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The world is locked right now in a deadly puzzle, and needs something like a miracle of good thought if it is to have the survival odds one might wish the world to have.
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Despite all priors and appearances, our little community (the "aspiring rationality" community; the "effective altruist" project; efforts to create an existential win; etc.) has a shot at seriously helping with this puzzle. This sounds like hubris, but it is at this point at least partially a matter of track record.[1]
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To aid in solving this puzzle, we must probably find a way to think together, accumulatively. We need to think about technical problems in AI safety, but also about the full surrounding context -- everything to do with understanding what the heck kind of a place the world is, such that that kind of place may contain cheat codes and trap doors toward achieving an existential win. We probably also need to think about "ways of thinking" -- both the individual thinking skills, and the community conversational norms, that can cause our puzzle-solving to work better. [2]
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One feature that is pretty helpful here, is if we somehow maintain a single "conversation", rather than a bunch of people separately having thoughts and sometimes taking inspiration from one another. By "a conversation", I mean a space where people can e.g. reply to one another; rely on shared jargon/shorthand/concepts; build on arguments that have been established in common as probably-valid; point out apparent errors and then have that pointing-out be actually taken into account or else replied-to).
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One feature that really helps things be "a conversation" in this way, is if there is a single Schelling set of posts/etc. that people (in the relevant community/conversation) are supposed to read, and can be assumed to have read. Less Wrong used to be a such place; right now there is no such place; it seems to me highly desirable to form a new such place if we can.
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We have lately ceased to have a "single conversation" in this way. Good content is still being produced across these communities, but there is no single locus of conversation, such that if you're in a gathering of e.g. five aspiring rationalists, you can take for granted that of course everyone has read posts such-and-such. There is no one place you can post to, where, if enough people upvote your writing, people will reliably read and respond (rather than ignore), and where others will call them out if they later post reasoning that ignores your evidence. Without such a locus, it is hard for conversation to build in the correct way. (And hard for it to turn into arguments and replies, rather than a series of non sequiturs.)
Here's an opinion on this that I haven't seen voiced yet:
I have trouble being excited about the 'rationalist community' because it turns out it's actually the "AI doomsday cult", and never seems to get very far away from that.
As a person who thinks we have far bigger fish to fry than impending existential AI risk - like problems with how irrational most people everywhere (including us) are, or how divorced rationality is from our political discussions / collective decision making progress, or how climate change or war might destroy our relatively-peaceful global state before AI even exists - I find that I have little desire to try to contribute here. Being a member of this community seems to requiring buying into the AI-thing, and I don't so I don't feel like a member.
(I'm not saying that AI stuff shouldn't be discussed. I'd like it to dominate the discussion a lot less.)
I think this community would have an easier time keeping members, not alienating potential members, and getting more useful discussion done, if the discussions were more located around rationality and effectiveness in general, instead of the esteemed founder's pet obsession.
I don't think that it's true that you need to buy into the AI-thing to be a member of the community, and so I think that it seems that way is a problem.
But I think you do need to be able to buy into the non-weirdness of caring about the AI-thing, and that we may need to be somewhat explicit about the difference between those two things.
[This isn't specific to AI; I think this holds for lots of positions. Cryonics is probably an easy one to point at that disproportionately many LWers endorse but is seen as deeply weird by society at large.]