Just loudly repeating what you said using my own words… when we talk about optimizing for truth (or any other X), there are essentially 3 options (and of course any mix of them)...
optimizing explicitly for X;
optimizing neither for X nor against X (but perhaps for something else, or nothing at all); or
optimizing explicitly against X.
And while it is a bad form to accuse someone of optimizing against truth, it makes sense to suspect that people are simply not optimizing for truth… which—especially when they optimize for something else—usually ends with some misleading, even it there was no conscious intention to mislead.
This said, how to communicate this conclusion of “you need to explicitly optimize for truth, otherwise you will probably end up misleading people even if your intentions are pure”?
Probably needs to be communicated differently among rationalists, and outside of our small community. Either way, it helps emphasising that we talk about “misleading unintentionally” or perhaps just “misunderstanding”, i.e. to put high priority on communicating that we are not accusing the other side of having bad intentions, merely that… what they said is not what the perfect version of them would say in a perfect world, and that we would like them to get closer to that.
Just loudly repeating what you said using my own words… when we talk about optimizing for truth (or any other X), there are essentially 3 options (and of course any mix of them)...
optimizing explicitly for X;
optimizing neither for X nor against X (but perhaps for something else, or nothing at all); or
optimizing explicitly against X.
And while it is a bad form to accuse someone of optimizing against truth, it makes sense to suspect that people are simply not optimizing for truth… which—especially when they optimize for something else—usually ends with some misleading, even it there was no conscious intention to mislead.
This said, how to communicate this conclusion of “you need to explicitly optimize for truth, otherwise you will probably end up misleading people even if your intentions are pure”?
Probably needs to be communicated differently among rationalists, and outside of our small community. Either way, it helps emphasising that we talk about “misleading unintentionally” or perhaps just “misunderstanding”, i.e. to put high priority on communicating that we are not accusing the other side of having bad intentions, merely that… what they said is not what the perfect version of them would say in a perfect world, and that we would like them to get closer to that.