If you work at SpaceX, the decisions Elon Musk makes are very important to you. However, it would be bad if you thus spent a large deal of time discussing Musk’s motives, goals, and personal preferences, instead of building a space rocket. It’s best for the company as a whole to spend most resources building the actual products, and the best way to reliably rise is to reliably create value. It would be really bad if each worker at the company spent 10% of their time gossiping about Musk, rather than building a space rocket.
To give another example, in online forums, there’s a common phenomena whereby a set that is nominally about something (e.g. podcasting equipment) becomes about the forum—who should run it, who gets what rights, etc.
The general point is that there is a constant force to discuss the meta, discuss the community, discuss status, that negatively affects any community that is trying to do something real, be it discuss podcasting gear, anime, or research. The x-risk community is no different.
(I was somewhat sloppy in my words; while I did say “Avoid things that (because they’re social) are fun to argue about”, I also said “Another candidate for a sexy subject that is basically a distraction, is discussion of the high status people in AI e.g. “Did you hear what Elon Musk said to Demis Hassabis?”″. It is actually important, but I want to suggest that most of the time we discuss it we’re likely being motivated by other reasons, and on net we should push against that.)
If you work at SpaceX, the decisions Elon Musk makes are very important to you. However, it would be bad if you thus spent a large deal of time discussing Musk’s motives, goals, and personal preferences, instead of building a space rocket. It’s best for the company as a whole to spend most resources building the actual products, and the best way to reliably rise is to reliably create value. It would be really bad if each worker at the company spent 10% of their time gossiping about Musk, rather than building a space rocket.
To give another example, in online forums, there’s a common phenomena whereby a set that is nominally about something (e.g. podcasting equipment) becomes about the forum—who should run it, who gets what rights, etc.
The general point is that there is a constant force to discuss the meta, discuss the community, discuss status, that negatively affects any community that is trying to do something real, be it discuss podcasting gear, anime, or research. The x-risk community is no different.
(I was somewhat sloppy in my words; while I did say “Avoid things that (because they’re social) are fun to argue about”, I also said “Another candidate for a sexy subject that is basically a distraction, is discussion of the high status people in AI e.g. “Did you hear what Elon Musk said to Demis Hassabis?”″. It is actually important, but I want to suggest that most of the time we discuss it we’re likely being motivated by other reasons, and on net we should push against that.)