Perhaps I should start saying “Guys, can we encourage folks to work on both issues please, so that people who care about x-risk have more ways to show up and professionally matter?”, and maybe that will trigger less pushback of the form “No, alignment is the most important thing”…
I think that probably would be true.
For some reason when I express opinions of the form “Alignment isn’t the most valuable thing on the margin”, alignment-oriented folks (e.g., Paul here) seem to think I’m saying you shouldn’t work on alignment (which I’m not), which triggers a “Yes, this is the most valuable thing” reply.
Fwiw my reaction is not “Critch thinks Rohin should do something else”, it’s more like “Critch is saying something I believe to be false on an important topic that lots of other people will read”. I generally want us as a community to converge to true beliefs on important things (part of my motivation for writing a newsletter) and so then I’d say “but actually alignment still seems like the most valuable thing on the margin because of X, Y and Z”.
(I’ve had enough conversations with you at this point to know the axes of disagreement, and I think you’ve convinced me that “which one is better on the margin” is not actually that important a question to get an answer to. So now I don’t feel as much of an urge to respond that way. But that’s how I started out.)
I think that probably would be true.
Fwiw my reaction is not “Critch thinks Rohin should do something else”, it’s more like “Critch is saying something I believe to be false on an important topic that lots of other people will read”. I generally want us as a community to converge to true beliefs on important things (part of my motivation for writing a newsletter) and so then I’d say “but actually alignment still seems like the most valuable thing on the margin because of X, Y and Z”.
(I’ve had enough conversations with you at this point to know the axes of disagreement, and I think you’ve convinced me that “which one is better on the margin” is not actually that important a question to get an answer to. So now I don’t feel as much of an urge to respond that way. But that’s how I started out.)
Got it, thanks!