He really appreciates us taking it down since he doesn’t usually talk in much detail about future plans.
He really enjoys engaging with this community and it’s nice to able to do this in an off-the-record-ish way.
That seems reasonable to me. If I had to guess, many people are very interested in Sam’s plans which makes them hard to talk about publicly (people reading too much into every little thing, misinterpreting things, etc, and he probably doesn’t want people reacting to misunderstandings, etc.). Given that, I think the content should stay down out of respect for Sam’s wishes.
Sam apparently said at the meetup that it was fine to share notes with friends, so I assume it’s fine to pass around private copies of p.b.‘s notes (and Gwern’s LW comments, etc.) in a Google Doc—manually adding each individual who wants to see it, rather than setting it to ‘anyone with the link can view’.
There’s also an ambiguity here about “how much can LWers discuss particular important questions or issues that are informed by stuff they learned from the meetup, or from p.b. and others’ notes?”.
I assume Sam’s views are now generally ‘in the water’ on LW, and that it would be pretty costly for the whole community to permanently self-censor about them in all non-private discussion.
(Both because the info is pretty important and discussion-worthy, and because keeping long-term secrets tends to be very cognitively taxing. And people weren’t warned in advance that they might have to permanently tag a bunch of complicated facts in their head as ‘secret’ and avoid mentioning them at all—either at the meetup, AFAICT, or before reading p.b.’s post.)
I think it makes more sense for the norm to be something like ‘don’t make a big public list of Things Sam Said At The Meetup’, ‘don’t go giving interviews to reporters about it’, and ‘don’t title your posts “Sam Altman thinks X” if your only evidence is from the meetup’, but for discussion of this stuff to otherwise be fair game going forward. (Maybe after a one-week moratorium or something, I dunno.)
+1 My model of this (was not at the meetup, but have been part of many discussions/announcements with varying levels of confidentiality) is that talking about issues or topics is just fine, but quotes or appeals to authority “Sam Altman said!” are discouraged. Anything Privileged and Confidential (legally non-discoverable) was already not part of the Q&A. Anything so tentative or sensitive that it shouldn’t be discussed at all will have been explicitly stated in the meeting as such (or omitted entirely).
Sam has replied to us:
He really appreciates us taking it down since he doesn’t usually talk in much detail about future plans.
He really enjoys engaging with this community and it’s nice to able to do this in an off-the-record-ish way.
That seems reasonable to me. If I had to guess, many people are very interested in Sam’s plans which makes them hard to talk about publicly (people reading too much into every little thing, misinterpreting things, etc, and he probably doesn’t want people reacting to misunderstandings, etc.). Given that, I think the content should stay down out of respect for Sam’s wishes.
Good to know!
Sam apparently said at the meetup that it was fine to share notes with friends, so I assume it’s fine to pass around private copies of p.b.‘s notes (and Gwern’s LW comments, etc.) in a Google Doc—manually adding each individual who wants to see it, rather than setting it to ‘anyone with the link can view’.
There’s also an ambiguity here about “how much can LWers discuss particular important questions or issues that are informed by stuff they learned from the meetup, or from p.b. and others’ notes?”.
I assume Sam’s views are now generally ‘in the water’ on LW, and that it would be pretty costly for the whole community to permanently self-censor about them in all non-private discussion.
(Both because the info is pretty important and discussion-worthy, and because keeping long-term secrets tends to be very cognitively taxing. And people weren’t warned in advance that they might have to permanently tag a bunch of complicated facts in their head as ‘secret’ and avoid mentioning them at all—either at the meetup, AFAICT, or before reading p.b.’s post.)
I think it makes more sense for the norm to be something like ‘don’t make a big public list of Things Sam Said At The Meetup’, ‘don’t go giving interviews to reporters about it’, and ‘don’t title your posts “Sam Altman thinks X” if your only evidence is from the meetup’, but for discussion of this stuff to otherwise be fair game going forward. (Maybe after a one-week moratorium or something, I dunno.)
+1
My model of this (was not at the meetup, but have been part of many discussions/announcements with varying levels of confidentiality) is that talking about issues or topics is just fine, but quotes or appeals to authority “Sam Altman said!” are discouraged. Anything Privileged and Confidential (legally non-discoverable) was already not part of the Q&A. Anything so tentative or sensitive that it shouldn’t be discussed at all will have been explicitly stated in the meeting as such (or omitted entirely).
(If others disagree, I’m probably easy to convince on this.)