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Will_Newsome comments on Why We Can't Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They're Unbiased) - Less Wrong
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The answer to your question isn't among your list of possible answers. The recent effort to start an in-house research team was a good attempt and didn't fail for political reasons. I am speaking of other things. However I want to take a few weeks off from discussion of such topics; I seem to have given off the entirely wrong impression and would prefer to start such discussion anew in a better context, e.g. one that better emphasizes cooperation and tentativeness rather than reactionary competition. My apologies.
I have no particular attachments to SIAI and would love to see a more effective Singularitarian organization formed if that were possible. I'm just having genuine trouble understanding why you think this new proposed organization will be able to do more effective FAI research. Perhaps you could use these few weeks off to ask some trusted advisors how to better communicate this point. (I understand you have sensitive information that you can't reveal, but I'm guessing that you can do better even within that constraint.)
It's rather strange how the SIAI is secretive. The military projects are secretive, the commercial projects are secretive alas: so few value transparency. An open project would surely do better, through being more obviously trustworthy and accountable, being better able to use talent across the internet, etc. I figure if the SIAI persists in not getting to grips with this issue, some other organisation will.
This is exactly the strategy I've decided to enact, e.g. talking to Anna. Thanks for being... gentle, I suppose? I've been getting a lot of flak lately, it's nice to get some non-insulting advice sometimes. :)
(Somehow I completely failed to communicate the tentativeness of the ideas I was throwing around; in my head I was giving it about a 3% chance that I'd actually work on helping build an organization but I seem to have given off an impression of about 30%. I think this caused everyone's brains to enter politics mode, which is not a good mode for brains to be in.)
If you can't say anything, don't say anything.
It's a good heuristic, but can be very psychologically difficult. E.g. if you think that not even trying to communicate will be seen as unjustified in retrospect even if people should know that there was no obvious way for you to communicate. This has happened enough to me that the thought of just giving up on communication is highly aversive; my fear of being blamed for not preventing others to take unjustified actions (that will cause me, them, and the universe counterfactually-needless pain) is too great. But whatever, I'm starting to get over it.
Like, I remember a pigeon dying... people dying... a girl who starved herself... a girl who cut herself... a girl who wanted to commit suicide... just, trust me, there are reasons that I'm afraid. I could talk about those reasons but I'd rather not. It's just, if you don't even make a token gesture it's like you don't even care at all, and it's easier to be unjustified in a way that can be made to look sorta like caring than in a way that looks like thoughtlessness or carelessness.
(ETA: A lot of the time when people give me or others advice I mentally translate it to "The solution is simple, just shut up and be evil.".)