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JoshuaZ comments on Existential Risk and Public Relations - Less Wrong
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I disagree strongly with this post. In general, it is a bad idea to refrain from making claims that one believes are true simply because those claims will make people less likely to listen to other claims. That direction lies the downwards spiral of emotional manipulation, rhetoric, and other things not conducive to rational discourse.
Would one under this logic encourage the SIAI to make statements that are commonly accepted but wrong in order to make people more likely to listen to the SIAI? If not, what is the difference?
I believe that there are contexts in which the right thing to do is to speak what one believes to be true even if doing so damages public relations.
These things need to be decided on a case-by-case basis. There's no royal road to instrumental rationality.
As I say here, in the present context, a very relevant issue in my mind is that Eliezer & co. have not substantiated their most controversial claims with detailed evidence.
It's clichéd to say so, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A claim of the type "I'm the most important person alive" is statistically many orders of magnitude more likely to be made by a poser than by somebody for whom the claim is true. Casual observers are rational to believe that Eliezer is a poser. The halo effect problem is irrational, yes, but human irrationality must be acknowledged, it's not the sort of thing that goes away if you pretend that it's not there.
I don't believe that Eliezer's outlandish and unjustified claims contribute to rational discourse. I believe that Eliezer's outlandish and unjustified claims lower the sanity waterline.
To summarize, I believe that in this particular case the costs that you allude to are outweighed by the benefits.
Come on - he never actually claimed that.
Besides, many people have inflated views of their own importance. Humans are built that way. For one thing, It helps them get hired, if they claim that they can do the job. It is sometimes funny - but surely not a big deal.
It seems as though the latter strategy could backfire - if the false statements were exposed. Keeping your mouth shut about controversial issues seems safer.
To the extent that people really want what you argue against, perhaps they should pursue an alternate organization than SIAI that promotes only the more palatable subset. I agree with you that somebody should be making all the claims, popular or not, that bear on x-risk.