Paul’s post on takeoff speed had long been IMO the last major public step in the dialogue on this subject (not forgetting to honorably mention Katja’s crazy discontinuous progress examples and Kokotajlo’s arguments against using GPD as a metric), and I found it exceedingly valuable to read how it reads to someone else who has put in a great deal of work into figuring out what’s true about the topic, thinks about it in very different ways, and has come to different views on it. I found this very valuable for my own understanding of the subject, and I felt I learned a bunch on reading it.
Eliezer wrote it from a fairly exasperated (and a little desperate) place and that comes across in the writing. I think if you aren’t literally Paul and you are interested in the subject, then you should get over that and read it for the insights. I think if you are literally Paul then it’s quite reasonable to be very defensive in the ensuing dialogue.
I do not know what to make of the monkeys/chimp thing, except to be at least fairly scared about similarly sudden improvements in generality occurring again (though I acknowledge Paul has an argument that we shouldn’t expect to see that again).
I could say more about what I learned from reading this, but I don’t value my own take on the object level that highly to be worth writing about here.
I didn’t learn much from the ensuing dialogue and I’m not intending to vote for that. I think most of the dialogues were valuable as artifacts of conversation and attempted communication, but not as valuable for learning about takeoff (especially the Paul/Eliezer back-and-forth on whether they should even be able to find something to bet about).Edit: After re-reading a bunch of the ensuing discussion, I actually think it’s great, and will be +9′ing a bunch of that too.
This isn’t a great review from me, but I thought I’d write a few notes anyway, because this is one of my few +9s.
Paul’s post on takeoff speed had long been IMO the last major public step in the dialogue on this subject (not forgetting to honorably mention Katja’s crazy discontinuous progress examples and Kokotajlo’s arguments against using GPD as a metric), and I found it exceedingly valuable to read how it reads to someone else who has put in a great deal of work into figuring out what’s true about the topic, thinks about it in very different ways, and has come to different views on it. I found this very valuable for my own understanding of the subject, and I felt I learned a bunch on reading it.
Eliezer wrote it from a fairly exasperated (and a little desperate) place and that comes across in the writing. I think if you aren’t literally Paul and you are interested in the subject, then you should get over that and read it for the insights. I think if you are literally Paul then it’s quite reasonable to be very defensive in the ensuing dialogue.
I do not know what to make of the monkeys/chimp thing, except to be at least fairly scared about similarly sudden improvements in generality occurring again (though I acknowledge Paul has an argument that we shouldn’t expect to see that again).
I could say more about what I learned from reading this, but I don’t value my own take on the object level that highly to be worth writing about here.
I didn’t learn much from the ensuing dialogue and I’m not intending to vote for that. I think most of the dialogues were valuable as artifacts of conversation and attempted communication, but not as valuable for learning about takeoff (especially the Paul/Eliezer back-and-forth on whether they should even be able to find something to bet about).Edit: After re-reading a bunch of the ensuing discussion, I actually think it’s great, and will be +9′ing a bunch of that too.This isn’t a great review from me, but I thought I’d write a few notes anyway, because this is one of my few +9s.