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waitingforgodel comments on Best career models for doing research? - Less Wrong
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I agree that there's a lot in history, but the examples you cited have something that doesn't match here -- historically, you lie to people you don't plan on cooperating with later.
If you lie to an oppressive government, it's okay because it'll either get overthrown or you'll never want to cooperate with it (so great is your reason for lying).
Lying to your donor pool is very, very different than lying to the Nazis about hiding jews.
You're throwing around accusations of lying pretty lightly.
Am I missing something? Desrtopa responded to questions of lying to the donor pool with the equivalent of "We do it for the greater good"
Desrtopa isn't affiliated with SIAI. You seem to be deliberately designing confusing comments, a la Glenn Beck's "I'm just asking questions" motif.
Is calling someone here Glenn Beck equivalent to Godwination?
wfg's post strikes me as almost entirely reasonable (except the last question, which is pointless to ask) and your response as excessively defensive.
Also, you're saying this to someone who says he's a past donor and has not yet ruled out being a future donor. This is someone who could reasonably expect his questions to be taken seriously.
(I have some experience of involvement in a charity that suffers a relentless barrage of blitheringly stupid questions from idiots, and my volunteer role is media handling - mostly I come up with good and effective soundbites. So I appreciate and empathise with your frustration, but I think I can state with some experience behind me that your response is actually terrible.)
Okay. Given your and the folks who downvoted my comment's perceptions, I'll revise my opinion on the matter. I'll also put that under "analogies not to use"; I was probably insufficiently familiar with the pop culture.
The thing I meant to say was just... Roko made a post, Nick suggested it gave bad impressions, Roko deleted it. wfg spent hours commenting again and again about how he had been asked to delete it, perhaps by someone "high up within SIAI", and how future censorship might be imminent, how the fact that Roko had had a bascially unrelated conversation suggested that we might be lying to donors (a suggestion that he didn't make explicitly, but rather left to innuendo), etc. I feel tired of this conversation and want to go back to research and writing, but I'm kind of concerned that it'll leave a bad taste in readers mouths not because of any evidence that's actually being advanced, but because innuendo and juxtapositions, taken out of context, leave impressions of badness.
I wish I knew how to have a simple, high-content, low-politics conversation on the subject. Especially one that was self-contained and didn't leave me feeling as though I couldn't bow out after awhile and return to other projects.
The essential problem is that with the (spectacular) deletion of the Forbidden Post, LessWrong turned into the sort of place where posts get disappeared. Those are not good places to be on the Internet. They are places where honesty is devalued and statements of fact must be reviewed for their political nature.
So it can happen here - because it did happen. It's no longer in the class "things that are unthinkable". This is itself a major credibility hit for LW.
And when a Roko post disappears - well, it was one of his posts that was disappeared before.
With this being the situation, assumptions of bad faith are going to happen. (And "stupidity" is actually the assumption of good faith.)
Your problem now is to restore trust in LW's intellectual integrity, because SIAI broke it good and hard. Note that this is breaking an expectation, which is much worse than breaking a rule - if you break a rule you can say "we broke this rule for this reason", but if you break expectations, people feel the ground moving under their feet, and get very upset.
There are lots of suggestions in this thread as to what people think might restore their trust in LW's intellectual integrity, SIAI needs to go through them and work out precisely what expectations they broke and how to come clean on this.
I suspect you could at this point do with an upside to all this. Fortunately, there's an excellent one: no-one would bother making all this fuss if they didn't really care about LW. People here really care about LW and will do whatever they can to help you make it better.
(And the downside is that this is separate from caring about SIAI, but oh well ;-) )
(and yes, this sort of discussion around WP/WMF has been perennial since it started.)
Most people wouldn't dispute the first half of your comment. What they might take issue with is this:
The problem is that we have to defer to Eliezer's (and, by extension, SIAI's) judgment on such issues. Many of the commenters here think that this is not only bad PR for them, but also a questionable policy for a "community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality."
If you are going to quote and respond to that sentence, which anticipates people objecting to trusting Eliezer to make those judgments, you should also quote and repond to my response to that anticipation (ie, the next sentence):
Also, I am getting tired of objections framed as predictions that others would make the objections. It is possible to have a reasonable discussion with people who put forth their own objections, explain their own true rejections, and update their own beleifs. But when you are presenting the objections you predict others will make, it is much harder, even if you are personally convinced, to predict that these nebulous others will also be persuaded by my response. So please, stick your own neck out if you want to complain about this.
The above deleted comment referenced some details of the banned post. With those details removed, it said:
It was forbidden for being a Langford Basilisk.
Strange LessWrong software fact: this showed up in my reply stream as a comment consisting only of a dot ("."), though it appears to be a reply to a reply to me.
I’ve seen several variations of this expressed about this topic, and it’s interesting to me, because this sort of view is somewhat foreign to me. I wouldn’t say I’m pro-censorship, but as an attorney trained in U.S. law, I think I’ve very much internalized the idea that the most serious sorts of censorship actions are those taken by the government (i.e., this is what the First Amendment free speech right is about, and that makes sense because of the power of the government), and that there are various levels of seriousness/danger beyond that, with say, big corporate censorship also being somewhat serious because of corporate power, and censorship by the owner of a single blog (even a community one) not being very serious at all, because a blogowner is not very powerful compared to the government or a major corporation, and shutting down one outlet of communication on the Internet is comparatively not a big deal because it’s a big internet where there are lots of other places to express one’s views. If a siteowner exercises his or her right to delete something on a website, it's just not the sort of harm that I weigh very heavily.
What I’m totally unsure of is where the average LW reader falls on the scale between you and me, and therefore, despite the talk about the Roko incident being such a public relations disaster and a “spectacular” deletion, I just don’t know how true that is and I’m curious what the answer would be. People who feel like me may just not feel the need to weigh in on the controversy, whereas people who are very strongly anti-censorship in this particular context do.
That's not really the crux of the issue (for me, at least, and probably not for others). As David Gerard put it, the banning of Roko's post was a blow to people's expectations, which was why it was so shocking. In other words, it was like discovering that LW wasn't what everyone thought it was (and not in a good way).
Note: I personally wouldn't classify the incident as a "disaster," but was still very alarming.
Like Airedale, I don't have that impression - my impression is that 1) Censorship by website's owner doesn't have the moral problems associated with censorship by governments (or corporations), and 2) in online communities, dictatorship can work quite well, as long as the dictator isn't a complete dick.
I've seen quite functional communities where the moderators would delete posts without warning if they were too stupid, offensive, repetitive or immoral (such as bragging about vandalizing wikipedia).
So personally, I don't see a need for "restoring trust". Of course, as your post attests, my experience doesn't seem to generalize to other posters.
Great post. It confuses me why this isn't at 10+ karma
+5 is fine!
Y'know, one of the actual problems with LW is that I read it in my Internet as Television time, but there's a REALLY PROMINENT SCORE COUNTER at the top left. This does not help in not treating it as a winnable video game.
(That said, could the people mass-downvoting waitingforgodel please stop? It's tiresome. Please try to go by comment, not poster.)
So true!
(Except it's at the top right. At least, the one I'm thinking of.)
Probably because its buried in the middle of an enormous discussion that very few people have read and will read.
This is about politics. The censorship of an idea related to a future dictator implementing some policy is obviously about politics.
You tell people to take friendly AI serious. You tell people that we need friendly AI to marshal our future galactic civilisation. People take it serious. Now the only organisation working on this is the SIAI. Therefore the SIAI is currently in direct causal control of our collective future. So why do you wonder people care about censorship and transparency? People already care about what the U.S. is doing and demand transparency. Which is ludicrous in comparison to the power of a ruling superhuman artificial intelligence that implements what the SIAI came up with as the seed for its friendliness.
If you really think that the SIAI has any importance and could possible achieve to influence or implement the safeguards for some AGI project, then everything the SIAI does is obviously very important to everyone concerned (everyone indeed).
What? No way! The organisation seems very unlikely to produce machine intelligence to me - due to all the other vastly-better funded players.
I wish you used a classification algorithm that more naturally identified the tension between "wanting low-politics conversation" and comparing someone to Glenn Beck as a means of criticism.
Sorry. This was probably simply a terrible mistake born of unusual ignorance of pop culture and current politics. I meant to invoke "using questions as a means to plant accusations" and honestly didn't understand that he was radically unpopular. I've never watched anything by him.
Well, it's not that Beck is unpopular; it's that he's very popular with people of a particular political ideology.
In fairness, though, he is sort of the canonical example for "I'm just asking questions, here!". (And I wasn't one of those voting you down on this.)
I think referring to the phenomenon itself is enough to make one's point on the issue, and it's not necessary to identify a person who does it a lot.
-3 after less than 15 minutes suggests so!
Make that "they do it for the greater good"
Sorry about mistakingly implying s/he was affiliated. I'll be more diligent with my google stalking in the future.
edit: In my defense, SIAI affiliation has been very common when looking up very "pro" people from this thread
Thanks. I appreciate that.