By temperament and training, we don’t do strategic propaganda campaigns even when there’s a naïvely-appealing consequentialist case for it.
We argue that Microsoft is doing a bad thing—but we also discuss specific flaws in those arguments, even when that would undermine the simplified propaganda message. We do this because we think arguments aren’t soldiers; we’re trying to have a discourse oriented towards actually figuring out what’s going on in the world, instead of shaping public perception.
Are you saying that you’re unsure if the launch of the chatbot was net positive?
I’m not talking about propaganda. I’m literally saying “signal boost the accurate content that’s already out there showing that Microsoft rushed the launch of their AI chatbot making it creepy, aggressive, and misaligned. Showing that it’s harder to do right than they thought”
Eleizer (and others) retweeted content admonishing Microsoft, I’m just saying we should be doing more of that.
Maybe this is a better way of putting it: I agree that the Bing launch is very bad precedent and it’s important to warn people about the problems with that, but the whole way you’re talking about this seems really spammy and low-integrity, which would be fine and great if being spammy would save the world, but there are generalizable reasons why that doesn’t work. People can tell when the comments section is being flooded by an organized interest group, and that correctly makes them trust the comments less.
Here’s an idea (but maybe you can think of something better): if you want to help spread messages about this, maybe instead of telling “us” (the EAs, the rats) to become a signal-boosting PR war army (which is not what we’re built for), write up your own explanation of why the Bing launch was bad, in your own voice, that covers an angle of the situation that hasn’t already been covered by someone else. Sincerity is more credible than just turning up the volume. I will eagerly retweet it (when I get back from my February Twitter hiatus).
Are you saying that you’re unsure if the launch of the chatbot was net positive?
No. (I agree that it was bad, and that pointing out that it was bad is good.) The intent of “I’m not going to take a position on that” was to keep the grandparent narrowly-scoped; you asked, “Why aren’t we?” and I explained a reason why Less Wrong readers are disinclined in general to strategically take action to “shape the public’s perception”, as contrasted to laying out our actual reasoningwithout trying to control other people’s decisions.
By temperament and training, we don’t do strategic propaganda campaigns even when there’s a naïvely-appealing consequentialist case for it.
We argue that Microsoft is doing a bad thing—but we also discuss specific flaws in those arguments, even when that would undermine the simplified propaganda message. We do this because we think arguments aren’t soldiers; we’re trying to have a discourse oriented towards actually figuring out what’s going on in the world, instead of shaping public perception.
Is this dumb? I’m not going to take a position on that in this comment. Holden Karnofsky has some thoughts about messages to spread.
Are you saying that you’re unsure if the launch of the chatbot was net positive?
I’m not talking about propaganda. I’m literally saying “signal boost the accurate content that’s already out there showing that Microsoft rushed the launch of their AI chatbot making it creepy, aggressive, and misaligned. Showing that it’s harder to do right than they thought”
Eleizer (and others) retweeted content admonishing Microsoft, I’m just saying we should be doing more of that.
Maybe this is a better way of putting it: I agree that the Bing launch is very bad precedent and it’s important to warn people about the problems with that, but the whole way you’re talking about this seems really spammy and low-integrity, which would be fine and great if being spammy would save the world, but there are generalizable reasons why that doesn’t work. People can tell when the comments section is being flooded by an organized interest group, and that correctly makes them trust the comments less.
Here’s an idea (but maybe you can think of something better): if you want to help spread messages about this, maybe instead of telling “us” (the EAs, the rats) to become a signal-boosting PR war army (which is not what we’re built for), write up your own explanation of why the Bing launch was bad, in your own voice, that covers an angle of the situation that hasn’t already been covered by someone else. Sincerity is more credible than just turning up the volume. I will eagerly retweet it (when I get back from my February Twitter hiatus).
No. (I agree that it was bad, and that pointing out that it was bad is good.) The intent of “I’m not going to take a position on that” was to keep the grandparent narrowly-scoped; you asked, “Why aren’t we?” and I explained a reason why Less Wrong readers are disinclined in general to strategically take action to “shape the public’s perception”, as contrasted to laying out our actual reasoning without trying to control other people’s decisions.
In the sense of “A concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people”.