I’m not sure what your own position is on the “should we discuss object-level politics on LW” question. Are you suggesting that we should just go ahead and do it without giving any weight to taintedness?
No. (Sorry, I guess this isn’t clear at all from the post, which was written hastily and arguably should have just been a mere comment on the “Against Premature Abstraction” thread; I wanted to make it a top-level post for psychological reasons that I probably shouldn’t elaborate on because (a) you probably don’t care, and (b) they reflect poorly on me. Feel free to downvote if I made the wrong call.)
You didn’t fully spell out the analogy with the Triskaidekaphobic Calculator, but it seems like you’re saying that worrying about taintedness while trying to solve AI safety is like trying to make a calculator while worrying about triskaidekaphobia, so we shouldn’t do that?
More like—we should at least be aware that worrying about taintedness is making the task harder and that we should be on the lookout for ways to strategize around that (e.g., encouraging the use of a separate forum and pseudonyms for non-mathy topics, having “mutual defense pact” norms where curious thinkers support each other rather than defaulting to “Well, you should’ve known better than to say that” victim-blaming, &c.).
No. (Sorry, I guess this isn’t clear at all from the post, which was written hastily and arguably should have just been a mere comment on the “Against Premature Abstraction” thread; I wanted to make it a top-level post for psychological reasons that I probably shouldn’t elaborate on because (a) you probably don’t care, and (b) they reflect poorly on me. Feel free to downvote if I made the wrong call.)
More like—we should at least be aware that worrying about taintedness is making the task harder and that we should be on the lookout for ways to strategize around that (e.g., encouraging the use of a separate forum and pseudonyms for non-mathy topics, having “mutual defense pact” norms where curious thinkers support each other rather than defaulting to “Well, you should’ve known better than to say that” victim-blaming, &c.).