My comment here is not cosmically important and I may delete it if it derails the conversation.
There are times when I would really want a friend to tap me on the shoulder and say “hey, from the outside the way you talk about <X> seems way worse than normal. Are you hungry/tired/too emotionally close?”. They may be wrong, but often they’re right. If you (general reader you) would deeply want someone to tap you on the shoulder, read on, otherwise this comment isn’t for you.
If you burn at NYT/Cade Metz intolerable hostile garbage, are you have not taken into account how defensive tribal instincts can cloud judgements, then, um <tap tap>?
FWIW, Cade Metz was reaching out to MIRI and some other folks in the x-risk space back in January 2020, and I went to read some of his articles and came to the conclusion in January that he’s one of the least competent journalists—like, most likely to misunderstand his beat and emit obvious howlers—that I’d ever encountered. I told folks as much at the time, and advised against talking to him just on the basis that a lot of his journalism is comically bad and you’ll risk looking foolish if you tap him.
This was six months before Metz caused SSC to shut down and more than a year before his hit piece on Scott came out, so it wasn’t in any way based on ‘Metz has been mean to my friends’ or anything like that. (At the time he wasn’t even asking around about SSC or Scott, AFAIK.)
(I don’t think this is an idiosyncratic opinion of mine, either; I’ve seen other non-rationalists I take seriously flag Metz as someone unusually out of his depth and error-prone for a NYT reporter, for reporting unrelated to SSC stuff.)
I think it is useful for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say “Hey, this information you are consuming, its from <this source that you don’t entirely trust and have a complex causal model of>”.
Enforcing social norms to prevent scapegoating also destroys information that is valuable for accurate credit assignment and causally modelling reality. I haven’t yet found a third alternative, and until then, I’d recommend people both encourage and help people in their community to not scapegoat or lose their minds in ‘tribal instincts’ (as you put it), while not throwing away valuable information.
You can care about people while also seeing their flaws and noticing how they are hurting you and others you care about.
And yeah, that’s why I said only “Note that...”, and not something like “don’t trust this guy”. I think the content of the article is probably true, and maybe it’s Metz who wrote it just because AI is his beat. But I do also hold tiny models that say “maybe he dislikes us” and also something about the “questionable understanding” etc that habryka mentions below. AFAICT I’m not internally seething or anything, I just have a yellow-flag attached to this name.
FWIW I do think “don’t trust this guy” is warranted; I don’t know that he’s malicious, but I think he’s just exceptionally incompetent relative to the average tech reporter you’re likely to see stories from.
Like, in 2018 Metz wrote a full-length article on smarter-than-human AI that included the following frankly incredible sentence:
During a recent Tesla earnings call, Mr. Musk, who has struggled with questions about his company’s financial losses and concerns about the quality of its vehicles, chastised the news media for not focusing on the deaths that autonomous technology could prevent — a remarkable stance from someone who has repeatedly warned the world that A.I. is a danger to humanity.
My comment here is not cosmically important and I may delete it if it derails the conversation.
There are times when I would really want a friend to tap me on the shoulder and say “hey, from the outside the way you talk about <X> seems way worse than normal. Are you hungry/tired/too emotionally close?”. They may be wrong, but often they’re right.
If you (general reader you) would deeply want someone to tap you on the shoulder, read on, otherwise this comment isn’t for you.
If you burn at NYT/Cade Metz intolerable hostile garbage, are you have not taken into account how defensive tribal instincts can cloud judgements, then, um <tap tap>?
FWIW, Cade Metz was reaching out to MIRI and some other folks in the x-risk space back in January 2020, and I went to read some of his articles and came to the conclusion in January that he’s one of the least competent journalists—like, most likely to misunderstand his beat and emit obvious howlers—that I’d ever encountered. I told folks as much at the time, and advised against talking to him just on the basis that a lot of his journalism is comically bad and you’ll risk looking foolish if you tap him.
This was six months before Metz caused SSC to shut down and more than a year before his hit piece on Scott came out, so it wasn’t in any way based on ‘Metz has been mean to my friends’ or anything like that. (At the time he wasn’t even asking around about SSC or Scott, AFAIK.)
(I don’t think this is an idiosyncratic opinion of mine, either; I’ve seen other non-rationalists I take seriously flag Metz as someone unusually out of his depth and error-prone for a NYT reporter, for reporting unrelated to SSC stuff.)
I think it is useful for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say “Hey, this information you are consuming, its from <this source that you don’t entirely trust and have a complex causal model of>”.
Enforcing social norms to prevent scapegoating also destroys information that is valuable for accurate credit assignment and causally modelling reality. I haven’t yet found a third alternative, and until then, I’d recommend people both encourage and help people in their community to not scapegoat or lose their minds in ‘tribal instincts’ (as you put it), while not throwing away valuable information.
You can care about people while also seeing their flaws and noticing how they are hurting you and others you care about.
I really appreciate this comment!
And yeah, that’s why I said only “Note that...”, and not something like “don’t trust this guy”. I think the content of the article is probably true, and maybe it’s Metz who wrote it just because AI is his beat. But I do also hold tiny models that say “maybe he dislikes us” and also something about the “questionable understanding” etc that habryka mentions below. AFAICT I’m not internally seething or anything, I just have a yellow-flag attached to this name.
FWIW I do think “don’t trust this guy” is warranted; I don’t know that he’s malicious, but I think he’s just exceptionally incompetent relative to the average tech reporter you’re likely to see stories from.
Like, in 2018 Metz wrote a full-length article on smarter-than-human AI that included the following frankly incredible sentence: