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David_Gerard comments on Best career models for doing research? - Less Wrong
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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.
That's definitely a fair objection, and I'll answer: I personally trust Eliezer's honesty, and he is obviously much smarter than myself. However, that doesn't mean that he's always right, and it doesn't mean that we should trust his judgment on an issue until it has been discussed thoroughly.
I agree. The above paragraph is my objection.
The problem with a public thorough discussion in these cases is that once you understand the reasons why the idea is dangerous, you already know it, and don't have the opportunity to choose whether to learn about it.
If you trust Eliezer's honesty, then though he may make mistakes, you should not expect him to use this policy as a cover for banning posts as part of some hidden agenda.
That's definitely the root of the problem. In general, though, if we are talking about FAI, then there shouldn't be a dangerous idea. If there is, then it means we are doing something wrong.
I don't think he's got a hidden agenda; I'm concerned about his mistakes. Though I'm not astute enough to point them out, I think the LW community as a whole is.
I have a response to this that I don't actually want to say, because it could make the idea more dangerous to those who have heard about it but are currently safe due to not fully understanding it. I find that predicting that this sort of thing will happen makes me reluctant to discuss this issue, which may explain why of those who are talking about it, most seem to think the banning was wrong.
Given that there has been one banned post. I think that his mistakes are much less of a problem than overwrought concern about his mistakes.
If you have a reply, please PM me. I'm interested in hearing it.
Are you interested in hearing it if it does give you a better understanding of the dangerous idea that you then realize is in fact dangerous?
Why do you believe that? FAI is full of potential for dangerous ideas. In its full development, it's an idea with the power to rewrite 100 billion galaxies. That's gotta be dangerous.
Let me try to rephrase: correct FAI theory shouldn't have dangerous ideas. If we find that the current version does have dangerous ideas, then this suggests that we are on the wrong track. The "Friendly" in "Friendly AI" should mean friendly.
Pretty much correct in this case. Roko's original post was, in fact, wrong; correctly programmed FAIs should not be a threat.
This is certainly the case with regard to the kind of decision theoretic thing in Roko's deleted post. I'm not sure if it is the case with all ideas that might come up while discussing FAI.
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.
It also shows up on my user page as a dot. Before I edited it to be just a dot, it showed up in your comment stream and my user page with the original complete content.
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.)
The other left.
(Yes, I actually just confused left and right. STOP POSTING.)
Probably because its buried in the middle of an enormous discussion that very few people have read and will read.