I think it’s bad for discourse for us to pretend that discourse doesn’t have impacts on others in a democratic society.
I think I agree with this in principle. Possible that the crux between us is more like “what is the role of LessWrong.”
For instance, if Bob wrote a NYT article titled “Anthropic is not publishing its safety research”, I would be like “meh, this doesn’t seem like a particularly useful or high-priority thing to be bringing to everyone’s attention– there are like at least 10+ topics I would’ve much rather Bob spent his points on.”
But LW generally isn’t a place where you’re going to get EG thousands of readers or have a huge effect on general discourse (with the exception of a few things that go viral or AIS-viral).
So I’m not particularly worried about LW discussions having big second-order effects on democratic society. Whereas LW can be a space for people to have a relatively low bar for raising questions, being curious, trying to understand the world, offering criticism/praise without thinking much about how they want to be spending “points”, etc.
I think I agree with this in principle. Possible that the crux between us is more like “what is the role of LessWrong.”
For instance, if Bob wrote a NYT article titled “Anthropic is not publishing its safety research”, I would be like “meh, this doesn’t seem like a particularly useful or high-priority thing to be bringing to everyone’s attention– there are like at least 10+ topics I would’ve much rather Bob spent his points on.”
But LW generally isn’t a place where you’re going to get EG thousands of readers or have a huge effect on general discourse (with the exception of a few things that go viral or AIS-viral).
So I’m not particularly worried about LW discussions having big second-order effects on democratic society. Whereas LW can be a space for people to have a relatively low bar for raising questions, being curious, trying to understand the world, offering criticism/praise without thinking much about how they want to be spending “points”, etc.