I think that the vibes here have been unhealthy in ways that made model-challenging evidence seeking harder to think of; for example, yudkowsky’s intense anxiety, dying with dignity needing to be said and also that shock inducing name, etc. Your reaction seems to me to miss the point that I would agree with CellBioGiy about, though I do also think you’re right in every implied rebuttal your questions point to; it’s just that trying to solve safety requires willingness to question deep assumptions and yet retain stability in the face of doing so, and retaining stability is hard and often failed at when taking huge magnitude ratios seriously. Ziz seems to me to have been the most intense example of a general failure pattern in how this intercommunity directs a person’s intention, and thinking about that carefully seems important to me. It’s also something where real progress has been made and I hardly think the critique warrants writing off the site as a whole or anything like that.
I do think calling the whole thing a spiraling cult takes it too far; it’s got elevated levels of cult disease and features that can’t be removed which make it pattern match aesthetically to cult adjacency in ways that may not always be fundamental—real crazy things are coming—but I think that there are in fact concerning thought stopping patterns in the interpersonal anxiety patterns, patterns of who trusts who without ongoing verification, etc.
I think that the vibes here have been unhealthy in ways that made model-challenging evidence seeking harder to think of; for example, yudkowsky’s intense anxiety, dying with dignity needing to be said and also that shock inducing name, etc. Your reaction seems to me to miss the point that I would agree with CellBioGiy about, though I do also think you’re right in every implied rebuttal your questions point to; it’s just that trying to solve safety requires willingness to question deep assumptions and yet retain stability in the face of doing so, and retaining stability is hard and often failed at when taking huge magnitude ratios seriously. Ziz seems to me to have been the most intense example of a general failure pattern in how this intercommunity directs a person’s intention, and thinking about that carefully seems important to me. It’s also something where real progress has been made and I hardly think the critique warrants writing off the site as a whole or anything like that.
I do think calling the whole thing a spiraling cult takes it too far; it’s got elevated levels of cult disease and features that can’t be removed which make it pattern match aesthetically to cult adjacency in ways that may not always be fundamental—real crazy things are coming—but I think that there are in fact concerning thought stopping patterns in the interpersonal anxiety patterns, patterns of who trusts who without ongoing verification, etc.