Interesting interview. Metz seems extraordinarily incurious about anything Vassar says—like he mentions all sorts of things like Singularity University or Kurzweil or Leverage, which Metz clearly doesn’t know much about and are relevant to his stated goals, but Metz is instead fixated on asking about a few things like ‘how did X meet Thiel?’ ‘how did Y meet Thiel?’ ‘what did Z talk about with Thiel?’ ‘What did A say to Musk at Puerto Rico?’ Like he’s not listening to Vassar at all, just running a keyword filter over a few people’s names and ignoring anything else. (Can you imagine, say, Caro doing an interview like this? Dwarkesh Patel? Or literally any Playboy interviewer? Even Lex Fridman asks better questions.)
I was wondering how, in his 2020 DL book The Genius Makers he could have so totally missed the scaling revolution when he was talking to so many of the right people, who surely would’ve told him how it was happening; and I guess seeing how he does interviews helps explain it: he doesn’t hear even the things you tell him, just the things he expects to hear. Trying to tell him about the scaling hypothesis would be like trying to tell him about, well, things like Many Worlds… (He is also completely incurious about GPT-3 in this August 2020 interview too, which is especially striking given all the reporting he’s done on people at OA since then, and the fact that he was presumably working on finishing Genius Makers for its March 2021 publication despite how obvious it should have been that GPT-3 may have rendered it obsolete almost a year before publication.)
And Metz does seem unable to explain at all what he considers ‘facts’ or what he does when reporting or how he picks the topics to fixate on that he does, giving bizarre responses like
Cade Metz: Well, you know, honestly, my, like, what I think of them doesn’t matter what I’m trying to do is understand what’s going on like, and so -
How do you ‘understand’ them without ‘thinking of them’...? (Some advanced journalist Buddhism?) Or how about his blatant dodges and non-responses:
Michael Vassar: So you have read Scott’s posts about Neo-reaction, right? They’re very long.
Cade Metz: Yes.
Michael Vassar: So what did you think of those?
Cade Metz: Well, okay, maybe maybe I’ll get even simpler here. So one thing I mentioned is just sort of the way all this stuff played out. So you had this relationship with Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel has, had, this relationship with, with Curtis Yarvin. Do you know much about that? Like, what’s the overlap between sort of Yarvin’s world and Silicon Valley?
We apparently have discovered the only human being to ever read all of Scott’s criticisms of NRx and have no opinion or thought about them whatsoever. Somehow, it is ‘simpler’ to instead pivot to… ‘how did X have a relationship with Thiel’ etc. (Simpler in what respect, exactly?)
I was also struck by this passage at the end on the doxing:
Michael Vassar: …So there are some important facts that need to be explained. There’s there’s this fact about why it would seem threatening to a highly influential psychologist and psychiatrist and author to have a New York Times article written about his blog with his real name, that seems like a very central piece of information that would need to be gathered, and which I imagine you’ve gathered to some degree, so I’d love to hear your take on that.
Cade Metz: Well, I mean… sigh Well, rest assured, you know, we we will think long and hard about that. And also -
Vassar: I’m not asking you do to anything, or to not do anything. I’m asking a question about what information you’ve gathered about the question. It’s the opposite of a call to action: it’s a request for facts.
Cade Metz: Yeah, I mean, so you know, I think what I don’t know for sure, but I think when it comes time, you know, depending on what the what the decision is, we might even try to explain it in like a separate piece. You know, I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there about this and and not all the not all the facts are out about this and so it is it is our job as trained journalists who have a lot of experience with this stuff. To to get this right and and we will.
Michael Vassar: What would getting it right mean?
Cade Metz: Well, I will send our—send you a link whenever, whenever the time comes,
Michael Vassar: No, I don’t mean, “what will you do?” I’m saying what—what, okay. That that the link, whenever the time comes, would be a link to what you did. If getting it right means “whatever you end up doing”, then it’s a recursive definition and therefore provides no information about what you’re going to do. The fact that you’re going to get it right becomes a non-fact.
Cade Metz: Right. All right. Well… pause let me put it this way. We are journalists with a lot of experience with these things. And, and that is -
Michael Vassar: Who’s “we”?
Cade Metz: Okay, all right. You know, I don’t think we’re gonna reach common ground on this. So I might just have to, to, to beg off on this. But honestly, I really appreciate all your help on this. I do appreciate it. And I’ll send you a copy of this recording. As I said, and I really appreciate you taking all the time. It’s, it’s been helpful.
One notes that there was no separate piece, and even in OP’s interview of Metz 4 years later about a topic that he promised Vassar he was going to have “thought long and hard about” and which caused Metz a good deal of trouble, Metz appears to struggle to provide any rationale beyond the implied political activism one. Here Metz struggles to even think of what the justification could be or even who exactly is the ‘we’ making the decision to dox Scott. This is not some dastardly gotcha but would seem to be a quite straightforward question and easy answer: “I and my editor at the NYT on this story” would not seem to be a hard response! Who else could be involved? The Pope? Pretty sure it’s not, like, NYT shareholders like Carlos Slim who are gonna make the call on it… But Metz instead speaks ex cathedra in the royal we, and signs off in an awful hurry after he says “once I gather all the information that I need, I will write a story” and Vassar starts asking pointed questions about that narrative and why it seems to presuppose doxing Scott while unable to point to some specific newsworthy point of his true name like “his dayjob turns out to be Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan”.
(This interview is also a good example of the value of recordings. Think how useful this transcript is and how much less compelling some Vassar paraphrases of their conversation would be.)
“Outperform at talking about epistemics” doesn’t mean “perform better at being epistemically correct”, it means “perform better at getting what he wants when epistemics are involved”.
I might be misunderstanding, I understood the comment I was responding to as saying that Zack was helping Cade do a better job of disguising himself as someone who cared about good epistemics. Something like “if Zack keeps talking, Cade will learn to the surface level features of a good Convo about epistemology and thus, even if he still doesn’t know shit, he’ll be able to trick more people into thinking he’s someone worth talking to.”
In response to that claim, I shared an older interview of Cade to demonstrate that his been exposed to people who talk about epistemology for a while, and he did not do a convincing job of pretending to be in good faith then, and in this interview with Zack I don’t think he’s doing any better a job of seeming like he’s acting in good faith.
And while there can still be plenty of reasons to not talk to journalists, or Cade in particular, I really don’t think “you’ll enable them to mimick us better” is remotely plausible.
I agree, except for the last statement. I’ve found that talking to certain people with bad epistemology about epistemic concepts will, instead of teaching them concepts, teach them a rhetorical trick that (soon afterward) they will try to use against you as a “gotcha” (related)… as a result of them having a soldier mindset and knowing you have a different political opinion.
While I expect most of them won’t ever mimic rationalists well, (i) mimicryper se doesn’t seem important and (ii) I think there are a small fraction of people (tho not Metz) who do end up fostering a “rationalist skin” ― they talk like rationalists, but seem to be in it mostly for gotchas, snipes and sophistry.
I understood the comment I was responding to as saying that Zack was helping Cade do a better job of disguising himself as someone who cared about good epistemics.
Yes, but disguising himself as someone who cares about good epistemics doesn’t require using good epistemics. Rather it means saying the right things to get the rationalist to let his guard down. There are plenty of ways to convince people about X that don’t involve doing X.
I agree that disguising one’s self as “someone who cares about X” doesn’t require being good at X, at least when you only have short contained contact with them.
I’m trying to emphasize that I don’t think Cade has made any progress in learning to “say the right things”. I think he has probably learned more individual words that are more frequent in a rationalist context than not (like the word “priors”), but it seems really unlikely that he’s gotten any better at even the grammar of rationalist communication.
Like, I’d be mediumly surprised if he, when talking to a rat, said something like “so what’s your priors on XYZ?” I’d be incredibly surprised if he said something like “there’s clearly a large inferential distance between your world model and the public’s world model, so maybe you could help point me towards what you think the cruxes might be for my next article?”
That last sentence seems like a v clear example of something that both doesn’t actually require understanding or caring about epistemology to utter, yet if I heard it I’d assume a certain orientation to epistemology and someone could falsely get me to “let my guard down”. I don’t think Cade can do things like that. And based on Zack’s convo and Vassar’s convo with him, and the amount of time and exposure he’s had to learn between the two convos, I don’t think that’s the sort of thing he’s capable of.
it seems really unlikely that he’s gotten any better at even the grammar of rationalist communication.
You don’t need to use rationalist grammar to convince rationalists that you like them. You just need to know what biases of theirs to play upon, what assumptions they’re making, how to reassure them, etc.
The skills for pretending to be someone’s friend are very different from the skills for acting like them.
I think as a 15 year old I could’ve had as hard a time as Metz did there. I mean, not if it were a normal conversation, then I would be far more curious about the questions being brought up, but if it was a first connection and I was trying to build a relationship and interview someone for information in a high-stakes situation, then I can imagine me being very confused and just trying to placate (and at that age I may have given a false pretense of understanding my interlocutor).
Yet from my current position everything Vassar said was quite straightforward (though the annotations were helpful).
Metz doesn’t seem any better at seeming like he cares about or thinks at all about epistemics than he did in 2021.
https://naturalhazard.xyz/vassar_metz_interview.html
Interesting interview. Metz seems extraordinarily incurious about anything Vassar says—like he mentions all sorts of things like Singularity University or Kurzweil or Leverage, which Metz clearly doesn’t know much about and are relevant to his stated goals, but Metz is instead fixated on asking about a few things like ‘how did X meet Thiel?’ ‘how did Y meet Thiel?’ ‘what did Z talk about with Thiel?’ ‘What did A say to Musk at Puerto Rico?’ Like he’s not listening to Vassar at all, just running a keyword filter over a few people’s names and ignoring anything else. (Can you imagine, say, Caro doing an interview like this? Dwarkesh Patel? Or literally any Playboy interviewer? Even Lex Fridman asks better questions.)
I was wondering how, in his 2020 DL book The Genius Makers he could have so totally missed the scaling revolution when he was talking to so many of the right people, who surely would’ve told him how it was happening; and I guess seeing how he does interviews helps explain it: he doesn’t hear even the things you tell him, just the things he expects to hear. Trying to tell him about the scaling hypothesis would be like trying to tell him about, well, things like Many Worlds… (He is also completely incurious about GPT-3 in this August 2020 interview too, which is especially striking given all the reporting he’s done on people at OA since then, and the fact that he was presumably working on finishing Genius Makers for its March 2021 publication despite how obvious it should have been that GPT-3 may have rendered it obsolete almost a year before publication.)
And Metz does seem unable to explain at all what he considers ‘facts’ or what he does when reporting or how he picks the topics to fixate on that he does, giving bizarre responses like
How do you ‘understand’ them without ‘thinking of them’...? (Some advanced journalist Buddhism?) Or how about his blatant dodges and non-responses:
We apparently have discovered the only human being to ever read all of Scott’s criticisms of NRx and have no opinion or thought about them whatsoever. Somehow, it is ‘simpler’ to instead pivot to… ‘how did X have a relationship with Thiel’ etc. (Simpler in what respect, exactly?)
I was also struck by this passage at the end on the doxing:
One notes that there was no separate piece, and even in OP’s interview of Metz 4 years later about a topic that he promised Vassar he was going to have “thought long and hard about” and which caused Metz a good deal of trouble, Metz appears to struggle to provide any rationale beyond the implied political activism one. Here Metz struggles to even think of what the justification could be or even who exactly is the ‘we’ making the decision to dox Scott. This is not some dastardly gotcha but would seem to be a quite straightforward question and easy answer: “I and my editor at the NYT on this story” would not seem to be a hard response! Who else could be involved? The Pope? Pretty sure it’s not, like, NYT shareholders like Carlos Slim who are gonna make the call on it… But Metz instead speaks ex cathedra in the royal we, and signs off in an awful hurry after he says “once I gather all the information that I need, I will write a story” and Vassar starts asking pointed questions about that narrative and why it seems to presuppose doxing Scott while unable to point to some specific newsworthy point of his true name like “his dayjob turns out to be Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan”.
(This interview is also a good example of the value of recordings. Think how useful this transcript is and how much less compelling some Vassar paraphrases of their conversation would be.)
“Outperform at talking about epistemics” doesn’t mean “perform better at being epistemically correct”, it means “perform better at getting what he wants when epistemics are involved”.
I might be misunderstanding, I understood the comment I was responding to as saying that Zack was helping Cade do a better job of disguising himself as someone who cared about good epistemics. Something like “if Zack keeps talking, Cade will learn to the surface level features of a good Convo about epistemology and thus, even if he still doesn’t know shit, he’ll be able to trick more people into thinking he’s someone worth talking to.”
In response to that claim, I shared an older interview of Cade to demonstrate that his been exposed to people who talk about epistemology for a while, and he did not do a convincing job of pretending to be in good faith then, and in this interview with Zack I don’t think he’s doing any better a job of seeming like he’s acting in good faith.
And while there can still be plenty of reasons to not talk to journalists, or Cade in particular, I really don’t think “you’ll enable them to mimick us better” is remotely plausible.
I agree, except for the last statement. I’ve found that talking to certain people with bad epistemology about epistemic concepts will, instead of teaching them concepts, teach them a rhetorical trick that (soon afterward) they will try to use against you as a “gotcha” (related)… as a result of them having a soldier mindset and knowing you have a different political opinion.
While I expect most of them won’t ever mimic rationalists well, (i) mimicry per se doesn’t seem important and (ii) I think there are a small fraction of people (tho not Metz) who do end up fostering a “rationalist skin” ― they talk like rationalists, but seem to be in it mostly for gotchas, snipes and sophistry.
Yes, but disguising himself as someone who cares about good epistemics doesn’t require using good epistemics. Rather it means saying the right things to get the rationalist to let his guard down. There are plenty of ways to convince people about X that don’t involve doing X.
I agree that disguising one’s self as “someone who cares about X” doesn’t require being good at X, at least when you only have short contained contact with them.
I’m trying to emphasize that I don’t think Cade has made any progress in learning to “say the right things”. I think he has probably learned more individual words that are more frequent in a rationalist context than not (like the word “priors”), but it seems really unlikely that he’s gotten any better at even the grammar of rationalist communication.
Like, I’d be mediumly surprised if he, when talking to a rat, said something like “so what’s your priors on XYZ?” I’d be incredibly surprised if he said something like “there’s clearly a large inferential distance between your world model and the public’s world model, so maybe you could help point me towards what you think the cruxes might be for my next article?”
That last sentence seems like a v clear example of something that both doesn’t actually require understanding or caring about epistemology to utter, yet if I heard it I’d assume a certain orientation to epistemology and someone could falsely get me to “let my guard down”. I don’t think Cade can do things like that. And based on Zack’s convo and Vassar’s convo with him, and the amount of time and exposure he’s had to learn between the two convos, I don’t think that’s the sort of thing he’s capable of.
You don’t need to use rationalist grammar to convince rationalists that you like them. You just need to know what biases of theirs to play upon, what assumptions they’re making, how to reassure them, etc.
The skills for pretending to be someone’s friend are very different from the skills for acting like them.
That interview is hysterically funny.
I think as a 15 year old I could’ve had as hard a time as Metz did there. I mean, not if it were a normal conversation, then I would be far more curious about the questions being brought up, but if it was a first connection and I was trying to build a relationship and interview someone for information in a high-stakes situation, then I can imagine me being very confused and just trying to placate (and at that age I may have given a false pretense of understanding my interlocutor).
Yet from my current position everything Vassar said was quite straightforward (though the annotations were helpful).