I am very sorry that you feel this way. I think it is completely fine for you, or anyone else, to have internal conflicts about your career or purpose. I hope you find a solution to your troubles in the following months.
Moreover, I think you did an useful thing, raising awareness about some important points:
“The amount of funding in 2022 exceeded the total cost of useful funding opportunities in 2022.”
“Being used to do everything in Berkeley, on a high budget, is strongly suboptimal in case of sudden funding constraints.”
“Why don’t we spend less money and donate the rest?”
Epistemic status for what follows: medium-high for the factual claims, low for the claims about potential bad optics. It might be that I’m worrying about nothing here.
However, I do not think this place should be welcoming of posts displaying bad rhetoric and epistemic practices.
Posts like this can hurt hurt the optics of the research done in the LW/AF extended universe. What does a prospective AI x-safety researcher think when they get referred to this site and see this post above several alignment research posts? EDIT: The above paragraph was off. See Ben’s excellent reply for a better explanation of why anyone should care.
I think this place should be careful about maintaining:
the epistemic standard of talking about falsifiable things;
the accepted rhetoric being fundamentally honest and straightforward, and always asking “compared to what?” before making claims;
the aversion to present uncertainties as facts.
For some examples:
My hotel room had the nightly price written on the inside of the door: $500. Shortly afterwards, I found out that the EA-adjacent community had bought the entire hotel complex.
I tried for 15 minutes to find a good faith reading of this, but I could not. Most people would read this as “the hotel room costs $500 and the EA-adjacent community bought the hotel complex in which that hotel is a part of”, while being written in a way that only insinuates and does not commit to meaning exactly that. Insinuating bad optics facts while maintaining plausible deniability, without checking the facts, is a horrible practice, usually employed by politicians and journalists.
The poster does not deliberately lie, but this is not enough when making a “very bad optics” statement that sounds like this one. At any point, they could have asked for the actual price of the hotel room, or about the condition of the actual hotel that might be bought.
I have never felt so obliged, so unpressured. If I produce nothing, before Christmas, then nothing bad will happen. Future funds will be denied, but no other punishment will ensue.
This is true. But it is not much different from working a normal software job. The worst thing that can happen is getting fired after not delivering for several months. Some people survive years coasting until there is a layoff round.
An important counterfactual for a lot of people reading this is a PhD degree. There is no punishment for failing to produce good research, except getting dropping out of the program after a few years.
After a while I work out why: every penny I’ve pinched, every luxury I’ve denied myself, every financial sacrifice, is completely irrelevant in the face of the magnitude of this wealth. I expect I could have easily asked for an extra 20%, and received it.
This might be true. Again, I think it would be useful to ask: what is the counterfactual? All of this is applicable for anyone that starts working for Google or Facebook, if they were poor beforehand. This feeling (regretting saving and not spending money) is incredibly common in all people that have good careers.
I would suggest going through the post with a cold head and removing parts which are not up to the standards.
I agree with the focus on epistemic standards, and I think many of the points here are good. I disagree that this is the primary reason to focus on maintaining epistemic standards:
Posts like this can hurt hurt the optics of the research done in the LW/AF extended universe. What does a prospective AI x-safety researcher think when they get referred to this site and see this post above several alignment research posts?
I think we want to focus on the epistemic standards of posts so that we ourselves can trust the content on LessWrong to be honestly informing us about the world. In most places you have to watch your back way more than on LessWrong (e.g. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook). I don’t currently value the question “what does this look like to other people” half as much as I care about the question “can I myself trust the content on LessWrong”.
(Though, I admit, visibly having strong truth-seeking norms is a good way to select for the sorts of folks who will supply truth and not falsehood.)
I somewhat agree, athough I obviously put a bit less weight on your reason than you do. Maybe I should update my confidence of the importance of what I wrote to medium-high.
Let me raise the question of continuously rethinking incentives on LW/AF, for both Ben’s reason and my original reason.
The upvote/karma system does not seem like it incentivizes high epistemic standards and top-rigor posts, although I would need more datapoints to make a proper judgement.
Rigor as in meticulously researching everything seems not like the best thing to strive for? For what it’s worth I think the post actually did a good job in framing this post, so I mostly took this as, “this is what this feels like” and less this is what the current fundig situation ~actually~ is. The Karma system of the comments did a great job at surfacing important facts like the hotel price.
This might be true. Again, I think it would be useful to ask: what is the counterfactual? All of this is applicable for anyone that starts working for Google or Facebook, if they were poor beforehand.
You’re interpreting as though they’re making evaluative all-things-considered judgments, but it seems to me that the OP is reporting feelings.
(If this post was written for EA’s criticism and red teaming contest, I’d find the subjective style and lack of exploring of alternatives inappropriate. By contrast, for what it aspires to be, I thought the post was extremely good at describing a certain mood. I’m usually a bit bad at inhabiting the experience of people with frugality intuitions / scrupulosity about spending, but this one seemed to evoke something that helps me understand and relate.)
And re Google or Facebook, the juxtaposition of “we’re doing this for altruistic reasons” and “we’re swimming in luxury” is extra jarring for some people.
Most people would read this as “the hotel room costs $500 and the EA-adjacent community bought the hotel complex in which that hotel is a part of”, while being written in a way that only insinuates and does not commit to meaning exactly that.
I disagree both that posts that are clearly marked as sharing unendorsed feelings in a messy way need to be held to a high epistemic standard, and that there is no good faith interpretation of the post’s particular errors. If you don’t want to see personal posts I suggest disabling their appearance on your front page, which is the default anyway.
This is a mistake on my own part that actually changes the impact calculus, as most people looking into AI x-safety on this place will not actually ever see this post. Therefore, the “negative impact” section is retracted.[1] I point to Ben’s excellent comment for a correct interpretation of why we still care.
I do not know why I was not aware of this “block posts like this” feature, and I wonder if my experience of this forum was significantly more negative as a result of me accidentally clicking “Show Personal Blogposts” at some point. I did not even know that button existed.
No other part of my post is retracted. In fact, I’d like to reiterate a wish for the community to karma-enforce [2] the norms of:
the epistemic standard of talking about falsifiable things;
the accepted rhetoric being fundamentally honest and straightforward, and always asking “compared to what?” before making claims;
the aversion to present uncertainties as facts.
Thank you for improving my user experience of this site!
Personal is a special tag in various ways, but you can ban or change weightings on any tag. You can put a penalty on tag so you see it less, but still see very high karma posts, or give tags a boost so even low karma posts linger on your list.
Thanks for being open about your response, I appreciate it and I expect many people share your reaction.
I’ve edited the section about the hotel room price/purchase, where people have pointed out I may have been incorrect or misleading,
This definitely wasn’t meant to be a hit piece, or misleading “EA bad” rhetoric.
On the point of “What does a prospective AI x-safety researcher think when they get referred to this site and see this post above several alignment research posts?”—I think this is a large segment of my intended audience. I would like people to know what they’re getting themselves in for, so they can make an informed decision.
I think that a lot of the point of this post is to explore and share the dissonance between what “thinks” right, and what “feels” right. The title of the piece was intended to make it clear that this is about an emotional, non-rational reaction. It’s styled more as a piece of journalism than as a scientific paper, because I think that that’s the best way to communicate the emotional reaction which is the main focus of the piece.
Fwiw I disagree with this. I’m a LW mod. Other LW mods haven’t talked through this post yet and I’m not sure if they’d all agree, but, I think people sharing their feelings is just a straightforwardly reasonable thing to do.
I think this post did a reasonable job framing itself as not-objective-truth, just a self report on feelings. (i.e. it’s objectively true about “these were my feelings”, which is fine).
I think the author was straightforwardly wrong about Rose Garden Inn being $500 a night, but that seems like a simple mistake that was easily corrected. I also think it is straightforwardly correct that EA projects in San Francisco spend money very liberally, and if you’re in the middle of the culture shock of realizing how much money people are spending and haven’t finished orienting, $500/night is not an unbelievable number.
(it so happens that there’s been at least one event with lodging that I think averaged $500/person/night (although this was including other venue expenses, and was a pretty weird edge case of events that happened for weird contingent reasons. Meanwhile in Berkeley there’s been plenty of $230ish/night hotel rooms used for events, which is not $500 but still probably a lot more than Sam was expecting)
I do agree with you that the implied frame of:
“After a while I work out why: every penny I’ve pinched, every luxury I’ve denied myself, every financial sacrifice, is completely irrelevant in the face of the magnitude of this wealth. I expect I could have easily asked for an extra 20%, and received it.”
is, in fact, an unhelpful frame. It’s important for people to learn to orient in a world where money is available and learn to make use of more money. (Penny-pinching isn’t the right mindset for EA – even before longtermist billionaires flooding the ecosystem I still think it was generally a better mindset for people to look for strategies that would get them enough surplus money that they didn’t have to spend cognition penny pinching)
But, just because penny-pinching isn’t the right mindset for EA in 2022, doesn’t mean that that the amount of wealth isn’t… just a pretty disorienting situation. I expect lots of people to experience cultural whiplash about this. I think posts like this are a reasonable part of processing it. I also think there are issues not articulated here that come from a sudden influx of money that are potentially pretty bad (i.e. attracting grifters trying to scam us, reducing signal/noise, etc).
I think people writing up their emotional experiences (flagging them as such) is an important source of information about this.
I do of course want people to write posts about this from other perspectives as well. And I think it’d be bad if the implied frame of this post became the default frame.
(that all said, after some reflection I did weak downvote the OP because I thought 98 karma felt a bit too high. ((I’m someone who thinks it’s fine to vote based on the total karma, not just on whether I thought it was overall good or bad)). I would feel like the site-karma-health was off if this got like 200 karma, and IMO an emotional report like this should get, like, a respectable 40-80-ish karma, but if it’s getting over 100 I expect that’s largely coming from people who are applauding the general concept of wealth-is-sinful or something, and I do worry about the cultural effects of that)
I am very sorry that you feel this way. I think it is completely fine for you, or anyone else, to have internal conflicts about your career or purpose. I hope you find a solution to your troubles in the following months.
Moreover, I think you did an useful thing, raising awareness about some important points:
“The amount of funding in 2022 exceeded the total cost of useful funding opportunities in 2022.”
“Being used to do everything in Berkeley, on a high budget, is strongly suboptimal in case of sudden funding constraints.”
“Why don’t we spend less money and donate the rest?”
Epistemic status for what follows: medium-high for the factual claims, low for the claims about potential bad optics. It might be that I’m worrying about nothing here.
However, I do not think this place should be welcoming of posts displaying bad rhetoric and epistemic practices.
Posts like this can hurt hurt the optics of the research done in the LW/AF extended universe. What does a prospective AI x-safety researcher think when they get referred to this site and see this post above several alignment research posts?EDIT: The above paragraph was off. See Ben’s excellent reply for a better explanation of why anyone should care.
I think this place should be careful about maintaining:
the epistemic standard of talking about falsifiable things;
the accepted rhetoric being fundamentally honest and straightforward, and always asking “compared to what?” before making claims;
the aversion to present uncertainties as facts.
For some examples:
I tried for 15 minutes to find a good faith reading of this, but I could not.
Most people would read this as “the hotel room costs $500 and the EA-adjacent community bought the hotel complex in which that hotel is a part of”, while being written in a way that only insinuates and does not commit to meaning exactly that. Insinuating bad optics facts while maintaining plausible deniability, without checking the facts, is a horrible practice, usually employed by politicians and journalists.
The poster does not deliberately lie, but this is not enough when making a “very bad optics” statement that sounds like this one. At any point, they could have asked for the actual price of the hotel room, or about the condition of the actual hotel that might be bought.
This is true. But it is not much different from working a normal software job. The worst thing that can happen is getting fired after not delivering for several months. Some people survive years coasting until there is a layoff round.
An important counterfactual for a lot of people reading this is a PhD degree.
There is no punishment for failing to produce good research, except getting dropping out of the program after a few years.
This might be true. Again, I think it would be useful to ask: what is the counterfactual?
All of this is applicable for anyone that starts working for Google or Facebook, if they were poor beforehand.
This feeling (regretting saving and not spending money) is incredibly common in all people that have good careers.
I would suggest going through the post with a cold head and removing parts which are not up to the standards.
Again, I am very sorry that you feel like this.
I agree with the focus on epistemic standards, and I think many of the points here are good. I disagree that this is the primary reason to focus on maintaining epistemic standards:
I think we want to focus on the epistemic standards of posts so that we ourselves can trust the content on LessWrong to be honestly informing us about the world. In most places you have to watch your back way more than on LessWrong (e.g. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook). I don’t currently value the question “what does this look like to other people” half as much as I care about the question “can I myself trust the content on LessWrong”.
(Though, I admit, visibly having strong truth-seeking norms is a good way to select for the sorts of folks who will supply truth and not falsehood.)
I somewhat agree, athough I obviously put a bit less weight on your reason than you do. Maybe I should update my confidence of the importance of what I wrote to medium-high.
Let me raise the question of continuously rethinking incentives on LW/AF, for both Ben’s reason and my original reason.
The upvote/karma system does not seem like it incentivizes high epistemic standards and top-rigor posts, although I would need more datapoints to make a proper judgement.
Rigor as in meticulously researching everything seems not like the best thing to strive for? For what it’s worth I think the post actually did a good job in framing this post, so I mostly took this as, “this is what this feels like” and less this is what the current fundig situation ~actually~ is. The Karma system of the comments did a great job at surfacing important facts like the hotel price.
You’re interpreting as though they’re making evaluative all-things-considered judgments, but it seems to me that the OP is reporting feelings.
(If this post was written for EA’s criticism and red teaming contest, I’d find the subjective style and lack of exploring of alternatives inappropriate. By contrast, for what it aspires to be, I thought the post was extremely good at describing a certain mood. I’m usually a bit bad at inhabiting the experience of people with frugality intuitions / scrupulosity about spending, but this one seemed to evoke something that helps me understand and relate.)
And re Google or Facebook, the juxtaposition of “we’re doing this for altruistic reasons” and “we’re swimming in luxury” is extra jarring for some people.
I disagree both that posts that are clearly marked as sharing unendorsed feelings in a messy way need to be held to a high epistemic standard, and that there is no good faith interpretation of the post’s particular errors. If you don’t want to see personal posts I suggest disabling their appearance on your front page, which is the default anyway.
This is a mistake on my own part that actually changes the impact calculus, as most people looking into AI x-safety on this place will not actually ever see this post. Therefore, the “negative impact” section is retracted.[1] I point to Ben’s excellent comment for a correct interpretation of why we still care.
I do not know why I was not aware of this “block posts like this” feature, and I wonder if my experience of this forum was significantly more negative as a result of me accidentally clicking “Show Personal Blogposts” at some point. I did not even know that button existed.
No other part of my post is retracted. In fact, I’d like to reiterate a wish for the community to karma-enforce [2] the norms of:
the epistemic standard of talking about falsifiable things;
the accepted rhetoric being fundamentally honest and straightforward, and always asking “compared to what?” before making claims;
the aversion to present uncertainties as facts.
Thank you for improving my user experience of this site!
I am now slightly proud that my original disclaimer precisely said that this was the part I was unsure of the most.
As in, I wish to personally be called out on any violations of the described norms.
Personal is a special tag in various ways, but you can ban or change weightings on any tag. You can put a penalty on tag so you see it less, but still see very high karma posts, or give tags a boost so even low karma posts linger on your list.
Thanks for being open about your response, I appreciate it and I expect many people share your reaction.
I’ve edited the section about the hotel room price/purchase, where people have pointed out I may have been incorrect or misleading,
This definitely wasn’t meant to be a hit piece, or misleading “EA bad” rhetoric.
On the point of “What does a prospective AI x-safety researcher think when they get referred to this site and see this post above several alignment research posts?”—I think this is a large segment of my intended audience. I would like people to know what they’re getting themselves in for, so they can make an informed decision.
I think that a lot of the point of this post is to explore and share the dissonance between what “thinks” right, and what “feels” right. The title of the piece was intended to make it clear that this is about an emotional, non-rational reaction. It’s styled more as a piece of journalism than as a scientific paper, because I think that that’s the best way to communicate the emotional reaction which is the main focus of the piece.
Fwiw I disagree with this. I’m a LW mod. Other LW mods haven’t talked through this post yet and I’m not sure if they’d all agree, but, I think people sharing their feelings is just a straightforwardly reasonable thing to do.
I think this post did a reasonable job framing itself as not-objective-truth, just a self report on feelings. (i.e. it’s objectively true about “these were my feelings”, which is fine).
I think the author was straightforwardly wrong about Rose Garden Inn being $500 a night, but that seems like a simple mistake that was easily corrected. I also think it is straightforwardly correct that EA projects in San Francisco spend money very liberally, and if you’re in the middle of the culture shock of realizing how much money people are spending and haven’t finished orienting, $500/night is not an unbelievable number.
(it so happens that there’s been at least one event with lodging that I think averaged $500/person/night (although this was including other venue expenses, and was a pretty weird edge case of events that happened for weird contingent reasons. Meanwhile in Berkeley there’s been plenty of $230ish/night hotel rooms used for events, which is not $500 but still probably a lot more than Sam was expecting)
I do agree with you that the implied frame of:
is, in fact, an unhelpful frame. It’s important for people to learn to orient in a world where money is available and learn to make use of more money. (Penny-pinching isn’t the right mindset for EA – even before longtermist billionaires flooding the ecosystem I still think it was generally a better mindset for people to look for strategies that would get them enough surplus money that they didn’t have to spend cognition penny pinching)
But, just because penny-pinching isn’t the right mindset for EA in 2022, doesn’t mean that that the amount of wealth isn’t… just a pretty disorienting situation. I expect lots of people to experience cultural whiplash about this. I think posts like this are a reasonable part of processing it. I also think there are issues not articulated here that come from a sudden influx of money that are potentially pretty bad (i.e. attracting grifters trying to scam us, reducing signal/noise, etc).
I think people writing up their emotional experiences (flagging them as such) is an important source of information about this.
I do of course want people to write posts about this from other perspectives as well. And I think it’d be bad if the implied frame of this post became the default frame.
(that all said, after some reflection I did weak downvote the OP because I thought 98 karma felt a bit too high. ((I’m someone who thinks it’s fine to vote based on the total karma, not just on whether I thought it was overall good or bad)). I would feel like the site-karma-health was off if this got like 200 karma, and IMO an emotional report like this should get, like, a respectable 40-80-ish karma, but if it’s getting over 100 I expect that’s largely coming from people who are applauding the general concept of wealth-is-sinful or something, and I do worry about the cultural effects of that)