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XiXiDu comments on Breaking the vicious cycle - Less Wrong
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To be honest, I had you pegged as being stuck in a partisan spiral. The fact that you are willing to do this is pretty cool. Have some utils on the house. I don’t know if officially responding to your blog is worth MIRI’s time; it would imply some sort of status equivalence.
Also, you published some very embarrassing quotes from Yudkowsky. I’m guessing you caused him quite a bit of distress, so he’s probably not inclined to do you any favors. Mining someone’s juvenilia for outrageous statements is not productive – I mean he was 16 when he wrote some of the stuff you quote. I would remove those pages. Same with the usenet stuff – I know it was posted publicly but it feels like furtively-recorded conversations to me all these years later. Stick to arguments against positions MIRI and Yudkowsky currently hold. Personally I’ve moved from highly-skeptical of MIRI to moderately approving. I made this comment a year ago:
And MIRI has stayed on course and is becoming a productive think tank with three full-time researchers and, it seems to me, a highly competent CEO. It is a very different organization now than the one you started out criticizing.
If I post an embarrassing quote by Sarah Palin, then I am not some kind of school bully who likes causing people distress. Instead I highlight an important shortcoming of an influential person. I have posted quotes of various people other than Yudkowsky. I admire all of them for their achievements and wish them all the best. But as influential people they have to expect that someone might highlight something they said. This is not a smear campaign.
As far as I can tell, Yudkowsky basically grew up on the internet. I think it is more like you went through all the copies of Palin's school newspaper, and picked up some notes she passed around in class, and then published the most outrageous things she said in such a way that you implied they were written recently. I think this goes against some notion of journalistic tact.
This is exactly the kind of misrepresentation that make me avoid deleting my posts. Most of the most outrageous things he said have been written in the past ten years.
I suppose you are partly referring to the quotes page? Please take a look, there are only two quotes that are older than 2004, for one of which I explicitly note that he doesn't agree with it anymore, and a second which I believe he still agrees with.
Those two quotes that are dated before 2004 are the least outrageous. They are there mainly to show that he has long been believing into singularitarian ideas and that he can save the world. This is important in evaluating how much of the later arguments are rationalizations of those early beliefs. Which is in turn important because he's actually asking people for money and giving a whole research field a bad name with his predictions about AI.
This is the most outrageous one to me:
And it's clearly the exact opposite of what present Eliezer belives.
The stuff that bothers me are Usenet and mailing list quotes (they are equivalent to passing notes and should be considered off the record) and anything written when he was a teenager. The rest, I suppose, should at least be labeled with the date they were written. And if he has explicitly disclaimed the statement, perhaps that should be mentioned, too.
Young Eliezer was a little crankish and has pretty much grown out of it. I feel like you're criticising someone who no longer exists.
Also, the page where you try to diagnose him with narsisism just seems mean.
I can clarify this. I never intended to write that post but was forced to do so out of self-defense.
I replied to this comment whose author was wondering why Yudkowsky is using Facebook more than LessWrong these days. To which I replied with an on-topic speculation based on evidence.
Then people started viciously attacking me, to which I had to respond. In one of those replies I unfortunately used the term "narcissistic tendencies". I was then again attacked for using that term. I defended my use of that term with evidence, the result of which is that post.
What do you expect that I do when I am mindlessly attacked by a horde of people? That I just leave it at that and let my name being dragged into dirt?
Many of my posts and comments are direct responses to personal attacks on me from LessWrong members.
So let me get this straight - you did a psychiatric diagnosis over the internet, and instead of saying, 'obviously I'm using the term colloquially' you provided evidence.
...
and then you are surprised when you get attacked, and even now characterize these attacks by like as coming from a mindless horde...
when the horde was actually 4 people, only one post was against you personally as opposed to being against that one thing you said, and there were roughly 2 others on your side. And your comments there are upvoted.
Yes, it was a huge overreaction on my side and I shouldn't have written such a comment in the first place. It was meant as an explanation of how that post came about, it was not meant as an excuse. It was still wrong. The point I want to communicate is that I didn't do it out of some general interest to cause MIRI distress.
I apologize for offending people and overreacting to what I perceived the way I described it but which was, as you wrote, not that way. I already deleted that post yesterday.
OK!
You do not stand to Eliezer as you stand to Sarah Palin (as a far as public figures go). The equivalent would be a minor congressmen consistently devoting his speaking time to highlight all the stupid things Sarah Palin has said (and retracted). I'm pretty sure such congressman would meet far worse consequences than you have been meeting.
EDIT: Not sure why this comment is being downvoted, but as a clarification I merely meant the difference in social status between Alex and Sarah is bigger than between Eliezer and him. When the gap is big enough, it doesn't matter what one says about the other, but this is not the case here. Why is that offensive/such a bad idea?