The size of the community working on the alignment problem can be assumed to be at least somewhat proportional to the likelihood of successfully solving the alignment problem.
Eliezer, being the most public face of the alignment problem community, wields outsized influence in shaping public perception of the community.
Eliezer’s writing is distinctly condescending and polemical, and has at least a hypothetical possibility of causing reputational harm to the community (as evidenced by your comment).
Based on this, there absolutely exists a hypothetical point where, based purely on writing style, the net effect of a post like this could fully undermine the post’s ostensible aim. Whether this post crosses that point is a subjective evaluation, and I don’t know of any rigorous way to evaluate this.
I’m fully aware that this could be construed as “tone policing”, but ignorance of the impacts of writing tone seems like a blind spot to Eliezer and the community overall, so I think the topic is worthy of discussion.
The size of the community working on the alignment problem can be assumed to be at least somewhat proportional to the likelihood of successfully solving the alignment problem.
Eliezer, being the most public face of the alignment problem community, wields outsized influence in shaping public perception of the community.
Eliezer’s writing is distinctly condescending and polemical, and has at least a hypothetical possibility of causing reputational harm to the community (as evidenced by your comment).
Based on this, there absolutely exists a hypothetical point where, based purely on writing style, the net effect of a post like this could fully undermine the post’s ostensible aim. Whether this post crosses that point is a subjective evaluation, and I don’t know of any rigorous way to evaluate this.
I’m fully aware that this could be construed as “tone policing”, but ignorance of the impacts of writing tone seems like a blind spot to Eliezer and the community overall, so I think the topic is worthy of discussion.
My first order response to this is in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Js34Ez9nrDeJCTYQL/politics-is-way-too-meta