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CarlShulman comments on Best career models for doing research? - Less Wrong
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Yes, his post was based on (garbled versions of) some work I had been doing at FHI, which I had talked about with him while trying to figure out some knotty sub-problems.
I think the intent behind it was benign, at least in that Eliezer had his views about the issue (which is more general, and not about screwed-up FAI attempts) previously, and that he was motivated to prevent harm to people hearing the idea and others generally. Indeed, he was explicitly motivated enough to take a PR hit for SIAI.
Regarding the substance, I think there are some pretty good reasons for thinking that the expected value (with a small probability of a high impact) of the info for the overwhelming majority of people exposed to it would be negative, although that estimate is unstable in the face of new info.
It's obvious that the deletion caused more freak-out and uncertainty than anticipated, leading to a net increase in people reading and thinking about the content compared to the counterfactual with no deletion. So regardless of the substance about the info, clearly it was a mistake to delete (which Eliezer also recognizes).
Obviously, Eliezer is continuing to delete comments reposting on the topic of the deleted post. It seems fairly futile to me, but not entirely. I don't think that Less Wrong is made worse by the absence of that content as such, although the fear and uncertainty about it seem to be harmful. You said you were worried because it makes you uncertain about whether future deletions will occur and of what.
After about half an hour of trying, I can't think of another topic with the same sorts of features. There may be cases involving things like stalkers or bank PINs or 4chan attacks or planning illegal activities. Eliezer called on people not to discuss AI at the beginning of Less Wrong to help establish its rationality focus, and to back off from the gender warfare, but hasn't used deletion powers for such things.
Less Wrong has been around for 20 months. If we can rigorously carve out the stalker/PIN/illegality/spam/threats cases I would be happy to bet $500 against $50 that we won't see another topic banned over the next 20 months.
That sounds like it'd generate some perverse incentives to me.
Urk.
Just to be clear: he recognizes this by comparison with the alternative of privately having the poster delete it themselves, rather than by comparison to not-deleting.
Or at least that was my understanding.
Regardless, thanks for a breath of clarity in this thread. As a mostly disinterested newcomer, I very much appreciated it.
Well, if counterfactually Roko hadn't wanted to take it down I think it would have been even more of a mistake to delete it, because then the author would have been peeved, not just the audience/commenters.
Which is fine.
But Eliezer's comments on the subject suggest to me that he doesn't think that.
More specifically, they suggest that he thinks the most important thing is that the post not be viewable, and if we can achieve that by quietly convincing the author to take it down, great, and if we can achieve it by quietly deleting it without anybody noticing, great, and if we can't do either of those then we achieve it without being quiet, which is less great but still better than leaving it up.
And it seemed to me your parenthetical could be taken to mean that he agrees with you that deleting it would be a mistake in all of those cases, so I figured I would clarify (or let myself be corrected, if I'm misunderstanding).
I should have taken this bet
Your post has been moved to the Discussion section, not deleted.