Someone privately contacted me to express confusion, because they thought my ‘+1’ means that I think adamShimi’s initial comment was unusually great. That’s not the case. The reasons I commented positively are:
I think this overall exchange went well—it raised good points that might have otherwise been neglected, and everyone quickly reached agreement about the real crux.
I want to try to cancel out any impression that criticizing / pushing back on Eliezer-stuff is unwelcome, since Adam expressed worries about a “taboo on criticizing MIRI and EY too hard”.
On a more abstract level, I like seeing people ‘blurt out what they’re actually thinking’ (if done with enough restraint and willingness-to-update to mostly avoid demon threads), even if I disagree with the content of their thought. I think disagreements are often tied up in emotions, or pattern-recognition, or intuitive senses of ‘what a person/group/forum is like’. This can make it harder to epistemically converge about tough topics, because there’s a temptation to pretend your cruxes are more simple and legible than they really are, and end up talking about non-cruxy things.
Separately, I endorse Ben Pace’s question (“Can you make a positive case here for how the work being done on prosaic alignment leads to success?”) as the thing to focus on.
Someone privately contacted me to express confusion, because they thought my ‘+1’ means that I think adamShimi’s initial comment was unusually great. That’s not the case. The reasons I commented positively are:
I think this overall exchange went well—it raised good points that might have otherwise been neglected, and everyone quickly reached agreement about the real crux.
I want to try to cancel out any impression that criticizing / pushing back on Eliezer-stuff is unwelcome, since Adam expressed worries about a “taboo on criticizing MIRI and EY too hard”.
On a more abstract level, I like seeing people ‘blurt out what they’re actually thinking’ (if done with enough restraint and willingness-to-update to mostly avoid demon threads), even if I disagree with the content of their thought. I think disagreements are often tied up in emotions, or pattern-recognition, or intuitive senses of ‘what a person/group/forum is like’. This can make it harder to epistemically converge about tough topics, because there’s a temptation to pretend your cruxes are more simple and legible than they really are, and end up talking about non-cruxy things.
Separately, I endorse Ben Pace’s question (“Can you make a positive case here for how the work being done on prosaic alignment leads to success?”) as the thing to focus on.