I had mixed feelings about the dialogue personally. I enjoy the writing style and think Eliezer is a great writer with a lot of good opinions and arguments, which made it enjoyable.
But at the same time, it felt like he was taking down a strawman. Maybe you’d label it part of “conflict aversion”, but I tend to get a negative reaction to take-downs of straw-people who agree with me.
To give an unfair and exaggerated comparison, it would be a bit like reading a take-down of a straw-rationalist in which the straw-rationalist occasionally insists such things as “we should not be emotional” or “we should always use Bayes’ Theorem in every problem we encounter.” It should hopefully be easy to see why a rationalist might react negatively to reading that sort of dialogue.
I had mixed feelings about the dialogue personally. I enjoy the writing style and think Eliezer is a great writer with a lot of good opinions and arguments, which made it enjoyable.
But at the same time, it felt like he was taking down a strawman. Maybe you’d label it part of “conflict aversion”, but I tend to get a negative reaction to take-downs of straw-people who agree with me.
To give an unfair and exaggerated comparison, it would be a bit like reading a take-down of a straw-rationalist in which the straw-rationalist occasionally insists such things as “we should not be emotional” or “we should always use Bayes’ Theorem in every problem we encounter.” It should hopefully be easy to see why a rationalist might react negatively to reading that sort of dialogue.