Your response to Eliezer, both here and in the other thread, comes across as a completely unjustified refusal to take his comment at face-value: Eliezer explaining that he concluded your views were not worth spending time on for quite rational reasons, and is saying so because he doesn’t want people thinking he or the majority of the community he leads hold views which they don’t in fact hold.
This seems to be part of a pattern with you: you refuse to accept that people (especially smart people) really disagree with you, and aren’t just lying about their views for fear or reputational consequences. It’s reminiscent of creationists who insist there’s a big conspiracy among scienitsts to suppress their revolutionary ideas. And it contributes to me being glad that you are no longer working for MIRI, for much the same reasons that I am glad MIRI does not employ any outspoken creationists.
I find this comment a bit mean (and meaner than most of what I saw in this thread or the linked one, tho I haven’t read that one in much detail).
Maybe it’s because other people feel more strongly about this topic than I do; to me “democracy vs. monarchy” is both a confused and fuzzy question and an irrelevant one. Maybe with a lot of effort one can clarify the question and with even more effort, come up with an answer, but then it has no practical consequences.
Not mean-spirited. Just honest. If this were a private conversation, I’d keep my thoughts to myself and leave in search of more rational company, but when someone starts publicly saying things like...
“Eliezer [is] proclaiming that it’s not canon for this community.”
“The comment is basically like, ‘Scott Alexander good boy. We have paid him recently. Anissimov bad. Bad Anissimov no work for us no more.’”
Accusing Eliezer of dismissing an idea out of hand due to fear of public unpopularity.
(all of which are grossly unfair readings of Eliezer’s coment)
Not that much more unfair than proclaiming something thoroughly refuted and uninteresting based on a single post rebutting the least interesting claims of only two authors, especially given that what appears to have gotten picked up as the central point of the post (NK/SK) is wrong on many different levels.
Your response to Eliezer, both here and in the other thread, comes across as a completely unjustified refusal to take his comment at face-value: Eliezer explaining that he concluded your views were not worth spending time on for quite rational reasons, and is saying so because he doesn’t want people thinking he or the majority of the community he leads hold views which they don’t in fact hold.
This seems to be part of a pattern with you: you refuse to accept that people (especially smart people) really disagree with you, and aren’t just lying about their views for fear or reputational consequences. It’s reminiscent of creationists who insist there’s a big conspiracy among scienitsts to suppress their revolutionary ideas. And it contributes to me being glad that you are no longer working for MIRI, for much the same reasons that I am glad MIRI does not employ any outspoken creationists.
I find this comment a bit mean (and meaner than most of what I saw in this thread or the linked one, tho I haven’t read that one in much detail).
Maybe it’s because other people feel more strongly about this topic than I do; to me “democracy vs. monarchy” is both a confused and fuzzy question and an irrelevant one. Maybe with a lot of effort one can clarify the question and with even more effort, come up with an answer, but then it has no practical consequences.
Chris is obviously being mean-spirited here, and a direct response would only escalate, so I won’t make one.
Not mean-spirited. Just honest. If this were a private conversation, I’d keep my thoughts to myself and leave in search of more rational company, but when someone starts publicly saying things like...
“Eliezer [is] proclaiming that it’s not canon for this community.”
“The comment is basically like, ‘Scott Alexander good boy. We have paid him recently. Anissimov bad. Bad Anissimov no work for us no more.’”
Accusing Eliezer of dismissing an idea out of hand due to fear of public unpopularity.
(all of which are grossly unfair readings of Eliezer’s coment)
...then I think some bluntness is called for.
Not that much more unfair than proclaiming something thoroughly refuted and uninteresting based on a single post rebutting the least interesting claims of only two authors, especially given that what appears to have gotten picked up as the central point of the post (NK/SK) is wrong on many different levels.