Ironic disclaimer: Arguing about whether politics is useful is temptingly distracting in the same way that politics is. I’ll do one more public response clarifiying something if need be, but if this seems like it warrants further discussion would prefer to do so in private channel.
You persuaded me elsewhere that politics/gossip/etc are (at least sometimes, at least reasonably) important to most people. However, the phrasing of this comment feels exactly like what I was trying to caution against.
Ben’s point about “just build the space rocket” is one key point. Another is that if you aren’t in particular circles, Demis and Eloncan’t hear you. And, the set of things you can do that influence them meaningfully are very different from what your intuitions will push you towards. (on average, for most values of “you”)
Yes, there’s something important that needs to be dealt with here. But not the way everyone will do by default as if Elon and Demis were people in the tribe a few hundred feet away.
AI alignment technical progress feels (to the average AI Alignment enthusiast) like something they don’t understand well enough to comment on. So they instead comment on something they think they can comment on, which is what Elon and Demis et all seem to be doing.
I think (this is a bit of an exaggeration but I think close enough to true) that productively engaging in politics should feel about as intimidatingly-opaque as AI Technical Progress does. If it doesn’t feel like you’re solving a complicated problem that your brain didn’t evolve to handle, you probably aren’t doing it right.
You and Ben make fair points. I think I didn’t have a good sense of what level of gossip Ben was pushing back against; I had a sense he was pushing back against “occasionally gossip at parties” which seemed too strong to me (that’s the level of gossip I get exposed to by default), but if Ben is pushing against something more like “15% of my conversations are dominated by gossip by default” that would make more sense to me.
Arguing about whether politics is useful is temptingly distracting in the same way that politics is.
Yeah, this is why I decided that the next post I write on this topic will be more fleshing out of the ‘background models’ section than the heuristic section.
Ironic disclaimer: Arguing about whether politics is useful is temptingly distracting in the same way that politics is. I’ll do one more public response clarifiying something if need be, but if this seems like it warrants further discussion would prefer to do so in private channel.
You persuaded me elsewhere that politics/gossip/etc are (at least sometimes, at least reasonably) important to most people. However, the phrasing of this comment feels exactly like what I was trying to caution against.
Ben’s point about “just build the space rocket” is one key point. Another is that if you aren’t in particular circles, Demis and Elon can’t hear you. And, the set of things you can do that influence them meaningfully are very different from what your intuitions will push you towards. (on average, for most values of “you”)
Yes, there’s something important that needs to be dealt with here. But not the way everyone will do by default as if Elon and Demis were people in the tribe a few hundred feet away.
AI alignment technical progress feels (to the average AI Alignment enthusiast) like something they don’t understand well enough to comment on. So they instead comment on something they think they can comment on, which is what Elon and Demis et all seem to be doing.
I think (this is a bit of an exaggeration but I think close enough to true) that productively engaging in politics should feel about as intimidatingly-opaque as AI Technical Progress does. If it doesn’t feel like you’re solving a complicated problem that your brain didn’t evolve to handle, you probably aren’t doing it right.
You and Ben make fair points. I think I didn’t have a good sense of what level of gossip Ben was pushing back against; I had a sense he was pushing back against “occasionally gossip at parties” which seemed too strong to me (that’s the level of gossip I get exposed to by default), but if Ben is pushing against something more like “15% of my conversations are dominated by gossip by default” that would make more sense to me.
Yeah, this is why I decided that the next post I write on this topic will be more fleshing out of the ‘background models’ section than the heuristic section.