I’m not really fond of Connor’s current culture war-esque public persona. Some relatively minor issues with Yud’s 2000s personality alone (it’s probably a neurotype thing, not unusual in rare extraordinary people as they were often failed to conform to other children, and also something he did a great job working on over the years, including the routine strategic jettison of the fedora) resulted in like a dozen people who are way too fond of spending way too much of their time hating on him. The internet doesn’t particularly dunk on Bostrom.
If everything goes well, the culture war types will probably look back at Connor’s persona and think he was very based. But that requires everything to go well, and I’m doubtful that Connor’s current persona will be net positive towards making things go well. Not a good look for AI safety; the Openphil and FHI people aren’t consistently friendly and thoughtful because they’re EA, it’s because it’s instrumentally convergent to work on your personality if you’re serious about saving the world and it’s a social primate species.
I’m not really fond of Connor’s current culture war-esque public persona. Some relatively minor issues with Yud’s 2000s personality alone (it’s probably a neurotype thing, not unusual in rare extraordinary people as they were often failed to conform to other children, and also something he did a great job working on over the years, including the routine strategic jettison of the fedora) resulted in like a dozen people who are way too fond of spending way too much of their time hating on him. The internet doesn’t particularly dunk on Bostrom.
If everything goes well, the culture war types will probably look back at Connor’s persona and think he was very based. But that requires everything to go well, and I’m doubtful that Connor’s current persona will be net positive towards making things go well. Not a good look for AI safety; the Openphil and FHI people aren’t consistently friendly and thoughtful because they’re EA, it’s because it’s instrumentally convergent to work on your personality if you’re serious about saving the world and it’s a social primate species.