Yes, but I don’t think the negative press LessWrong receives is simply because journalists are fickle creatures. I think there is something inherent to the culture that turns outsiders off.
My guess is that Eliezer, MIRI, and LWers in general are strange people who believe strange things, and yet they (we) are pretty confident that they are right and everyone else is wrong. Not only that, but they believe that the future of humanity is in their hands. So at best, they’re delusional. At worst, they’re right… which is absolutely terrifying.
Also, like I said, Eliezer is a big dork, who for example openly talks about reading My Little Pony fanfiction. The idea that such a goober claims to be in charge of humanity’s destiny is off-putting for the same reason. I wonder if to most people, Eliezer pattern-matches better to “weird internet celebrity”, kind of an Amazing Atheist figure, than to “respectable intellectual” the same way e.g. Nick Bostrom might. We can see in presidential elections that Americans don’t trust someone who isn’t charismatic, tall, in good shape, etc. to run the country. So, of course, the average person will not trust someone who lacks those qualities to save the world. It’s an ivory tower thing, but instead of ivory it’s more like green play-doh.
I think Eliezer’s lack of “professionalism” in this sense probably has its upsides as well. It makes him more relatable, which helps him establish an audience. It makes his writings more fun to read. And it is probably easier for him to communicate his ideas if he isn’t trying to sanitize them so they meet a certain standard. MIRI in general seems to favor an “open book, keep it real, no bullshit” approach, as exemplified with how lukeprog wrote on this forum that it was disastrously managed before he took over, and all he had to do was read Nonprofits for Dummies. From a PR standpoint, that seems unequivocally stupid to publicly admit, but he did it anyway. I feel like this philosophy has its benefits for MIRI as a whole, but I can’t quite put my finger on what they are.
2) Admit your weakness. Leads to low status, and then opposition from outsiders.
I wonder: it feels like with individuals, honestly and directly admitting your weakness while giving the impression that they’re not anything you’re trying to hide, can actually increase your status. Having weaknesses yet being comfortable with them signals that you believe you have strength that compensates for those weaknesses, plus having flaws makes you more relatable. Could that also work for groups? I guess the biggest problem would be that with groups, it’s harder to present a unified front: even when a single person smoothly and honestly admits the flaw, another gets all defensive.
I don’t think this strategy works well for individuals. Though maybe we are thinking of different reference sets. To me the way to understand social interactions is to look at what politicians do. Or if one only cares about a more intelligent set of humans executives at companies. People may hate politicians/executives but they are provably good at succeeding socially.
Are politicians/executives big on admitting weakness? I don’t think so. They seem much more fond of either blatantly lying (and betting their supporters will defend them) or making only the weakest possible admissions of weakness/guilt (“mistakes were made”).
Of course acting like a politician is usually pretty terrible for all sorts of reasons. But its probably the “playing to win” action socially.
In real life these choices are neither exclusive nor binary. A group might well admit the weakness in internal meetings and PR-manage the exposure of that weakness to the outside without either fully denying it or doing the whole sackcloth-and-ashes bit.
Thanks! On the other hand, lest I prove too much, each of these ways can work:
1) Irrationality does not have to be fatal. Dilbert makes a living complaining about irrationality of companies, and yet those companies make billions of profit.
2) Open source software exposes all their bugs, and still many open-source projects are respected. (Although this may be because their exposed weakness is incomprehensible for most people, so on the social level it is as if they exposed nothing.)
3) Most organizations have people with privileged access to information, and don’t expose everything to public. Most organizations have a clear boundary between a non-member and a member, between a non-manager and a manager. People don’t question this, because it’s business as usual.
So probably the problem here is that LessWrong is not an organization, and that LessWrong is somehow not sufficiently separated from MIRI. Which feels ironical, because I am on LessWrong every day, and I mostly don’t know what people in MIRI are working at now, so the separation clearly exists from my view; but it may not exist from an outsider’s view, for whom simply LessWrong = Eliezer, and MIRI = Eliezer (so if Eliezer said something low status on LessWrong, it automatically means MIRI is low status). So my conclusion is that compartmentalization has an important role, and Eliezer failed to do it properly.
In real life, we usually don’t have much data about leaders of high-status organizations. From the outside they seem like boring people, who only do their work and that’s all they ever do. (Think about what it did for Bill Clinton’s career when the details of his sex life became public.) I understand the desire to be influential and to be free to expose whatever you want about yourself, but it probably doesn’t work this way. By exposing too much, you limit your status. Powerful people do not enjoy freedom of speech in the same way popular bloggers do. Eliezer went the popular blogger way. Now we need a way to promote MIRI which does not mention Eliezer.
I understand the desire to be influential and to be free to expose whatever you want about yourself, but it probably doesn’t work this way. By exposing too much, you limit your status.
It certainly doesn’t work that way, but I think it’s not just about status. If you want to be influential (aka have power, that’s different from just being high-status), you should be instrumentally rational about it, that is, evaluate whether the consequences of your actions serve your goals. In this particular case, you need to carefully manage your public persona, the image you present to the outside. This careful management is not very compatible with exposing ” whatever you want about yourself”.
This is actually a problem in that it’s a serious disincentive for good people to get involved in high-level politics. Would you want a team of smart lawyers and investigators to go over your visible life with a fine-toothed comb looking with malice for any kind of dirt they can fling at you?
So, obviously that list isn’t exhaustive, because there are more ways to split interactions than public/private, but in an attempt to add meaningful new outlooks:
4) Speak about your weaknesses openly when in public, and deny them in private.
Many high status individuals are much harsher, demanding, arrogant, and certain in private than in public. I think this is a result of—when you don’t know the target well—not knowing who you will have to impress, who you have to suck up to, and who is only useful when they get you the thing you want.
2) Admit your weakness. Leads to low status, and then opposition from outsiders.
That sounds similar to a standard job interview question “What is your greatest weakness?”. In that situation, perhaps a standard advice how to answer this question—emphasize how one intends to overcome that weakness and what weaknesses one has conquered in the past—is applicable here as well?
Edit. Although perhaps you meant that the very act of letting outsiders to define what is and what is not a weakness leads to low status.
It is suicidal to admit an actual serious weakness. For multiple reasons. One is that admitting a serious weakness will leave a very bad impressions that is hard to overcome. See the research that people will frequently pay more for a single intact set of objects then two sets of the same objects where one set is damaged.
The other problem is that admitting an actual error is going off the social script. It either paints you as clueless or a “weirdo.” This is also a very serious problem.
I don’t think this is right. I talk pretty publicly about whatever problems/insecurities I have, but I do so in a pretty self-confident manner. It may help that I’m visibly competent at what I do and I don’t claim that it is a universally good strategy, but it works for me and helps me to stay in a fairly constant state of growth mindset which I’ve found to be beneficial.
In the job interview, you are explicitly given the task to describe your weakness. And you probably choose one that is relatively harmless. Something like “I am very rational, but sometimes I am underconfident”. So that’s different.
Yes, but I don’t think the negative press LessWrong receives is simply because journalists are fickle creatures. I think there is something inherent to the culture that turns outsiders off.
My guess is that Eliezer, MIRI, and LWers in general are strange people who believe strange things, and yet they (we) are pretty confident that they are right and everyone else is wrong. Not only that, but they believe that the future of humanity is in their hands. So at best, they’re delusional. At worst, they’re right… which is absolutely terrifying.
Also, like I said, Eliezer is a big dork, who for example openly talks about reading My Little Pony fanfiction. The idea that such a goober claims to be in charge of humanity’s destiny is off-putting for the same reason. I wonder if to most people, Eliezer pattern-matches better to “weird internet celebrity”, kind of an Amazing Atheist figure, than to “respectable intellectual” the same way e.g. Nick Bostrom might. We can see in presidential elections that Americans don’t trust someone who isn’t charismatic, tall, in good shape, etc. to run the country. So, of course, the average person will not trust someone who lacks those qualities to save the world. It’s an ivory tower thing, but instead of ivory it’s more like green play-doh.
I think Eliezer’s lack of “professionalism” in this sense probably has its upsides as well. It makes him more relatable, which helps him establish an audience. It makes his writings more fun to read. And it is probably easier for him to communicate his ideas if he isn’t trying to sanitize them so they meet a certain standard. MIRI in general seems to favor an “open book, keep it real, no bullshit” approach, as exemplified with how lukeprog wrote on this forum that it was disastrously managed before he took over, and all he had to do was read Nonprofits for Dummies. From a PR standpoint, that seems unequivocally stupid to publicly admit, but he did it anyway. I feel like this philosophy has its benefits for MIRI as a whole, but I can’t quite put my finger on what they are.
Now I feel like every group that tries to do something faces a trilemma:
1) Deny your weakness. Leads to irrationality.
2) Admit your weakness. Leads to low status, and then opposition from outsiders.
3) Deny your weakness publicly, only admit them among trusted members. Leads to cultishness.
I wonder: it feels like with individuals, honestly and directly admitting your weakness while giving the impression that they’re not anything you’re trying to hide, can actually increase your status. Having weaknesses yet being comfortable with them signals that you believe you have strength that compensates for those weaknesses, plus having flaws makes you more relatable. Could that also work for groups? I guess the biggest problem would be that with groups, it’s harder to present a unified front: even when a single person smoothly and honestly admits the flaw, another gets all defensive.
I don’t think this strategy works well for individuals. Though maybe we are thinking of different reference sets. To me the way to understand social interactions is to look at what politicians do. Or if one only cares about a more intelligent set of humans executives at companies. People may hate politicians/executives but they are provably good at succeeding socially.
Are politicians/executives big on admitting weakness? I don’t think so. They seem much more fond of either blatantly lying (and betting their supporters will defend them) or making only the weakest possible admissions of weakness/guilt (“mistakes were made”).
Of course acting like a politician is usually pretty terrible for all sorts of reasons. But its probably the “playing to win” action socially.
In real life these choices are neither exclusive nor binary. A group might well admit the weakness in internal meetings and PR-manage the exposure of that weakness to the outside without either fully denying it or doing the whole sackcloth-and-ashes bit.
Great point, I didn’t think of it that way.
Thanks! On the other hand, lest I prove too much, each of these ways can work:
1) Irrationality does not have to be fatal. Dilbert makes a living complaining about irrationality of companies, and yet those companies make billions of profit.
2) Open source software exposes all their bugs, and still many open-source projects are respected. (Although this may be because their exposed weakness is incomprehensible for most people, so on the social level it is as if they exposed nothing.)
3) Most organizations have people with privileged access to information, and don’t expose everything to public. Most organizations have a clear boundary between a non-member and a member, between a non-manager and a manager. People don’t question this, because it’s business as usual.
So probably the problem here is that LessWrong is not an organization, and that LessWrong is somehow not sufficiently separated from MIRI. Which feels ironical, because I am on LessWrong every day, and I mostly don’t know what people in MIRI are working at now, so the separation clearly exists from my view; but it may not exist from an outsider’s view, for whom simply LessWrong = Eliezer, and MIRI = Eliezer (so if Eliezer said something low status on LessWrong, it automatically means MIRI is low status). So my conclusion is that compartmentalization has an important role, and Eliezer failed to do it properly.
In real life, we usually don’t have much data about leaders of high-status organizations. From the outside they seem like boring people, who only do their work and that’s all they ever do. (Think about what it did for Bill Clinton’s career when the details of his sex life became public.) I understand the desire to be influential and to be free to expose whatever you want about yourself, but it probably doesn’t work this way. By exposing too much, you limit your status. Powerful people do not enjoy freedom of speech in the same way popular bloggers do. Eliezer went the popular blogger way. Now we need a way to promote MIRI which does not mention Eliezer.
It certainly doesn’t work that way, but I think it’s not just about status. If you want to be influential (aka have power, that’s different from just being high-status), you should be instrumentally rational about it, that is, evaluate whether the consequences of your actions serve your goals. In this particular case, you need to carefully manage your public persona, the image you present to the outside. This careful management is not very compatible with exposing ” whatever you want about yourself”.
This is actually a problem in that it’s a serious disincentive for good people to get involved in high-level politics. Would you want a team of smart lawyers and investigators to go over your visible life with a fine-toothed comb looking with malice for any kind of dirt they can fling at you?
So, obviously that list isn’t exhaustive, because there are more ways to split interactions than public/private, but in an attempt to add meaningful new outlooks:
4) Speak about your weaknesses openly when in public, and deny them in private.
Many high status individuals are much harsher, demanding, arrogant, and certain in private than in public. I think this is a result of—when you don’t know the target well—not knowing who you will have to impress, who you have to suck up to, and who is only useful when they get you the thing you want.
That sounds similar to a standard job interview question “What is your greatest weakness?”. In that situation, perhaps a standard advice how to answer this question—emphasize how one intends to overcome that weakness and what weaknesses one has conquered in the past—is applicable here as well?
Edit. Although perhaps you meant that the very act of letting outsiders to define what is and what is not a weakness leads to low status.
It is suicidal to admit an actual serious weakness. For multiple reasons. One is that admitting a serious weakness will leave a very bad impressions that is hard to overcome. See the research that people will frequently pay more for a single intact set of objects then two sets of the same objects where one set is damaged.
The other problem is that admitting an actual error is going off the social script. It either paints you as clueless or a “weirdo.” This is also a very serious problem.
I don’t think this is right. I talk pretty publicly about whatever problems/insecurities I have, but I do so in a pretty self-confident manner. It may help that I’m visibly competent at what I do and I don’t claim that it is a universally good strategy, but it works for me and helps me to stay in a fairly constant state of growth mindset which I’ve found to be beneficial.
In the job interview, you are explicitly given the task to describe your weakness. And you probably choose one that is relatively harmless. Something like “I am very rational, but sometimes I am underconfident”. So that’s different.