In any case, I don’t want to spend any more time figuring out what Eliezer believes, he can say something himself if he wants. I mostly replied to this comment to clarify the particular argument I’m arguing against, which I thought Eliezer believed, but even if he doesn’t it seems like a common implicit belief in the rationalist AI safety crowd and should be debunked anyway.
It seems fine to debunk what you think is a common implicit belief in the rationalist AI safety crowd, but I think it’s important to be fair to other researchers and not attribute errors to them when you don’t know or aren’t sure that they actually committed such errors. For people who aren’t domain experts (which is most people), reputation is highly important for them to evaluate claims in a technical field like AI safety, so we should take care not to misinform them about, for example, how often someone makes technical errors.
I’m pretty sure I have never mentioned Eliezer in the Value Learning sequence. I linked to his writings because they’re the best explanation of the perspective I’m arguing against. (Note that this is different from claiming that Eliezer believes that perspective.) This post and comment thread attributed the argument and belief to Eliezer, not me. I responded because it was specifically about what I was arguing against in my post, and I didn’t say “I am clarifying the particular argument I am arguing against and am unsure what Eliezer’s actual position is” because a) I did think that it was Eliezer’s actual position, b) this is a ridiculous amount of boilerplate and c) I try not to spend too much time on comments.
I’m not feeling particularly open to feedback currently, because honestly I think I take far more care about this sort of issue than the typical researcher, but if you want to list a specific thing I could have done differently, I might try to consider how to do that sort of thing in the future.
It seems fine to debunk what you think is a common implicit belief in the rationalist AI safety crowd, but I think it’s important to be fair to other researchers and not attribute errors to them when you don’t know or aren’t sure that they actually committed such errors. For people who aren’t domain experts (which is most people), reputation is highly important for them to evaluate claims in a technical field like AI safety, so we should take care not to misinform them about, for example, how often someone makes technical errors.
I’m pretty sure I have never mentioned Eliezer in the Value Learning sequence. I linked to his writings because they’re the best explanation of the perspective I’m arguing against. (Note that this is different from claiming that Eliezer believes that perspective.) This post and comment thread attributed the argument and belief to Eliezer, not me. I responded because it was specifically about what I was arguing against in my post, and I didn’t say “I am clarifying the particular argument I am arguing against and am unsure what Eliezer’s actual position is” because a) I did think that it was Eliezer’s actual position, b) this is a ridiculous amount of boilerplate and c) I try not to spend too much time on comments.
I’m not feeling particularly open to feedback currently, because honestly I think I take far more care about this sort of issue than the typical researcher, but if you want to list a specific thing I could have done differently, I might try to consider how to do that sort of thing in the future.