It seems to me like you have a blind spot regarding how your position as a community leader functions. If you, very well respected high status rationalist, write a long, angry post dedicated to showing everyone else that they can’t do original work and that their earnest attempts at solving the problem are, at best, ineffective & distracting and you’re tired of having to personally go critique all of their action plans… They stop proposing action plans. They don’t want to dilute the field with their “noise”, and they don’t want you and others to think they’re stupid for not understanding why their actions are ineffective or not serious attempts in the first place. I don’t care what you think you’re saying—the primary operative takeaway for a large proportion of people, maybe everybody except recurring characters like Paul Christiano, is that even if their internal models say they have a solution, they should just shut up because they’re not you and can’t think correctly about these sorts of issues.
[Redacted rant/vent for being mean-spirited and unhelpful]
I don’t care what you think you’re saying—the primary operative takeaway for a large proportion of people, maybe everybody except recurring characters like Paul Christiano, is that even if their internal models say they have a solution, they should just shut up because they’re not you and can’t think correctly about these sorts of issues.
I think this is, unfortunately, true. One reason people might feel this way is because they view LessWrong posts through a social lens. Eliezer posts about how doomed alignment is and how stupid everyone else’s solution attempts are, that feels bad, you feel sheepish about disagreeing, etc.
But despite understandably having this reaction to the social dynamics, the important part of the situation is not the social dynamics. It is about finding technical solutions to prevent utter ruination. When I notice the status-calculators in my brain starting to crunch and chew on Eliezer’s posts, I tell them to be quiet, that’s not important, who cares whether he thinks I’m a fool. I enter a frame in which Eliezer is a generator of claims and statements, and often those claims and statements are interesting and even true, so I do pay attention to that generator’s outputs, but it’s still up to me to evaluate those claims and statements, to think for myself.
If Eliezer says everyone’s ideas are awful, that’s another claim to be evaluated. If Eliezer says we are doomed, that’s another claim to be evaluated. The point is not to argue Eliezer into agreement, or to earn his respect. The point is to win in reality, and I’m not going to do that by constantly worrying about whether I should shut up.
If I’m wrong on an object-level point, I’m wrong, and I’ll change my mind, and then keep working. The rest is distraction.
Sounds like same way we had a dumb questions post we need somewhere explicitly for posting dumb potential solutions that will totally never work, or something, maybe?
I think it’s unwise to internally label good-faith thinking as “dumb.” If I did that, I feel that I would not be taking my own reasoning seriously. If I say a quick take, or an uninformed take, I can flag it as such. But “dumb potential solutions that will totally never work”? Not to my taste.
That said, if a person is only comfortable posting under the “dumb thoughts incoming” disclaimer—then perhaps that’s the right move for them.
The point of that label is that for someone who already has the status-sense of “my ideas are probably dumb”, any intake point that doesn’t explicitly say “yeah, dumb stuff accepted here” will act as an emotional barrier. If you think what you’re carrying is trash, you’ll only throw it in the bin and not show it to anyone. If someone puts a brightly-colored bin right in front of you instead with “All Ideas Recycling! Two Cents Per Idea”, maybe you’ll toss it in there instead.
In the more general population, I believe the underlying sense to be a very common phenomenon, and easily triggered. Unless there is some other social context propping up a sense of equality, people will regularly feel dumb around you because you used a single long-and-classy-sounding word they didn’t know, or other similar grades of experience. Then they will stop telling you things. Including important things! If someone else who’s aligned can very overtly look less intimidating to step up and catch them, especially if they’re also volunteering some of the filtering effort that might otherwise make a broad net difficult to handle, that’s a huge win, especially because when people stop telling you things they often also stop listening and stop giving you the feedback you need to preserve alliances, much less try to convince them of anything “for real” rather than them walking away and feeling a sense of relief and throwing everything you said in the “that’s not for people like me” zone and never thinking about it again.
Notice what Aryeh Englander emphasized near the beginning of each of these secondary posts: “I noticed that while I had several points I wanted to ask about, I was reluctant to actually ask them”, “I don’t want to spam the group with half-thought-through posts, but I also want to post these ideas”. Beyond their truth value, these act as status-hedges (or anti-hedges, if you want to think of it in the sense of a hedge maze). They connect the idea of “I am feeling the same intimidation as you; I feel as dumb as you feel right now” with “I am acting like it’s okay to be open about this and giving you implicit permission to do the same”, thus helping puncture the bubble. (There is potentially some discussion to be had around the Sequences link I just edited in and what that implies for what can be expected socially, but I don’t want to dig too far unless people are interested and will only say that I don’t think relying on people putting that principle into practice most of the time is realistic in this context.)
Saying that people should not care about social dynamics and only about object level arguments is a failure at world modelling. People do care about social dynamics, if you want to win, you need to take that into account. If you think that people should act differently, well, you are right, but the people who counts are the real one, not those who live in your head.
Incentives matters. In today’s lesswrong, the threshold of quality for having your ideas heard (rather than everybody ganging up on you to explain how wrong you are) is much higher for people who disagree with Eliezer than for people who agree with him. Unsurprisingly, that means that people filter what they say at a higher rate if they disagree with Eliezer (or any other famous user honestly—including you.).
I wondered whether people would take away the message that “The social dynamics aren’t important.” I should have edited to clarify, so thanks for bringing this up.
Here was my intended message: The social dynamics are important, and it’s important to not let yourself be bullied around, and it’s important to make spaces where people aren’t pressured into conformity. But I find it productive to approach this situation with a mindset of “OK, whatever, this Eliezer guy made these claims, who cares what he thinks of me, are his claims actually correct?” This tactic doesn’t solve the social dynamics issues on LessWrong. This tactic just helps me think for myself.
So, to be clear, I agree that incentives matter, I agree that incentives are, in one way or another, bad around disagreeing with Eliezer (and, to lesser extents, with other prominent users). I infer that these bad incentives spring both from Eliezer’s condescension and rudeness, and also a range of other failures.
For example, if many people aren’t just doing their best to explain why they best-guess-of-the-facts agree with Eliezer—if those people are “ganging up” and rederiving the bottom line of “Eliezer has to be right”—then those people are failing at rationality,
or any other famous user honestly—including you.
For the record, I welcome any thoughtful commenter to disagree with me, for whatever small amount that reduces the anti-disagreement social pressure. I don’t negatively judge people who make good-faith efforts to disagree with me, even if I think their points are totally mistaken.
Seems to be sort of an inconsistent mental state to be thinking like that and writing up a bullet-point list of disagreements with me, and somebody not publishing the latter is, I’m worried, anticipating social pushback that isn’t just from me.
somebody not publishing the latter is, I’m worried, anticipating social pushback that isn’t just from me.
Respectfully, no shit Sherlock, that’s what happens when a community leader establishes a norm of condescending to inquirers.
I feel much the same way as Citizen in that I want to understand the state of alignment and participate in conversations as a layperson. I too, have spent time pondering your model of reality to the detriment of my mental health. I will never post these questions and criticisms to LW because even if you yourself don’t show up to hit me with the classic:
then someone else will, having learned from your example. The site culture has become noticeably more hostile in my opinion ever since Death with Dignity, and I lay that at least in part at your feet.
Let me make it clear that I’m not against venting, being angry, even saying to some people “dude, we’re going to die”, all that. Eliezer has put his whole life into this field and I don’t think it’s fair to say he shouldn’t be angry from time to time. It’s also not a good idea to pretend things are better than they actually are, and that includes regulating your emotional state to the point that you can’t accurately convey things. But if the linchpin of LessWrong says that the field is being drowned by idiots pushing low-quality ideas (in so many words), then we shouldn’t be surprised when even people who might have something to contribute decide to withhold those contributions, because they don’t know whether or not they’re the people doing the thing he’s explicitly critiquing.
You (and probably I) are doing the same thing that you’re criticizing Eliezer for. You’re right, but don’t do that. Be the change you wish to see in the world.
That sort of thinking is why we’re where we are right now.
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
I have no idea how that cashes out game theoretically. There is a difference between moving from the mutual cooperation square to one of the exploitation squares, and moving from an exploitation square to mutual defection. The first defection is worse because it breaks the equilibrium, while the defection in response is a defensive play.
swarriner’s post, including the tone, is True and Necessary.
High prestige users being condescending to low prestige users does not promote the same social norms as low prestige users being impertinent to high prestige users.
While that’s an admirable position to take and I’ll try to take it in hand, I do feel EY’s stature in the community puts us in differing positions of responsibility concerning tone-setting.
Chapter 7 in this book had a few good thoughts on getting critical feedback from subordinates, specifically in the context of avoiding disasters. The book claims that merely encouraging subordinates to give critical feedback is often insufficient, and offers ideas for other things to do.
Tell everyone in the organization that safety is their responsibility, everyone’s views are important.
Try to be accessible and not intimidating, admit that you make mistakes.
Schedule regular chats with underlings so they don’t have to take initiative to flag potential problems. (If you think such chats aren’t a good use of your time, another idea is to contract someone outside of the organization to do periodic informal safety chats. Chapter 9 is about how organizational outsiders are uniquely well-positioned to spot safety problems. Among other things, it seems workers are sometimes more willing to share concerns frankly with an outsider than they are with their boss.)
Accept that not all of the critical feedback you get will be good quality.
The book disrecommends anonymous surveys on the grounds that they communicate the subtext that sharing your views openly is unsafe. I think anonymous surveys might be a good idea in the EA community though—retaliation against critics seems fairly common here (i.e. the culture of fear didn’t come about by chance). Anyone who’s been around here long enough will have figured out that sharing your views openly isn’t safe. (See also the “People are pretty justified in their fears of critiquing EA leadership/community norms” bullet point here, and the last paragraph in this comment.)
I think it is very true that the pushback is not just from you, and that nothing you could do would drive it to zero, but also that different actions from you would lead to a lot less fear of bad reactions from both you and others.
To be honest, the fact that Eliezer is being his blunt unfiltered self is why I’d like to go to him first if he offered to evaluate my impact plan re AI. Because he’s so obviously not optimising for professionalism, impressiveness, status, etc. he’s deconfounding his signal and I’m much better able to evaluate what he’s optimising for.[1] Hence why I’m much more confident that he’s actually just optimising for roughly the thing I’m also optimising for. I don’t trust anyone who isn’t optimising purely to be able to look at my plan and think “oh ok, despite being a nobody this guy has some good ideas” if that were true.
And then there’s the Graham’s Design Paradox thing. I think I’m unusually good at optimising purely, and I don’t think people who aren’t around my level or above would be able to recognise that. Obviously, he’s not the only one, but I’ve read his output the most, so I’m more confident that he’s at least one of them.
Yes, perhaps a consequentialist would be instrumentally motivated to try to optimise more for these things, but the fact that Eliezer doesn’t do that (as much) just makes it easier to understand and evaluate him.
They don’t want to dilute the field with their “noise”
I think it would be great regarding posts and comments about AI on LessWrong if we could establish a more tolerant atmosphere and bias toward posting/commenting without fear of producing “noise”. The AI Alignment Forum exists to be the discussion platform that’s filtered to only high-quality posts and comments. So it seems suboptimal and not taking advantage of the dual-forum system for people to be self-censoring to a large degree on the more permissive forum (i.e. LessWrong).
(This is not at all to dismiss your concerns and say “you should feel more comfortable speaking freely on LessWrong”. Just stating a general direction I’d like to see the community and conversation norms move in.)
It seems to me like you have a blind spot regarding how your position as a community leader functions. If you, very well respected high status rationalist, write a long, angry post dedicated to showing everyone else that they can’t do original work and that their earnest attempts at solving the problem are, at best, ineffective & distracting and you’re tired of having to personally go critique all of their action plans… They stop proposing action plans. They don’t want to dilute the field with their “noise”, and they don’t want you and others to think they’re stupid for not understanding why their actions are ineffective or not serious attempts in the first place. I don’t care what you think you’re saying—the primary operative takeaway for a large proportion of people, maybe everybody except recurring characters like Paul Christiano, is that even if their internal models say they have a solution, they should just shut up because they’re not you and can’t think correctly about these sorts of issues.
[Redacted rant/vent for being mean-spirited and unhelpful]
I think this is, unfortunately, true. One reason people might feel this way is because they view LessWrong posts through a social lens. Eliezer posts about how doomed alignment is and how stupid everyone else’s solution attempts are, that feels bad, you feel sheepish about disagreeing, etc.
But despite understandably having this reaction to the social dynamics, the important part of the situation is not the social dynamics. It is about finding technical solutions to prevent utter ruination. When I notice the status-calculators in my brain starting to crunch and chew on Eliezer’s posts, I tell them to be quiet, that’s not important, who cares whether he thinks I’m a fool. I enter a frame in which Eliezer is a generator of claims and statements, and often those claims and statements are interesting and even true, so I do pay attention to that generator’s outputs, but it’s still up to me to evaluate those claims and statements, to think for myself.
If Eliezer says everyone’s ideas are awful, that’s another claim to be evaluated. If Eliezer says we are doomed, that’s another claim to be evaluated. The point is not to argue Eliezer into agreement, or to earn his respect. The point is to win in reality, and I’m not going to do that by constantly worrying about whether I should shut up.
If I’m wrong on an object-level point, I’m wrong, and I’ll change my mind, and then keep working. The rest is distraction.
Sounds like same way we had a dumb questions post we need somewhere explicitly for posting dumb potential solutions that will totally never work, or something, maybe?
I have now posted a “Half-baked AI safety ideas thread” (LW version, EA Forum version) - let me know if that’s more or less what you had in mind.
I think it’s unwise to internally label good-faith thinking as “dumb.” If I did that, I feel that I would not be taking my own reasoning seriously. If I say a quick take, or an uninformed take, I can flag it as such. But “dumb potential solutions that will totally never work”? Not to my taste.
That said, if a person is only comfortable posting under the “dumb thoughts incoming” disclaimer—then perhaps that’s the right move for them.
The point of that label is that for someone who already has the status-sense of “my ideas are probably dumb”, any intake point that doesn’t explicitly say “yeah, dumb stuff accepted here” will act as an emotional barrier. If you think what you’re carrying is trash, you’ll only throw it in the bin and not show it to anyone. If someone puts a brightly-colored bin right in front of you instead with “All Ideas Recycling! Two Cents Per Idea”, maybe you’ll toss it in there instead.
In the more general population, I believe the underlying sense to be a very common phenomenon, and easily triggered. Unless there is some other social context propping up a sense of equality, people will regularly feel dumb around you because you used a single long-and-classy-sounding word they didn’t know, or other similar grades of experience. Then they will stop telling you things. Including important things! If someone else who’s aligned can very overtly look less intimidating to step up and catch them, especially if they’re also volunteering some of the filtering effort that might otherwise make a broad net difficult to handle, that’s a huge win, especially because when people stop telling you things they often also stop listening and stop giving you the feedback you need to preserve alliances, much less try to convince them of anything “for real” rather than them walking away and feeling a sense of relief and throwing everything you said in the “that’s not for people like me” zone and never thinking about it again.
Notice what Aryeh Englander emphasized near the beginning of each of these secondary posts: “I noticed that while I had several points I wanted to ask about, I was reluctant to actually ask them”, “I don’t want to spam the group with half-thought-through posts, but I also want to post these ideas”. Beyond their truth value, these act as status-hedges (or anti-hedges, if you want to think of it in the sense of a hedge maze). They connect the idea of “I am feeling the same intimidation as you; I feel as dumb as you feel right now” with “I am acting like it’s okay to be open about this and giving you implicit permission to do the same”, thus helping puncture the bubble. (There is potentially some discussion to be had around the Sequences link I just edited in and what that implies for what can be expected socially, but I don’t want to dig too far unless people are interested and will only say that I don’t think relying on people putting that principle into practice most of the time is realistic in this context.)
I for one really appreciate the ‘dumb-question’ area :)
Oh yes please. Maybe some tag that could be added to the comment. Maybe a comment in a different color.
Saying that people should not care about social dynamics and only about object level arguments is a failure at world modelling. People do care about social dynamics, if you want to win, you need to take that into account. If you think that people should act differently, well, you are right, but the people who counts are the real one, not those who live in your head.
Incentives matters. In today’s lesswrong, the threshold of quality for having your ideas heard (rather than everybody ganging up on you to explain how wrong you are) is much higher for people who disagree with Eliezer than for people who agree with him. Unsurprisingly, that means that people filter what they say at a higher rate if they disagree with Eliezer (or any other famous user honestly—including you.).
I wondered whether people would take away the message that “The social dynamics aren’t important.” I should have edited to clarify, so thanks for bringing this up.
Here was my intended message: The social dynamics are important, and it’s important to not let yourself be bullied around, and it’s important to make spaces where people aren’t pressured into conformity. But I find it productive to approach this situation with a mindset of “OK, whatever, this Eliezer guy made these claims, who cares what he thinks of me, are his claims actually correct?” This tactic doesn’t solve the social dynamics issues on LessWrong. This tactic just helps me think for myself.
So, to be clear, I agree that incentives matter, I agree that incentives are, in one way or another, bad around disagreeing with Eliezer (and, to lesser extents, with other prominent users). I infer that these bad incentives spring both from Eliezer’s condescension and rudeness, and also a range of other failures.
For example, if many people aren’t just doing their best to explain why they best-guess-of-the-facts agree with Eliezer—if those people are “ganging up” and rederiving the bottom line of “Eliezer has to be right”—then those people are failing at rationality,
For the record, I welcome any thoughtful commenter to disagree with me, for whatever small amount that reduces the anti-disagreement social pressure. I don’t negatively judge people who make good-faith efforts to disagree with me, even if I think their points are totally mistaken.
Seems to be sort of an inconsistent mental state to be thinking like that and writing up a bullet-point list of disagreements with me, and somebody not publishing the latter is, I’m worried, anticipating social pushback that isn’t just from me.
Respectfully, no shit Sherlock, that’s what happens when a community leader establishes a norm of condescending to inquirers.
I feel much the same way as Citizen in that I want to understand the state of alignment and participate in conversations as a layperson. I too, have spent time pondering your model of reality to the detriment of my mental health. I will never post these questions and criticisms to LW because even if you yourself don’t show up to hit me with the classic:
then someone else will, having learned from your example. The site culture has become noticeably more hostile in my opinion ever since Death with Dignity, and I lay that at least in part at your feet.
Yup, I’ve been disappointed with how unkindly Eliezer treats people sometimes. Bad example to set.
EDIT: Although I note your comment’s first sentence is also hostile, which I think is also bad.
Let me make it clear that I’m not against venting, being angry, even saying to some people “dude, we’re going to die”, all that. Eliezer has put his whole life into this field and I don’t think it’s fair to say he shouldn’t be angry from time to time. It’s also not a good idea to pretend things are better than they actually are, and that includes regulating your emotional state to the point that you can’t accurately convey things. But if the linchpin of LessWrong says that the field is being drowned by idiots pushing low-quality ideas (in so many words), then we shouldn’t be surprised when even people who might have something to contribute decide to withhold those contributions, because they don’t know whether or not they’re the people doing the thing he’s explicitly critiquing.
You (and probably I) are doing the same thing that you’re criticizing Eliezer for. You’re right, but don’t do that. Be the change you wish to see in the world.
That sort of thinking is why we’re where we are right now.
I have no idea how that cashes out game theoretically. There is a difference between moving from the mutual cooperation square to one of the exploitation squares, and moving from an exploitation square to mutual defection. The first defection is worse because it breaks the equilibrium, while the defection in response is a defensive play.
swarriner’s post, including the tone, is True and Necessary.
High prestige users being condescending to low prestige users does not promote the same social norms as low prestige users being impertinent to high prestige users.
While that’s an admirable position to take and I’ll try to take it in hand, I do feel EY’s stature in the community puts us in differing positions of responsibility concerning tone-setting.
Chapter 7 in this book had a few good thoughts on getting critical feedback from subordinates, specifically in the context of avoiding disasters. The book claims that merely encouraging subordinates to give critical feedback is often insufficient, and offers ideas for other things to do.
Can you give us 3-5 bullet points of summary?
Power makes you dumb, stay humble.
Tell everyone in the organization that safety is their responsibility, everyone’s views are important.
Try to be accessible and not intimidating, admit that you make mistakes.
Schedule regular chats with underlings so they don’t have to take initiative to flag potential problems. (If you think such chats aren’t a good use of your time, another idea is to contract someone outside of the organization to do periodic informal safety chats. Chapter 9 is about how organizational outsiders are uniquely well-positioned to spot safety problems. Among other things, it seems workers are sometimes more willing to share concerns frankly with an outsider than they are with their boss.)
Accept that not all of the critical feedback you get will be good quality.
The book disrecommends anonymous surveys on the grounds that they communicate the subtext that sharing your views openly is unsafe. I think anonymous surveys might be a good idea in the EA community though—retaliation against critics seems fairly common here (i.e. the culture of fear didn’t come about by chance). Anyone who’s been around here long enough will have figured out that sharing your views openly isn’t safe. (See also the “People are pretty justified in their fears of critiquing EA leadership/community norms” bullet point here, and the last paragraph in this comment.)
Sure is lovely how the rationalist community is living up to its rationality norms.
I think it is very true that the pushback is not just from you, and that nothing you could do would drive it to zero, but also that different actions from you would lead to a lot less fear of bad reactions from both you and others.
To be honest, the fact that Eliezer is being his blunt unfiltered self is why I’d like to go to him first if he offered to evaluate my impact plan re AI. Because he’s so obviously not optimising for professionalism, impressiveness, status, etc. he’s deconfounding his signal and I’m much better able to evaluate what he’s optimising for.[1] Hence why I’m much more confident that he’s actually just optimising for roughly the thing I’m also optimising for. I don’t trust anyone who isn’t optimising purely to be able to look at my plan and think “oh ok, despite being a nobody this guy has some good ideas” if that were true.
And then there’s the Graham’s Design Paradox thing. I think I’m unusually good at optimising purely, and I don’t think people who aren’t around my level or above would be able to recognise that. Obviously, he’s not the only one, but I’ve read his output the most, so I’m more confident that he’s at least one of them.
Yes, perhaps a consequentialist would be instrumentally motivated to try to optimise more for these things, but the fact that Eliezer doesn’t do that (as much) just makes it easier to understand and evaluate him.
I think it would be great regarding posts and comments about AI on LessWrong if we could establish a more tolerant atmosphere and bias toward posting/commenting without fear of producing “noise”. The AI Alignment Forum exists to be the discussion platform that’s filtered to only high-quality posts and comments. So it seems suboptimal and not taking advantage of the dual-forum system for people to be self-censoring to a large degree on the more permissive forum (i.e. LessWrong).
(This is not at all to dismiss your concerns and say “you should feel more comfortable speaking freely on LessWrong”. Just stating a general direction I’d like to see the community and conversation norms move in.)