I’d be interested in a few more details/gears. (Also, are you primarily replying about the immediate parent, i.e. domestication of dissent, or also about the previous one)
Two different angles of curiosity I have are:
what sort of things you might you look out for, in particular, to notice if this was happening to you at OpenAI or similar?
something like… what’s your estimate of the effect size here? Do you have personal experience feeling captured by this dynamic? If so, what was it like? Or did you observe other people seeming to be captured, and what was your impression (perhaps in vague terms) of the diff that the dynamic was producing?
I was talking about the immediate parent, not the previous one. Though as secrecy gets ramped up, the effect described in the previous one might set in as well.
I have personal experience feeling captured by this dynamic, yes, and from conversations with other people i get the impression that it was even stronger for many others.
Hard to say how large of an effect it has. It definitely creates a significant chilling effect on criticism/dissent. (I think people who were employees alongside me while I was there will attest that I was pretty outspoken… yet I often found myself refraining from saying things that seemed true and important, due to not wanting to rock the boat / lose ‘credibility’ etc.
The point about salving the consciences of the majority is interesting and seems true to me as well. I feel like there’s definitely a dynamic of ‘the dissenters make polite reserved versions of their criticisms, and feel good about themselves for fighting the good fight, and the orthodox listen patiently and then find some justification to proceed as planned, feeling good about themselves for hearing out the dissent.’
I don’t know of an easy solution to this problem. Perhaps something to do with regular anonymous surveys? idk.
Wow, yeah. This is totally going on at OpenAI, and I expect at other AGI corporations also.
I’d be interested in a few more details/gears. (Also, are you primarily replying about the immediate parent, i.e. domestication of dissent, or also about the previous one)
Two different angles of curiosity I have are:
what sort of things you might you look out for, in particular, to notice if this was happening to you at OpenAI or similar?
something like… what’s your estimate of the effect size here? Do you have personal experience feeling captured by this dynamic? If so, what was it like? Or did you observe other people seeming to be captured, and what was your impression (perhaps in vague terms) of the diff that the dynamic was producing?
I was talking about the immediate parent, not the previous one. Though as secrecy gets ramped up, the effect described in the previous one might set in as well.
I have personal experience feeling captured by this dynamic, yes, and from conversations with other people i get the impression that it was even stronger for many others.
Hard to say how large of an effect it has. It definitely creates a significant chilling effect on criticism/dissent. (I think people who were employees alongside me while I was there will attest that I was pretty outspoken… yet I often found myself refraining from saying things that seemed true and important, due to not wanting to rock the boat / lose ‘credibility’ etc.
The point about salving the consciences of the majority is interesting and seems true to me as well. I feel like there’s definitely a dynamic of ‘the dissenters make polite reserved versions of their criticisms, and feel good about themselves for fighting the good fight, and the orthodox listen patiently and then find some justification to proceed as planned, feeling good about themselves for hearing out the dissent.’
I don’t know of an easy solution to this problem. Perhaps something to do with regular anonymous surveys? idk.