komponisto comments on Existential Risk and Public Relations - Less Wrong

36 Post author: multifoliaterose 15 August 2010 07:16AM

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Comment author: multifoliaterose 16 August 2010 12:04:13PM *  11 points [-]

And I would indeed expect IQ to correlate positively with what you might call openness.

My own experience is that the correlation is not very high. Most of the people who I've met who are as smart as me (e.g. in the sense of having high IQ) are not nearly as open as I am.

I didn't realize at all that by "smart" you meant "instrumentally rational";

I did not intend to equate intelligence with instrumental rationality. The reason why I mentioned instrumental rationality is that ultimately what matters is to get people with high instrumental rationality (whether they're open minded or not) interested in existential risk.

My point is that people who are closed minded should not be barred from consideration as potentially useful existential risk researchers, that although people are being irrational to dismiss Eliezer as fast as they do, that doesn't mean that they're holistically irrational. My own experience has been that my openness has both benefits and drawbacks.

The point of my comment was that reading his writings reveals a huge difference between Eliezer and UFO conspiracy theorists, a difference that should be more than noticeable to anyone with an IQ high enough to be in graduate school in mathematics.

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. See bentram's comment

Edit: You might wonder where the bias to dismiss Eliezer comes from. I think it comes mostly from conformity, which is, sadly, very high even among very smart people.

Comment author: komponisto 16 August 2010 12:33:25PM *  4 points [-]

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

This is a problem; no question about it.

Comment author: multifoliaterose 16 August 2010 12:39:14PM *  6 points [-]

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.)

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