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ciphergoth comments on Existential Risk and Public Relations - Less Wrong
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Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
I know some people who have had this sort of experience. My claim is not that Eliezer has uniformly repelled people from thinking about existential risk. My claim is that on average Eliezer's outlandish claims repel people from thinking about existential risk.
My guess would be that this is it. I'm the same way.
It's not clear that willingness to listen to strange-sounding claims exhibits correlation with instrumental rationality, or what the sign of that correlation is. People who are willing to listen to strange-sounding claims statistically end up hanging out with UFO conspiracy theorists, New Age people, etc. more often than usual. Statistically, people who make strange-sounding claims are not worth listening to. Too much willingness to listen to strange-sounding claims can easily result in one wasting large portions of one's life.
See my remarks above.
For my part, I keep wondering how long it's going to be before someone throws his "If you don't sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent" remark at me, to which I will only be able to say that even he says stupid things sometimes.
(Yes, I'd encourage anyone to sign their kids up for cryonics; but not doing so is an extremely poor predictor of whether or not you treat your kids well in other ways, which is what the term should mean by any reasonable standard).
Given Eliezer's belief about the probability of cryonics working and belief that others should understand that cryonics has a high probability of working, his statement that "If you don't sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent" is not just correct but trivial.
One of the reasons I so enjoy reading Less Wrong is Eliezer's willingness to accept and announce the logical consequences of his beliefs.
There is a huge gap between "you are doing your kids a great disservice" and "you are a lousy parent": "X is an act of a lousy parent" to me implies that it is a good predictor of other lousy parent acts.
EDIT: BTW I should make clear that I plan to try to persuade some of my friends to sign up themselves and both their kids for cryonics, so I do have skin in the game...
I'm not completely sure I disagree with that, but do you have the same attitude towards parents who try to heal treatable cancer with prayer and nothing else, but are otherwise great parents?
I think that would be a more effective predictor of other forms of lousiness: it means you're happy to ignore the advice of scientific authority in favour of what your preacher or your own mad beliefs tell you, which can get you into trouble in lots of other ways.
That said, this is a good counter, and it does make me wonder if I'm drawing the right line. For one thing, what do you count as a single act? If you don't get cryonics for your first child, it's a good predictor that you won't for your second either, so does that count? So I think another aspect of it is that to count, something has to be unusually bad. If you don't get your kids vaccinated in the UK in 2010, that's lousy parenting, but if absolutely everyone you ever meet thinks that vaccines are the work of the devil, then "lousy" seems too strong a term for going along with it.
True. However, if absolutely everyone you ever meet thinks vaccines are evil except for one doctor and that doctor has science on his side, and you choose not to get your kids vaccinated because of "going along with" social pressures, then "lousy parent" is exactly the right strength of term. And that's really the case here. Not absolutely everyone thinks cryonics is wrong or misguided. And if you can't sort the bullshit and wishful thinking from the science, then you're doing your child a disservice.
If "you" refers to a typical parent in the US, then it's sensible (but hardly trivial). But it could easily be interpreted as referring to parents who are poor enough that they should give higher priority to buying a safer car, moving to a neighborhood with a lower crime rate, etc.
Eliezer's writings about cryonics may help him attract more highly rational people to work with him, but will probably reduce his effectiveness at warning people working on other AGI projects of the risks. I think he has more potential to reduce existential risk via the latter approach.
Yes, this is the sort of thing that I had in mind in making my cryonics post - as I said in the revised version of my post, I have a sense that a portion of the Less Wrong community has the attitude that cryonics is "moral" in some sort of comprehensive sense.
If you believe that thousands of people die unnecessarily every single day then of course you think cryonics is a moral issue.
If people in the future come to believe that we should have know that cryonics would probably work then they might well conclude that our failure to at least offer cryonics to terminally ill children was (and yes I know what I'm about to write sounds extreme and will be off-putting to many) Nazi-level evil.
I've thought carefully about this matter and believe that there's good reason to doubt your prediction. I will detail my thoughts on this matter in a later top level post.
I would like the opportunity to make timely comments on such a post, but I will be traveling until Aug 27th and so request you don't post before then.
Sure, sounds good.