Cade Metz hadn’t had this much trouble with a story in years. Professional journalists don’t get writer’s block! Ms. Tam had rejected his original draft focused on the subject’s early warnings of the pandemic. Her feedback hadn’t been very specific … but then, it didn’t need to be.
For contingent reasons, the reporting for this piece had stretched out over months. He had tons of notes. It shouldn’t be hard to come up with a story that would meet Ms. Tam’s approval.
The deadline loomed. Alright, well, one sentence at a time. He wrote:
In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.”
Metz asked himself: Is this statement actually and literally true?
Having gotten started, the rest of the story came out easily. Why had he been so reluctant to write the new draft, as if in fear of some state of sin? This was his profession—to seek out all the news that’s fit to print, and bring it to the light of the world!
In Eliezer’s defense I’ll note that the original proposal took pains to say “At least as honest as an unusually honest person AND THEN also truthful in communicating about your meta-level principles about when you’ll lie”, so the above isn’t a literal following of what Eliezer said (because I don’t think an unusually honest person would write that). But I think that was not a very natural idea, and I mostly think of meta-honesty as about being honest on the meta level, and that it’s important, but I don’t think of it as really tied up with the object level being super honest.
Cade Metz hadn’t had this much trouble with a story in years. Professional journalists don’t get writer’s block! Ms. Tam had rejected his original draft focused on the subject’s early warnings of the pandemic. Her feedback hadn’t been very specific … but then, it didn’t need to be.
For contingent reasons, the reporting for this piece had stretched out over months. He had tons of notes. It shouldn’t be hard to come up with a story that would meet Ms. Tam’s approval.
The deadline loomed. Alright, well, one sentence at a time. He wrote:
Metz asked himself: Is this statement actually and literally true?
Yes! The subject had aligned himself with Charles Murray in one post: “The only public figure I can think of in the southeast quadrant with me is Charles Murray.”.
Metz asked himself: Is this statement actually and literally true?
Yes! The subject had pointed that out in another post: “Consider Charles Murray saying that he believes black people are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
Having gotten started, the rest of the story came out easily. Why had he been so reluctant to write the new draft, as if in fear of some state of sin? This was his profession—to seek out all the news that’s fit to print, and bring it to the light of the world!
For that was his mastery.
Good point.
In Eliezer’s defense I’ll note that the original proposal took pains to say “At least as honest as an unusually honest person AND THEN also truthful in communicating about your meta-level principles about when you’ll lie”, so the above isn’t a literal following of what Eliezer said (because I don’t think an unusually honest person would write that). But I think that was not a very natural idea, and I mostly think of meta-honesty as about being honest on the meta level, and that it’s important, but I don’t think of it as really tied up with the object level being super honest.
New jargon term: SuperMetaHonest
And if I’m honest about being SuperMetaHonest, then I’m: SuperDuperMetaHonest.
If I wrote a sequence about it it’d be my SuperDuperMetaHonestEpistemicOpus
“SuperDuperMetaHonestEpistemicOpus”
“If you try to Glomarize you will be too verbocious”