Me too! I put the AI problem in the broader class of topics where apathy serves as a dual defense mechanism — not just against needing to expend effort and resources, but against emotional discomfort. You can see the same dual barrier when promoting charitable causes aimed at reducing human misery, or when teaching a subject to students who have really struggled with it in the past.
As a teacher, I attacked both of those roots more deliberately as I grew, trying hard to not make my class feel like work most days while building an atmosphere of low-stakes experimentation where failure could be fun rather than painful. (An example of what success looked like: students taking the risk of trying the more advanced writing approaches I modeled instead of endlessly rewriting the same basic meta essay they had learned in middle school.)
One tactic for eroding defensive apathy is therapeutic empathy. You see this both in many good teachers and (I imagine) relationship counselors. It’s much harder in writing, though I suppose I did a little bit of that in this post when I talked about how the reader and I have probably both felt the pull of Apathy with regards to the AI problem. I think empathy works partly because it builds a human connection, and partly because it brings the feared pain to the surface, where we find (with the help of that human connection) that it can be endured, freeing us to work on the problem that accompanies it.
Whether and how to use authentic human connections in our communications is a topic of ongoing research and debate at MIRI. It has obvious problems with regards to scientific respectability, as there’s this sense in intellectual culture that it’s impossible to be impartial about anything one has feelings about.
And sure, the science itself should be dispassionate. The universe doesn’t care how we feel about it, and our emotions will try to keep us from learning things we don’t want to be true.
But when communicating our findings? To the extent that our task is two-pronged: (1) communicating the truth as we understand it and (2) eliciting a global response to address it, I suspect we will need some human warmth and connection in the second prong even as we continue to avoid it in the first. Apathy loves the cold.
I’d love to hear some more specific advice about how to communicate in these kinds of circumstances when it’s much easier for folk not to listen.
Me too! I put the AI problem in the broader class of topics where apathy serves as a dual defense mechanism — not just against needing to expend effort and resources, but against emotional discomfort. You can see the same dual barrier when promoting charitable causes aimed at reducing human misery, or when teaching a subject to students who have really struggled with it in the past.
As a teacher, I attacked both of those roots more deliberately as I grew, trying hard to not make my class feel like work most days while building an atmosphere of low-stakes experimentation where failure could be fun rather than painful. (An example of what success looked like: students taking the risk of trying the more advanced writing approaches I modeled instead of endlessly rewriting the same basic meta essay they had learned in middle school.)
One tactic for eroding defensive apathy is therapeutic empathy. You see this both in many good teachers and (I imagine) relationship counselors. It’s much harder in writing, though I suppose I did a little bit of that in this post when I talked about how the reader and I have probably both felt the pull of Apathy with regards to the AI problem. I think empathy works partly because it builds a human connection, and partly because it brings the feared pain to the surface, where we find (with the help of that human connection) that it can be endured, freeing us to work on the problem that accompanies it.
Whether and how to use authentic human connections in our communications is a topic of ongoing research and debate at MIRI. It has obvious problems with regards to scientific respectability, as there’s this sense in intellectual culture that it’s impossible to be impartial about anything one has feelings about.
And sure, the science itself should be dispassionate. The universe doesn’t care how we feel about it, and our emotions will try to keep us from learning things we don’t want to be true.
But when communicating our findings? To the extent that our task is two-pronged: (1) communicating the truth as we understand it and (2) eliciting a global response to address it, I suspect we will need some human warmth and connection in the second prong even as we continue to avoid it in the first. Apathy loves the cold.