Zac is consistently generous with his time, even when dealing with people who are openly hostile toward him. Of all lab employees, Zac is among the most available for—and eager to engage in—dialogue. He has furnished me personally with >2 dozen hours of extremely informative conversation, even though our views differ significantly (and he has ~no instrumental reason for talking to me in particular, since I am but a humble moisture farmer). I’ve watched him do the same with countless others at various events.
I’ve also watched people yell at him more than once. He kinda shrugged, reframed the topic, and politely continued engaging with the person yelling at him. He has leagues more patience and decorum than is common among the general population. Moreover, in our quarrelsome pocket dimension, he’s part of a mere handful of people with these traits.
I understand distrust of labs (and feel it myself!), but let’s not kill the messenger, lest we run out of messengers.
Ok, but, that’s what we have the whole agreement/approval distinction for.
I absolutely do not want people to hesitate to disagree vote on something because they are worried that this will be taken as disapproval or social punishment, that’s the whole reason we have two different dimensions! (And it doesn’t look like Zac’s comments are at any risk of ending up with a low approval voting score)
I think a non-zero number of those disagree votes would not have appeared if the same comment were made by someone other than an Anthropic employee, based on seeing how Zac is sometimes treated IRL. My comment is aimed most directly at the people who cast those particular disagree votes.
I agree with your comment to Ryan above that those who identified “Anthropic already does most of these” as “the central part of the comment” were using the disagree button as intended.
The threshold for hitting the button will be different in different situations; I think the threshold many applied here was somewhat low, and a brief look at Zac’s comment history, to me, further suggests this.
FTR I upvote-disagreed with the comment, in that I was glad that this dialogue was happening and yet disagreed with the comment. I think it likely I am not the only one.
let’s not kill the messenger, lest we run out of messengers.
Unfortunately we’re a fair way into this process, not because of downvotes[1] but rather because the comments are often dominated by uncharitable interpretations that I can’t productively engage with.[2]. I’ve had researchers and policy people tell me that reading the discussion convinced them that engaging when their work was discussed on LessWrong wasn’t worth the trouble.
I’m still here, sad that I can’t recommend it to many others, and wondering whether I’ll regret this comment too.
I also feel there’s a double standard, but don’t think it matters much. Span-level reacts would make it a lot easier to tell what people disagree with though.
Confidentiality makes any public writing far more effortful than you might expect. Comments which assume ill-faith are deeply unpleasant to engage with, and very rarely have any actionable takeaways. I’ve written and deleted a lot of other stuff here, and can’t find an object-level description that I think is worth posting, but there are plenty of further reasons.
I want to double down on this:
Zac is consistently generous with his time, even when dealing with people who are openly hostile toward him. Of all lab employees, Zac is among the most available for—and eager to engage in—dialogue. He has furnished me personally with >2 dozen hours of extremely informative conversation, even though our views differ significantly (and he has ~no instrumental reason for talking to me in particular, since I am but a humble moisture farmer). I’ve watched him do the same with countless others at various events.
I’ve also watched people yell at him more than once. He kinda shrugged, reframed the topic, and politely continued engaging with the person yelling at him. He has leagues more patience and decorum than is common among the general population. Moreover, in our quarrelsome pocket dimension, he’s part of a mere handful of people with these traits.
I understand distrust of labs (and feel it myself!), but let’s not kill the messenger, lest we run out of messengers.
Ok, but, that’s what we have the whole agreement/approval distinction for.
I absolutely do not want people to hesitate to disagree vote on something because they are worried that this will be taken as disapproval or social punishment, that’s the whole reason we have two different dimensions! (And it doesn’t look like Zac’s comments are at any risk of ending up with a low approval voting score)
I think a non-zero number of those disagree votes would not have appeared if the same comment were made by someone other than an Anthropic employee, based on seeing how Zac is sometimes treated IRL. My comment is aimed most directly at the people who cast those particular disagree votes.
I agree with your comment to Ryan above that those who identified “Anthropic already does most of these” as “the central part of the comment” were using the disagree button as intended.
The threshold for hitting the button will be different in different situations; I think the threshold many applied here was somewhat low, and a brief look at Zac’s comment history, to me, further suggests this.
FTR I upvote-disagreed with the comment, in that I was glad that this dialogue was happening and yet disagreed with the comment. I think it likely I am not the only one.
Unfortunately we’re a fair way into this process, not because of downvotes[1] but rather because the comments are often dominated by uncharitable interpretations that I can’t productively engage with.[2]. I’ve had researchers and policy people tell me that reading the discussion convinced them that engaging when their work was discussed on LessWrong wasn’t worth the trouble.
I’m still here, sad that I can’t recommend it to many others, and wondering whether I’ll regret this comment too.
I also feel there’s a double standard, but don’t think it matters much. Span-level reacts would make it a lot easier to tell what people disagree with though.
Confidentiality makes any public writing far more effortful than you might expect. Comments which assume ill-faith are deeply unpleasant to engage with, and very rarely have any actionable takeaways. I’ve written and deleted a lot of other stuff here, and can’t find an object-level description that I think is worth posting, but there are plenty of further reasons.