My point is that people who are closed minded should not be barred from consideration as potentially useful existential risk researchers
You may be right about this; perhaps Eliezer should in fact work on his PR skills. At the same time, we shouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of “recruiting” folks who are inclined to be conformists; unless there’s a major change in the general sanity level of the population, x-risk talk is inevitably going to sound “weird”.
Math grad students can see a huge difference between Eliezer and UFO conspiracy theorists—they recognize that Eliezer’s intellectually sophisticated. They’re still biased to dismiss him out of hand
At the same time we shouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of “recruiting” folks who are inclined to be conformists; unless there’s a major change in the general sanity level of the population, x-risk talk is inevitably going to sound “weird”.
I agree with this. It’s all a matter of degree. Maybe at present one has to be in the top 1% of the population in nonconformity to be interested in existential risk and with better PR one could reduce the level of nonconformity required to the top 5% level.
(I don’t know whether these numbers are right, but this is the sort of thing that I have in mind—I find it very likely that there are people who are nonconformist enough to potentially be interested in existential risk but too conformist to take it seriously unless the people who are involved seem highly credible.)
You may be right about this; perhaps Eliezer should in fact work on his PR skills. At the same time, we shouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of “recruiting” folks who are inclined to be conformists; unless there’s a major change in the general sanity level of the population, x-risk talk is inevitably going to sound “weird”.
This is a problem; no question about it.
I agree with this. It’s all a matter of degree. Maybe at present one has to be in the top 1% of the population in nonconformity to be interested in existential risk and with better PR one could reduce the level of nonconformity required to the top 5% level.
(I don’t know whether these numbers are right, but this is the sort of thing that I have in mind—I find it very likely that there are people who are nonconformist enough to potentially be interested in existential risk but too conformist to take it seriously unless the people who are involved seem highly credible.)