A couple of my comments could be viewed as “rounding off” to “the situation is hopeless”, but I think this is a fair reading of the source text. As noted, it is not very hopeful:
I consider the present gameboard to look incredibly grim, and I don’t actually see a way out through hard work alone. [...] Even if the social situation were vastly improved, on my read of things, everybody still dies. [...] There’s no obvious winnable position into which to play the board.
In Eliezer’s preface he tries to avoid instilling self-fulfilling gloom, and at this point where he is trying to be most positive about our chances of survival he says “Maybe the horse will sing”. Horses cannot sing and this is not encouraging.
Now, if Alice tells me “the situation is hopeless” and Bob tells me “maybe the horse will sing”, the emphasis is different. Alice is emphasizing the mainline bad outcome, and Bob is emphasizing the non-mainline good outcome. But I don’t infer that Alice and Bob have predictably different assessments of the situation.
The other factor is model error. Eliezer writes:
We can hope there’s a miracle that violates some aspect of my background model, and we can try to prepare for that unknown miracle; preparing for an unknown miracle probably looks like “Trying to die with more dignity on the mainline”.
Now, if Alice tells me “the situation appears hopeless, but maybe my model of the situation is wrong”, and Bob tells me “the situation is hopeless”, then concretely they are saying the same thing. Alice is explicit that she is fallible, and Bob lets his fallibility be implicit. But everyone knows that Alice and Bob are fallible, that is shared context for the conversation. Partly this is about a balance of concision and precision. Partly this is about social status and humility and false humility and so forth. But concretely Alice and Bob are saying the same thing. I don’t infer that Bob thinks his models are better than Alice’s.
To be clear, as requested, I am discussing the source text, not making inferences about Eliezer’s latent state of mind.
A couple of my comments could be viewed as “rounding off” to “the situation is hopeless”, but I think this is a fair reading of the source text. As noted, it is not very hopeful:
In Eliezer’s preface he tries to avoid instilling self-fulfilling gloom, and at this point where he is trying to be most positive about our chances of survival he says “Maybe the horse will sing”. Horses cannot sing and this is not encouraging.
Now, if Alice tells me “the situation is hopeless” and Bob tells me “maybe the horse will sing”, the emphasis is different. Alice is emphasizing the mainline bad outcome, and Bob is emphasizing the non-mainline good outcome. But I don’t infer that Alice and Bob have predictably different assessments of the situation.
The other factor is model error. Eliezer writes:
Now, if Alice tells me “the situation appears hopeless, but maybe my model of the situation is wrong”, and Bob tells me “the situation is hopeless”, then concretely they are saying the same thing. Alice is explicit that she is fallible, and Bob lets his fallibility be implicit. But everyone knows that Alice and Bob are fallible, that is shared context for the conversation. Partly this is about a balance of concision and precision. Partly this is about social status and humility and false humility and so forth. But concretely Alice and Bob are saying the same thing. I don’t infer that Bob thinks his models are better than Alice’s.
To be clear, as requested, I am discussing the source text, not making inferences about Eliezer’s latent state of mind.