Artaxerxes 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.
For the record, I genuinely object to being thought of as a "highly competent CEO." I think "non-natural CEO working hard and learning fast and picking up lots of low-hanging fruit but also making lots of mistakes along the way because he had no prior executive experience" is more accurate. The good news is that I've been learning even more quickly since Matt Fallshaw joined the Board, since he's able and willing to put in the time to transfer to me what he's learned from launching and running multiple startups.
So this comment here about a basically unrelated matter to the topic in the title post (but one that it isn't strange at all that you would reply to of course, since it's about you), is it essentially a way of communicating that you've seen XiXiDu's post and have chosen to ignore it? I mean, I'm sure it could be very simple and you're just too busy to deal with this kind of thing, but I can't help but to notice your appearance in the thread and your conspicuous lack of response of any kind, especially since, you know, you're the CEO of the organisation XiXiDu is attempting to make peace with.
Hopefully I haven't been too forward with what I've suggested here, and I'm also sorry if I'm speculating in an entirely inaccurate direction.
I haven't figured out what to say yet. :)
The short version is that I'm not sure we want to make counterclaims at the top of Alexander's blog posts. I mostly just wish Alexander was more consistently constructive in his criticism, like many of our other critics are. I think I'm far from alone in the impression that his criticisms are an uneven mix of kinda fair criticisms, deliberate straw men ("the intelligence explosion hypothesis is a tautology"), largely irrelevant character assassination (digging up embarrassing things Eliezer wrote when he was 16), and more. But I was resisting saying even this much, because I worry about putting Alexander in a position where he again feels he's being misrepresented and needs to defend himself.
Well, I guess let's see what happens. But I can't promise I'll think it's wise for me to reply further.
To make the first step and show that this is not some kind of evil ploy, I now deleted the (1) Yudkowsky quotes page and (2) the post on his personality (explanation on how that post came about).
I realize that they were unnecessarily offending and apologize for that. If I could turn back the clock I would do a lot differently and probably stay completely silent about MIRI and LW.
Thanks.
Things seem basically settled over here, so I'll just say: kudos for your efforts to break the vicious cycle!