OK, that’s a fair enough ask. Do you have an alternative candidate in mind with approximately Connor’s position and said experience? If wishes were horses beggars could ride. Connor understands the arguments and the epistemics, to the point that (from my perspective) he’s doing an even better job at live debates than Yudkowsky. (You might not consider that a high bar.) The only way he gets more debate skill is more practice, or perhaps much more specific guidance than you have given. Maybe doesn’t have to be public, but would Beff have agreed otherwise? And who would critique them?
I’m really frustrated with folks here for their blindness to how lopsided the debate was socio-emotionally.
Not obviously true to me, although admitedly bad if so. I accept that my perspective might be biased here, as I went in already somewhat familiar with Connor’s arguments. But I can only call what I’m capable of seeing. What’s your evidence? Anything legible to me? Beff’s fan club in the YouTube comments (or on Twitter X)? That’s not a good indicator of how a neutral party would see it, although I can see the comments themselves maybe skewing their perspective.
I do not have an alternate candidate in mind besides Bengio, and I don’t know if we should expect to be able to get him to have a debate like this. If Connor were to ruthlessly drill this in debates with people who are capable of acting on Beff’s level of consistent bad faith but are actually friendly, that might do the trick, not sure. But he has to be open to feedback that I currently model him as not being: things like “that argument structure will not work”.
(It might be more effective to have Bengio debate Connor in a format like this, actually.)
The marginal fan club member is who I’m concerned about, so yeah, the edge of beff’s fan club is my threat model. Neutral parties don’t matter significantly in my model; what matters is how many high skill technical people are following the instructions of the conceptual entity beff represents an instance of.
That seems like a pretty uphill battle, because they already kind of vibe with Beff, and this would naturally prejudice them. How big/dangerous is e/acc, really? Are they getting worse? Maybe we should be choosing different battles.
Connor also has fans (like me) and Beff utterly failed to move me. Would Beff draw away the marginal rationalist with his performance? I kind of think not. But that’s maybe not the part that matters.
OK, that’s a fair enough ask. Do you have an alternative candidate in mind with approximately Connor’s position and said experience? If wishes were horses beggars could ride. Connor understands the arguments and the epistemics, to the point that (from my perspective) he’s doing an even better job at live debates than Yudkowsky. (You might not consider that a high bar.) The only way he gets more debate skill is more practice, or perhaps much more specific guidance than you have given. Maybe doesn’t have to be public, but would Beff have agreed otherwise? And who would critique them?
Not obviously true to me, although admitedly bad if so. I accept that my perspective might be biased here, as I went in already somewhat familiar with Connor’s arguments. But I can only call what I’m capable of seeing. What’s your evidence? Anything legible to me? Beff’s fan club in the YouTube comments (or on
TwitterX)? That’s not a good indicator of how a neutral party would see it, although I can see the comments themselves maybe skewing their perspective.I do not have an alternate candidate in mind besides Bengio, and I don’t know if we should expect to be able to get him to have a debate like this. If Connor were to ruthlessly drill this in debates with people who are capable of acting on Beff’s level of consistent bad faith but are actually friendly, that might do the trick, not sure. But he has to be open to feedback that I currently model him as not being: things like “that argument structure will not work”.
(It might be more effective to have Bengio debate Connor in a format like this, actually.)
The marginal fan club member is who I’m concerned about, so yeah, the edge of beff’s fan club is my threat model. Neutral parties don’t matter significantly in my model; what matters is how many high skill technical people are following the instructions of the conceptual entity beff represents an instance of.
That seems like a pretty uphill battle, because they already kind of vibe with Beff, and this would naturally prejudice them. How big/dangerous is e/acc, really? Are they getting worse? Maybe we should be choosing different battles.
Connor also has fans (like me) and Beff utterly failed to move me. Would Beff draw away the marginal rationalist with his performance? I kind of think not. But that’s maybe not the part that matters.