Yeah, but he didn’t do it right there in that essay. And saying “AI is dangerous, stopping Moore’s Law might help, here’s how fragile semiconductor manufacture is, just saying” still read to someone (including several commenters on the post itself) as bloody obviously implying terrorism.
You’re pointing out it doesn’t technically say that, but multiple people coming to that essay have taken it that way. You can say “ha! They’re wrong”, but I nevertheless submit that if PR is a consideration, the essay strikes me as unlikely to be outweighed by using rot13 for SEO.
Yes, I accept that it’s a problem that everyone and their mother leapt to the false conclusion that he was advocating terrorism. I’m not saying anything like “Ha! They’re wrong!” I’m lamenting the lamentable state of affairs that led to so many people to jump to a false conclusion.
“Just saying” is really not a disclaimer at all. c.f. publishing lists of abortion doctors and saying you didn’t intend lunatics to kill them—if you say “we were just saying”, the courts say “no you really weren’t.”
We don’t have a demonstrated lunatic hazard on LW (though we have had unstable people severely traumatised by discussions and their implications, e.g. Roko’s Forbidden Thread), but “just saying” in this manner still brings past dangerous behaviour along these lines to mind; and, given that decompartmentalising toxic waste is a known nerd hazard, this may not even be an unreasonable worry.
As far as I can tell, “just saying” is a phrase you introduced to this conversation, and not one that appears anywhere in the original post or its comments. I don’t recall saying anything about disclaimers, either.
It’s a name for the style of argument: that it’s not advocating people do these things, it’s just saying that uFAI is a problem, slowing Moore’s Law might help and by the way here’s the vulnerabilities of Intel’s setup. Reasonable people assume that 2 and 2 can in fact be added to make 4, even if 4 is not mentioned in the original. This is a really simple and obvious point.
Note that I am not intending to claim that the implication was Gwern’s original intention (as I note way up there, I don’t think it is); I’m saying it’s a property of the text as rendered. And that me saying it’s a property of the text is supported by multiple people adding 2 and 2 for this result, even if arguably they’re adding 2 and 2 and getting 666.
It’s completely orthogonal to the point that I’m making.
If somebody reads something and comes to a strange conclusion, there’s got to be some sort of five-second level trigger that stops them and says, “Wait, is this really what they’re saying?” The responses to the essay made it evident that there’s a lot of people that failed to have that reaction in that case.
That point is completely independent from any aesthetic/ethical judgments regarding the essay itself. If you want to debate that, I suggest talking to the author, and not me.
I’d have wondered about it myself if I hadn’t had prior evidence that Gwern wasn’t a crazy person, so I’m not convinced that it’s as obviously surface-innocuous as you feel it is. Perhaps I’ve been biased by hearing crazy-nerd stories (and actually going looking for them, ’cos I find them interesting). And I do think the PR disaster potential was something I would class as obvious, even if terrorist threats from web forum postings are statistically bogeyman stories.
I suspect we’ve reached the talking past each other stage.
I understood “just saying” as a reference to the argument you imply here. That is, you are treating the object-level rejection of terrorism as definitive and rejecting the audience’s inference of endorsement of terrorism as a simple error, and DG is observing that treating the object-level rejection as definitive isn’t something you can take for granted.
Meaning does not excuse impact, and on some level you appear to still be making excuses. If you’re going to reason about impressions (I’m not saying that you should, it’s very easy to go too far in worrying about sounding respectable), you should probably fully compartmentalize (ha!) whether a conclusion a normal person might reach is false.
Talking about one aspect of a problem does not imply that other aspects of the problem are not important. But honestly, that debate is stale and appears to have had little impact on the author. So what’s the point in rehashing all of that?
I agree that it’s not fair to blame LW posters for the problem. However, I can’t think of any route to patching the problem that doesn’t involve either blaming LW posters, or doing nontrivial mind alterations on a majority of the general population.
Yeah, but he didn’t do it right there in that essay. And saying “AI is dangerous, stopping Moore’s Law might help, here’s how fragile semiconductor manufacture is, just saying” still read to someone (including several commenters on the post itself) as bloody obviously implying terrorism.
You’re pointing out it doesn’t technically say that, but multiple people coming to that essay have taken it that way. You can say “ha! They’re wrong”, but I nevertheless submit that if PR is a consideration, the essay strikes me as unlikely to be outweighed by using rot13 for SEO.
Yes, I accept that it’s a problem that everyone and their mother leapt to the false conclusion that he was advocating terrorism. I’m not saying anything like “Ha! They’re wrong!” I’m lamenting the lamentable state of affairs that led to so many people to jump to a false conclusion.
“Just saying” is really not a disclaimer at all. c.f. publishing lists of abortion doctors and saying you didn’t intend lunatics to kill them—if you say “we were just saying”, the courts say “no you really weren’t.”
We don’t have a demonstrated lunatic hazard on LW (though we have had unstable people severely traumatised by discussions and their implications, e.g. Roko’s Forbidden Thread), but “just saying” in this manner still brings past dangerous behaviour along these lines to mind; and, given that decompartmentalising toxic waste is a known nerd hazard, this may not even be an unreasonable worry.
As far as I can tell, “just saying” is a phrase you introduced to this conversation, and not one that appears anywhere in the original post or its comments. I don’t recall saying anything about disclaimers, either.
So what are you really trying to say here?
It’s a name for the style of argument: that it’s not advocating people do these things, it’s just saying that uFAI is a problem, slowing Moore’s Law might help and by the way here’s the vulnerabilities of Intel’s setup. Reasonable people assume that 2 and 2 can in fact be added to make 4, even if 4 is not mentioned in the original. This is a really simple and obvious point.
Note that I am not intending to claim that the implication was Gwern’s original intention (as I note way up there, I don’t think it is); I’m saying it’s a property of the text as rendered. And that me saying it’s a property of the text is supported by multiple people adding 2 and 2 for this result, even if arguably they’re adding 2 and 2 and getting 666.
It’s completely orthogonal to the point that I’m making.
If somebody reads something and comes to a strange conclusion, there’s got to be some sort of five-second level trigger that stops them and says, “Wait, is this really what they’re saying?” The responses to the essay made it evident that there’s a lot of people that failed to have that reaction in that case.
That point is completely independent from any aesthetic/ethical judgments regarding the essay itself. If you want to debate that, I suggest talking to the author, and not me.
I’d have wondered about it myself if I hadn’t had prior evidence that Gwern wasn’t a crazy person, so I’m not convinced that it’s as obviously surface-innocuous as you feel it is. Perhaps I’ve been biased by hearing crazy-nerd stories (and actually going looking for them, ’cos I find them interesting). And I do think the PR disaster potential was something I would class as obvious, even if terrorist threats from web forum postings are statistically bogeyman stories.
I suspect we’ve reached the talking past each other stage.
I understood “just saying” as a reference to the argument you imply here. That is, you are treating the object-level rejection of terrorism as definitive and rejecting the audience’s inference of endorsement of terrorism as a simple error, and DG is observing that treating the object-level rejection as definitive isn’t something you can take for granted.
Meaning does not excuse impact, and on some level you appear to still be making excuses. If you’re going to reason about impressions (I’m not saying that you should, it’s very easy to go too far in worrying about sounding respectable), you should probably fully compartmentalize (ha!) whether a conclusion a normal person might reach is false.
I’m not making excuses.
Talking about one aspect of a problem does not imply that other aspects of the problem are not important. But honestly, that debate is stale and appears to have had little impact on the author. So what’s the point in rehashing all of that?
I agree that it’s not fair to blame LW posters for the problem. However, I can’t think of any route to patching the problem that doesn’t involve either blaming LW posters, or doing nontrivial mind alterations on a majority of the general population.
Anyway, we shouldn’t make it too easy for people to get the false conlusion, and we should err on side of caution.
Having said this, I join your lamentations.