This is awkwardly armchair, but… my impression of Eliezer includes him being just so tired, both specifically from having sacrificed his present energy in the past while pushing to rectify the path of AI development (by his own model thereof, of course!) and maybe for broader zeitgeist reasons that are hard for me to describe. As a result, I expect him to have entered into the natural pattern of having a very low threshold for handing out blocks on Twitter, both because he’s beset by a large amount of sneering and crankage in his particular position and because the platform easily becomes a sinkhole in cognitive/experiential ways that are hard for me to describe but are greatly intertwined with the aforementioned zeitgeist tiredness.
Something like: when people run heavily out of certain kinds of slack for dealing with The Other, they reach a kind of contextual-but-bleed-prone scarcity-based closed-mindedness of necessity, something that both looks and can become “cultish” but where reaching for that adjective first is misleading about the structure around it. I haven’t succeeded in extracting a more legible model of this, and I bet my perception is still skew to the reality, but I’m pretty sure it reflects something important that one of the major variables I keep in my head around how to interpret people is “how Twitterized they are”, and Eliezer’s current output there fits the pattern pretty well.
I disagree with the sibling thread about this kind of post being “low cost”, BTW; I think adding salience to “who blocked whom” types of considerations can be subtly very costly. The main reason I’m not redacting my own whole comment on those same grounds is that I’ve wound up branching to something that I guess to be more broadly important: there’s dangerously misaligned social software and patterns of interaction right nearby due to how much of The Discussion winds up being on Twitter, and keeping a set of cognitive shielding for effects emanating from that seems prudent.
I disagree with the sibling thread about this kind of post being “low cost”, BTW; I think adding salience to “who blocked whom” types of considerations can be subtly very costly.
I agree publicizing blocks has costs, but so does a strong advocate of something with a pattern of blocking critics. People publicly announcing “Bob blocked me” is often the only way to find out if Bob has such a pattern.
I do think it was ridiculous to call this cultish. Tuning out critics can be evidence of several kinds of problems, but not particularly that one.
I agree that it is ridiculous to call this cultish if this was the only evidence, but we’ve got other lines of evidence pointing towards cultishness, so I’m making a claim of attribution more so than a claim of evidence.
Blocking a lot isn’t necessarily bad or unproductive… but in this case it’s practically certain blocking thousands will eventually lead to blocking someone genuinely more correct/competent/intelligent/experienced/etc… than himself, due to sheer probability. (Since even a ‘sneering’ crank is far from literal random noise.)
Which wouldn’t matter at all for someone just messing around for fun, who can just treat X as a text-heavy entertainment system. But it does matter somewhat for anyone trying to do something meaningful and/or accomplish certain goals.
In short, blocking does have some, variable, credibility cost. Ranging from near zero to quite a lot, depending on who the blockee is.
Eliezer Yudkowsky being tired isn’t an unrelated accident though. Bayesian decision theory in general intrinsically causes fatigue by relying on people to use their own actions to move outcomes instead of getting leverage from destiny/higher powers, which matches what you say about him having sacrificed his present energy for this.
Similarly, “being Twitterized” is just about stewing in garbage and cursed information, such that one is forced to filter extremely aggressively, but blocking high-quality information sources accelerates the Twitterization by changing the ratio of blessed to garbage/cursed information.
On the contrary, I think raising salience of such discussions helps clear up the “informational food chain”, allowing us to map out where there are underused opportunities and toxic accumulation.
It seems likely to me that Eliezer blocked you because he has concluded that you are a low-quality information source, no longer worth the effort of engaging with.
I agree that this is likely Eliezer’s mental state. I think this belief is false, but for someone who thinks it’s true, there’s of course no problem here.
Working on writing stuff but it’s not developed enough yet. To begin with you can read my Linear Diffusion of Sparse Lognormals sequence, but it’s not really oriented towards practical applications.
This is awkwardly armchair, but… my impression of Eliezer includes him being just so tired, both specifically from having sacrificed his present energy in the past while pushing to rectify the path of AI development (by his own model thereof, of course!) and maybe for broader zeitgeist reasons that are hard for me to describe. As a result, I expect him to have entered into the natural pattern of having a very low threshold for handing out blocks on Twitter, both because he’s beset by a large amount of sneering and crankage in his particular position and because the platform easily becomes a sinkhole in cognitive/experiential ways that are hard for me to describe but are greatly intertwined with the aforementioned zeitgeist tiredness.
Something like: when people run heavily out of certain kinds of slack for dealing with The Other, they reach a kind of contextual-but-bleed-prone scarcity-based closed-mindedness of necessity, something that both looks and can become “cultish” but where reaching for that adjective first is misleading about the structure around it. I haven’t succeeded in extracting a more legible model of this, and I bet my perception is still skew to the reality, but I’m pretty sure it reflects something important that one of the major variables I keep in my head around how to interpret people is “how Twitterized they are”, and Eliezer’s current output there fits the pattern pretty well.
I disagree with the sibling thread about this kind of post being “low cost”, BTW; I think adding salience to “who blocked whom” types of considerations can be subtly very costly. The main reason I’m not redacting my own whole comment on those same grounds is that I’ve wound up branching to something that I guess to be more broadly important: there’s dangerously misaligned social software and patterns of interaction right nearby due to how much of The Discussion winds up being on Twitter, and keeping a set of cognitive shielding for effects emanating from that seems prudent.
I agree publicizing blocks has costs, but so does a strong advocate of something with a pattern of blocking critics. People publicly announcing “Bob blocked me” is often the only way to find out if Bob has such a pattern.
I do think it was ridiculous to call this cultish. Tuning out critics can be evidence of several kinds of problems, but not particularly that one.
I agree that it is ridiculous to call this cultish if this was the only evidence, but we’ve got other lines of evidence pointing towards cultishness, so I’m making a claim of attribution more so than a claim of evidence.
Blocking a lot isn’t necessarily bad or unproductive… but in this case it’s practically certain blocking thousands will eventually lead to blocking someone genuinely more correct/competent/intelligent/experienced/etc… than himself, due to sheer probability. (Since even a ‘sneering’ crank is far from literal random noise.)
Which wouldn’t matter at all for someone just messing around for fun, who can just treat X as a text-heavy entertainment system. But it does matter somewhat for anyone trying to do something meaningful and/or accomplish certain goals.
In short, blocking does have some, variable, credibility cost. Ranging from near zero to quite a lot, depending on who the blockee is.
Eliezer Yudkowsky being tired isn’t an unrelated accident though. Bayesian decision theory in general intrinsically causes fatigue by relying on people to use their own actions to move outcomes instead of getting leverage from destiny/higher powers, which matches what you say about him having sacrificed his present energy for this.
Similarly, “being Twitterized” is just about stewing in garbage and cursed information, such that one is forced to filter extremely aggressively, but blocking high-quality information sources accelerates the Twitterization by changing the ratio of blessed to garbage/cursed information.
On the contrary, I think raising salience of such discussions helps clear up the “informational food chain”, allowing us to map out where there are underused opportunities and toxic accumulation.
It seems likely to me that Eliezer blocked you because he has concluded that you are a low-quality information source, no longer worth the effort of engaging with.
I agree that this is likely Eliezer’s mental state. I think this belief is false, but for someone who thinks it’s true, there’s of course no problem here.
Please say more about this. Where can I get some?
Working on writing stuff but it’s not developed enough yet. To begin with you can read my Linear Diffusion of Sparse Lognormals sequence, but it’s not really oriented towards practical applications.