I also don’t know what “social metaphysics” means.
I get the mood of the story. If you look at specific accusations, here is what I found, maybe I overlooked something:
there were at least 3 other cases of psychiatric institutionalizations by people in the social circle immediate to MIRI/CFAR; at least one other than me had worked at MIRI for a significant time, and at least one had done work with MIRI on a shorter-term basis. There was, in addition, a case of someone becoming very paranoid, attacking a mental health worker, and hijacking her car, leading to jail time; this person was not an employee of either organization, but had attended multiple CFAR events including a relatively exclusive AI-focused one.
There are even cases of suicide in the Berkeley rationality community [...] associated with a subgroup splitting off of the CFAR-centric rationality community due to its perceived corruption
a prominent researcher was going around convincing people that human-level AGI was coming in 5-15 years.
MIRI became very secretive about research. Many researchers were working on secret projects, and I learned almost nothing about these. I and other researchers were told not to even ask each other about what others of us were working on, on the basis that if someone were working on a secret project, they may have to reveal this fact. Instead, we were supposed to discuss our projects with an executive, who could connect people working on similar projects.
Someone in the community told me that for me to think AGI probably won’t be developed soon, I must think I’m better at meta-rationality than Eliezer Yudkowsky, a massive claim of my own specialness
Years before, MIRI had a non-disclosure agreement that members were pressured to sign, as part of a legal dispute with Louie Helm.
Anna Salamon said that Michael was causing someone else at MIRI to “downvote Eliezer in his head” and that this was bad because it meant that the “community” would not agree about who the leaders were, and would therefore have akrasia issues due to the lack of agreement on a single leader in their head telling them what to do.
MIRI had a “world-saving plan”. [...] Nate Soares frequently talked about how it was necessary to have a “plan” to make the entire future ok, to avert AI risk; this plan would need to “backchain” from a state of no AI risk and may, for example, say that we must create a human emulation using nanotechnology that is designed by a “genie” AI, which does a narrow task rather than taking responsibility for the entire future; this would allow the entire world to be taken over by a small group including the emulated human.
Our task was to create an integrated, formal theory of values, decisions, epistemology, self-improvement, etc (“Friendliness theory”), which would help us develop Friendly AI faster than the rest of the world combined was developing AGI (which was, according to leaders, probably in less than 20 years). It was said that a large part of our advantage in doing this research so fast was that we were “actually trying” and others weren’t. It was stated by multiple people that we wouldn’t really have had a chance to save the world without Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I heard that “political” discussions at CFAR (e.g. determining how to resolve conflicts between people at the organization, which could result in people leaving the organization) were mixed with “debugging” conversations, in a way that would make it hard for people to focus primarily on the debugged person’s mental progress without imposing pre-determined conclusions. Unfortunately, when there are few people with high psychological aptitude around, it’s hard to avoid “debugging” conversations having political power dynamics, although it’s likely that the problem could have been mitigated.
I recall talking to a former CFAR employee who was scapegoated and ousted after failing to appeal to the winning internal coalition; he was obviously quite paranoid and distrustful, and another friend and I agreed that he showed PTSD symptoms.
This is like 5-10% of the text. A curious thing is that it is actually the remaining 90-95% of the text that evoke bad feelings in the reader; at least in my case.
To compare, when I was reading Zoe’s article, I was shocked by the described facts. When I was reading Jessica’s article, I was shocked by the horrible things that happened to her, but the facts felt… most of them boring… the most worrying part was about a group of people who decided that CFAR was evil, spent some time blogging against CFAR, then some of them killed themselves; which is very sad, but I fail to see how exactly CFAR is responsible for this, when it seems like the anti-CFAR group actually escalated the underlying problems to the point of suicide. (This reminds me of XiXiDu describing how fighting against MIRI causes him health problems; I feel bad about him having the problems, but I am not sure what MIRI could possibly do to stop this.)
Jessica’s narrative is that MIRI/CFAR is just like Leverage, except less transparent. Yet when she mentions specific details, it often goes somewhat like this: “Zoe mentioned that Leverage did X. CFAR does not do X, but I feel terrible anyway, so it is similar. Here is something vaguely analogical.” Like, how can you conclude that not doing something bad is even worse than doing it, because it is less transparent?! Of course it is less transparent if it, you know, actually does not exist.
Or maybe I’m tired and failing at reading comprehension. I wish someone would rewrite the article, to focus on the specific accusations against MIRI/CFAR, and remove all those analogies-except-not-really with Zoe; just make it a standalone list of specific accusations. Then let’s discuss that.
I also don’t know what “social metaphysics” means.
I get the mood of the story. If you look at specific accusations, here is what I found, maybe I overlooked something:
This is like 5-10% of the text. A curious thing is that it is actually the remaining 90-95% of the text that evoke bad feelings in the reader; at least in my case.
To compare, when I was reading Zoe’s article, I was shocked by the described facts. When I was reading Jessica’s article, I was shocked by the horrible things that happened to her, but the facts felt… most of them boring… the most worrying part was about a group of people who decided that CFAR was evil, spent some time blogging against CFAR, then some of them killed themselves; which is very sad, but I fail to see how exactly CFAR is responsible for this, when it seems like the anti-CFAR group actually escalated the underlying problems to the point of suicide. (This reminds me of XiXiDu describing how fighting against MIRI causes him health problems; I feel bad about him having the problems, but I am not sure what MIRI could possibly do to stop this.)
Jessica’s narrative is that MIRI/CFAR is just like Leverage, except less transparent. Yet when she mentions specific details, it often goes somewhat like this: “Zoe mentioned that Leverage did X. CFAR does not do X, but I feel terrible anyway, so it is similar. Here is something vaguely analogical.” Like, how can you conclude that not doing something bad is even worse than doing it, because it is less transparent?! Of course it is less transparent if it, you know, actually does not exist.
Or maybe I’m tired and failing at reading comprehension. I wish someone would rewrite the article, to focus on the specific accusations against MIRI/CFAR, and remove all those analogies-except-not-really with Zoe; just make it a standalone list of specific accusations. Then let’s discuss that.
This comment was very helpful. Thank you.