. understanding, knowledge, community, etc. This doesn’t, of course, imply that I know what the actual motives of the commenter were, only that I’m fairly sure that they don’t fall into the specific subset of motives I consider good.
That being said, if I were forced to generate a hypothesis that fits into one of the three categories you described, I would (very tentatively) nominate the third thing—”less-than-ideal self-awareness and candor”—as closest to what I think may actually be happening.
Laziness. Though I note Stuart_Armstrong had the same opinion as me, and offered even fewer means of improvement, and got upvoted. I should have also said I agree with all points contained herein, and that the message is an important one. That would have reduced the bite.
Just as a data point, you’re right, your comment felt to me as though it had more ‘bite’ and felt a little more aggressive than Stuart’s, which is why I downvoted yours and not his, even though I almost downvoted his too.
This article is very heavy with Yudkosky-isms, repeats of stuff he’s posted before, and it needs a good summary, and editing to pare it down. I’m surprised they posted it to the MIRI blog in its current form.
Edit: As stated below, I agree with all the points of the article, and consider it an important message.
I’ll agree that it’s more than a little redundant, especially when I understood the point he was getting at in the first part. But how much of that is the fault of his writing here and how much of it is the fault of the fact that he’s written about the issue before? And, more importantly, if you were to hand this article to someone who knows nothing about Yudkowsky or Less Wrong, would that extra length help them? I’d argue that a lot of the article’s length comes from trying to avoid some of his most common problems—instead of referencing a post where he’d said something before, he would explain the concept from the ground up using a different metaphor. (which is good for those of us who don’t want to scrape through old Facebook rants)
Either way, in its current form it is definitely not out of place for rhetoric, and more than enough for Less Wrong.
I agree it fits well here. However, it has a very different tone from other posts on the MIRI blog, where it has also been posted.
There is constructive criticism, and there is non-constructive criticism. My personal heuristic for determining whether a given critic is being constructive is to look at (a) how specific they are about the issues they perceive, and (b) whether they provide any specific suggestions as to how to address those issues. The parent comment does poorly on both fronts, and that in conjunction with the heavily aggressive tone therein are sufficient to convince me that it was very much written in bad faith. Please strive to do better.
Tangent: “bad faith” can mean a lot of different things to different people (or in different contexts), ranging from “medium-severity dissimulation” to “deliberate cruelty/malice/malevolence” to “less-than-ideal self-awareness and candor”. My personal suggestion would be to taboo it wherever possible and be more concrete/precise about what you think is happening.
I’m generally leery of ascribing motives to people who I don’t know on the Internet, since I could very well be mistaken. By “bad faith”, I simply meant a comment that was not (primarily) written for the purpose of accelerating progress along some axis generally agreed to be positive, e.g. understanding, knowledge, community, etc. This doesn’t, of course, imply that I know what the actual motives of the commenter were, only that I’m fairly sure that they don’t fall into the specific subset of motives I consider good.
That being said, if I were forced to generate a hypothesis that fits into one of the three categories you described, I would (very tentatively) nominate the third thing—”less-than-ideal self-awareness and candor”—as closest to what I think may actually be happening.
Laziness. Though I note Stuart_Armstrong had the same opinion as me, and offered even fewer means of improvement, and got upvoted. I should have also said I agree with all points contained herein, and that the message is an important one. That would have reduced the bite.
Just as a data point, you’re right, your comment felt to me as though it had more ‘bite’ and felt a little more aggressive than Stuart’s, which is why I downvoted yours and not his, even though I almost downvoted his too.