not because most fringe masters are particularly good (they aren’t), but because thinking for yourself actually works and it’s not like our leaders in the town center know everything already.
I think the leaders in the town center do not know everything already. I think different areas have different risks when it comes to “thinking for yourself.” It’s one thing to think you can fly and jump off a roof yourself, and another thing to think it’s fine to cook for people when you’re Typhoid Mary, and I worry that you aren’t drawing a distinction here between those cases.
I have thought about this a fair amount, but am not sure I’ve discovered right conceptual lines here, and would be interested in how you would distinguish between the two cases, or if you think they are fundamentally equivalent, or that one of them isn’t real.
You seem to be arguing that we should become more centralized. I think that would be moving our culture in the absolute wrong direction.
In short, I think there are some centralizing moves that are worth it, and others that aren’t, and that we can choose policies individually instead of just throwing the lever on “centralization: Y/N”. Well-Kept Gardens Die by Pacifism is ever relevant; here, the thing that seems relevant to me is that there are some basic functions that need to happen (like, say, the removal of spam), and fulfilling those functions requires tools that could also be used for nefarious functions (as we could just mark criticisms of MIRI as ‘spam’ and they would vanish). But the conceptual categories that people normally have for this are predicated on the interesting cases; sure, both Nazi Germany and WWII America imprisoned rapists, but the interesting imprisonments are of political dissidents, and we might prefer WWII America because it had many fewer such political prisoners, and further prefer a hypothetical America that had no political prisoners. But this spills over into the question of whether we should have prisons or justice systems at all, and I think people’s intuitions on political dissidents are not very useful for what should happen with the more common sort of criminal.
Like, it feels almost silly to have to say this, but I like it when people put forth public positions that are critical of an idea I favor, because then we can argue about it and it’s an opportunity for me to learn something, and I generally expect the audience to be able to follow it and get things right. Like, I disagreed pretty vociferously with The AI Timelines Scam, and yet I thought the discussion it prompted was basically good. It did not ping my Out To Get You sensors in the way that ialdabaoth does. To me, this feels like a central example of the sort of thing you see in a less centralized culture where people are trying to think things through for themselves and end up with different answers, and is not at risk from this sort of moderation.
I think the leaders in the town center do not know everything already. I think different areas have different risks when it comes to “thinking for yourself.” It’s one thing to think you can fly and jump off a roof yourself, and another thing to think it’s fine to cook for people when you’re Typhoid Mary, and I worry that you aren’t drawing a distinction here between those cases.
I have thought about this a fair amount, but am not sure I’ve discovered right conceptual lines here, and would be interested in how you would distinguish between the two cases, or if you think they are fundamentally equivalent, or that one of them isn’t real.
In short, I think there are some centralizing moves that are worth it, and others that aren’t, and that we can choose policies individually instead of just throwing the lever on “centralization: Y/N”. Well-Kept Gardens Die by Pacifism is ever relevant; here, the thing that seems relevant to me is that there are some basic functions that need to happen (like, say, the removal of spam), and fulfilling those functions requires tools that could also be used for nefarious functions (as we could just mark criticisms of MIRI as ‘spam’ and they would vanish). But the conceptual categories that people normally have for this are predicated on the interesting cases; sure, both Nazi Germany and WWII America imprisoned rapists, but the interesting imprisonments are of political dissidents, and we might prefer WWII America because it had many fewer such political prisoners, and further prefer a hypothetical America that had no political prisoners. But this spills over into the question of whether we should have prisons or justice systems at all, and I think people’s intuitions on political dissidents are not very useful for what should happen with the more common sort of criminal.
Like, it feels almost silly to have to say this, but I like it when people put forth public positions that are critical of an idea I favor, because then we can argue about it and it’s an opportunity for me to learn something, and I generally expect the audience to be able to follow it and get things right. Like, I disagreed pretty vociferously with The AI Timelines Scam, and yet I thought the discussion it prompted was basically good. It did not ping my Out To Get You sensors in the way that ialdabaoth does. To me, this feels like a central example of the sort of thing you see in a less centralized culture where people are trying to think things through for themselves and end up with different answers, and is not at risk from this sort of moderation.
I don’t think this conversation is going to make any progress at this level of abstraction and in public. I might send you an email.
I look forward to receiving it.