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metaphysicist comments on Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) - Less Wrong
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So your argument that visiting a bunch of highly educated pencil-necked white nerds is physically dangerous boils down to... one incident of ineffective online censorship mocked by most of the LW community and all outsiders, and some criticism of Yudkowsky's computer science & philosophical achievements.
I see.
I would literally have had more respect for you if you had used racial slurs like "niggers" in your argument, since that is at least tethered to reality in the slightest bit.
Where a single incident seems grotesquely out of character, one should attempt to explain the single incident's cause. What's troubling is that Eliezer Yudkowsky has: 1) never admitted his mistake; 2) never shown (at least to my knowledge) any regret over how he handled it; and 3) most importantly, never explained his response (practically impossible without admitting his mistake).
The failure to address a wrongdoing or serious error over many years means it should be taken seriously, despite the lapse of time. The failure of self-analysis raises real questions about a lack of intellectual honesty--that is, a lack of epistemic rationality.
I don't think it's hard to explain at all: Eliezer prioritized a donor (presumably long-term and one he knew personally) over an article. I disagree with it, but you know what, I saw this sort of thing all the time on Wikipedia, and I don't need to go looking for theories of why administrators were crazy and deleted Daniel Brandt's article. I know why they did, even though I strongly disagreed.
He or someone else must have explained at some point, or I wouldn't know his reason was that the article was giving a donor nightmares.
Is deleting one post such an issue to get worked up over? Or is this just discussed because it's the best criticism one can come up with besides "he's a high school dropout who hasn't yet created an AI and so must be completely wrong"?
Please cite your claim that the affected person was a donor.
Like JoshuaZ, I hadn't known a donor was involved. What's the big deal? People donote to SIAI because they trust Eliezer Yudkowsky's integrity and intellect. So it's natural to ask whether he's someone you can count on to deliver the truth. Caving to donors is inauspicious.
In a related vein, I also found disturbing that Eliezer Yudkowsky repeated his claim that that Loosemoore guy "lied." Having had years to cool off, he still hasn't summoned the humility to admit he stretched the evidence for Loosemoore's deceitfulness: Loosemoore is obviously a cognitive scientist.
These two examples paint a picture of Eliezer Yudkowsky as a person subject to strong personal loyalties and animosities that exceed his dedication to the truth. In the first incident, his loyalty to a donor induced him to suppress information; in the Loosemoore incident, his longstanding animosity to Loosemoore made him unable to adjust his earlier opinion.
I hope these impressions aren't accurate. But one thing seems for sure: Eliezer Yudkowsky is not a person for serious self-criticism. Has he admitted any significant intellectual error since he became a rationalist? [Serious question.]
It's also a double-bind. If you do nothing, you are valuing donors at less than some random speculation which is unusually dubious even by LessWrong's standards, resting as it does on a novel speculative decision theory (acausal trade) whose most obvious requirement (implementing sufficiently similar algorithms) is beyond blatantly false when applied to humans and FAIs. (If you actually believe that SIAI is a good charity, pissing off donors over something like this is a really bad idea, and if you don't believe SIAI is a good charity, well, that's even more damning, isn't it?) And if you delete it, well, you get exactly this stupid mess which is still being dragged up years later.
Repudiating most of his long-form works like CFAI and LOGI and CEV isn't admission of error?
Personally, when he was writing the Sequences, I found it a little obnoxious how he kept saying "I was totally on the wrong track and mistaken before I was enlightened & came to understand Bayesian statistics, but now I have a chance of being less wrong" - once is enough, we get it already, I'm not that interested in your intellectual evolution.
As someone who hasn't been around that long, it would be interesting to have links. I'm having trouble coming up with useful search terms.
Creating Friendly AI, Levels of Organization in General Intelligence, and Coherent Extrapolated Volition.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant links to the repudiations. I've read some of the material in CFAI and CEV, but not the retraction, and not yet any of LOGI.
Oh. I don't remember, then, besides the notes about them being obsolete.
Once again: ROKO DELETED HIS OWN POST. NO OUTSIDE CENSORSHIP WAS INVOLVED.
This is how rumors evolve, ya know.
Eliezer, I upvoted you and was about to apologize for contributing to this rumor myself, but then found this quote from a copy of the Roko post that's available online:
Perhaps your memory got mixed up because Roko subsequently deleted all of his other posts and comments? (Unless "banning" meant something other than "deleting"?)
Now I've got no idea what I did. Maybe my own memory was mixed up by hearing other people say that the post was deleted by Roko? Or Roko retracted it after I banned it, or it was banned and then unbanned and then Roko retracted it?
I retract my grandparent comment; I have little trust for my own memories. Thanks for catching this.
A lesson learned here. I vividly remembered your "Meanwhile I'm banning this post" comment and was going to remind you, but chickened out due to the caps in the great-grandparent which seemed to signal that you Knew What You Were Talking About and wouldn't react kindly to correction. Props to Wei Dai for having more courage than I did.
I'm surprised and disconcerted that some people might be so afraid of being rebuked by Eliezer as to be reluctant to criticize/correct him even when such incontrovertible evidence is available showing that he's wrong. Your comment also made me recall another comment you wrote a couple of years ago about how my status in this community made a criticism of you feel like a "huge insult", which I couldn't understand at the time and just ignored.
I wonder how many other people feel this strongly about being criticized/insulted by a high status person (I guess at least Roko also felt strongly enough about being called "stupid" by Eliezer to contribute to him leaving this community a few days later), and whether Eliezer might not be aware of this effect he is having on others.
My brain really, really does not want to update on the numerous items of evidence available to it that it can hit people much much harder now, owing to community status, than when it was 12 years old.
(nods) I've wondered this many times.
I have also at times wondered if EY is adopting the "slam the door three times" approach to prospective members of his community, though I consider this fairly unlikely given other things he's said.
Somewhat relatedly, I remember when lukeprog first joined the site, he and EY got into an exchange that from what I recall of my perspective as a completely uninvolved third party involved luke earnestly trying to offer assistance and EY being confidently dismissive of any assistance someone like luke could provide, and at the time I remember feeling sort of sorry for luke, who it seemed to me was being treated a lot worse than he deserved, and surprised that he kept at it.
The way that story ultimately turned out led me to decide that my model of what was going on was at least importantly incomplete, and quite possibly fundamentally wrongheaded, but I haven't further refined that model.
As a data point here I tend to empathize with the recipient of such barrages to what I subjectively estimate as about 60% of the degree of emotional affect that I would experience if it were directed at myself. Particularly if said recipient is someone I respect as much as Roko and when the insults are not justified - less if they do not have my respect and if the insults are justified I experience no empathy. It is the kind of thing that I viscerally object to having in my tribe and where it is possible I try to ensure that the consequences to the high status person for their behavior are as negative as possible - or at least minimize the reward they receive if the tribe is one that tends to award bullying.
There are times in the past - let's say 4 years ago - where such an attack would certainly prompt me to leave a community, even if the community was otherwise moderately appreciated. Now I believe I am unlikely to leave over such an incident. I would say I am more socially resilient and also more capable as understanding social politics as a game and so take it less personally. For instance when received the more mildly expressed declaration from Eliezer "You are not safe to even associate with!" I don't recall experiencing any flight impulses - more surprise.
I was a little surprised at first too at reading of komponisto's reticence. Until I thought about it and reminded myself that in general I err on the side of not holding my tongue when I ought. In fact, the character "wedrifid" on wotmud.org with which I initially established this handle was banned from the game for 3 months for making exactly this kind of correction based off incontrovertible truth. People with status are dangerous and in general highly epistemically irrational in this regard. Correcting them is nearly always foolish.
I must emphasize that part of my initial surprise at kompo's reticence is due to my model of Eliezer as not being especially corrupt in this kind of regard. In response to such correction I expect him to respond positively and update. While Eliezer may be arrogant and a tad careless when interacting with people at times but he is not an egotistical jerk enforcing his dominance in his domain with dick moves. That's both high praise (by my way of thinking) and a reason for people to err less on the side of caution with him and to take less personally any 'abrupt' things he may say. Eliezer being rude to you isn't a precursor to him beating you to death with a metaphorical rock to maintain his power - as our instincts may anticipate. He's just being rude.
People have to realize that to critically examine his output is very important due to the nature and scale of what he is trying to achieve.
Even people with comparatively modest goals like trying to become the president of the United States of America should face and expect a constant and critical analysis of everything they are doing.
Which is why I am kind of surprised how often people ask me if I am on a crusade against Eliezer or find fault with my alleged "hostility". Excuse me? That person is asking for money to implement a mechanism that will change the nature of the whole universe. You should be looking for possible shortcomings as well!
Everyone should be critical of Eliezer and SIAI, even if they agree with almost anything. Why? Because if you believe that it is incredible important and difficult to get friendly AI just right, then you should be wary of any weak spot. And humans are the weak spot here.
That's why outsiders think it's a circlejerk. I've heard of Richard Loosemore whom as far as i can see was banned over corrections on the "conjunction fallacy", not sure what exactly went on, but ofc having spent time reading Roko thing (and having assumed that there was something sensible I did not hear of, and then learning that there wasn't) its kind of obvious where my priors are.
Maybe try keeping statements more accurate by qualifying your generalizations ("some outsiders"), or even just saying "that's why I think this is a circlejirk." That's what everyone ever is going to interpret it as anyhow (intentional).
I don't feel insulted at all. He is much smarter than me. But I am also not trying to accomplish the same as him. If he calls me stupid for criticizing him, that's as if someone who wants to become a famous singer is telling me that I can't sing when I criticized their latest song. No shit Sherlock!
To clarify for those new here -- "retract" here is meant purely in the usual sense, not in the sense of hitting the "retract" button, as that didn't exist at the time.
IIRC Roko deleted the speculation-about-superintelligences part of the post shortly after its publication, but discussion in the comments raged on, so you subsequently banned the whole post/discussion.
And a few days later, primarily for unrelated reasons but probably with this incident as a trigger, Roko deleted his account, which on that version of LW meant that the text of all his comments disappeared (on the current version of LW, only author's name gets removed when account is deleted, comments don't disappear).
Roko never deleted his account; he simply deleted all of his comments individually.
Surely not individually (there were probably thousands and IIRC it was also happening to other accounts, so wasn't the result of running a self-made destructive script); what you're seeing is just how "deletion of account" performed on old version of LW looks like on current version of LW.
No, I don't think so; in fact I don't think it was even possible for users to delete their own accounts on the old version of LW. (See here.) SilasBarta discovered Roko in the process of deleting his comments, before they had been completely deleted.
This sounds right to me, but I still have little trust in my memories.
Or little interest in rational self-improvement by figuring what actually happened and why?
[You've made an outrageously self-assured false statement about this, and you were upvoted—talk about sycophancy—for retracting your falsehood, while suffering no penalty for your reckless arrogance.]
Are there no server logs or database fields that would clarify the mystery? Couldn't Trike answer the question? (Yes, this is a use of scarce time - but if people are going to keep bringing it up, a solid answer is best.)
Your point is well taken, but since part of the concern about that whole affair was your extreme language and style, maybe stating this in normal caps might be a reasonable step for PR.
Has he said anywhere that the individual with nightmares was a donor? Note incidentally that having content that is acting as that much of a cognitive basilisk might be a legitimate reason to delete (although I'm inclined to think that it wasn't).