I intended Leveling Up in Rationality to communicate this:
Despite worries that extreme rationality isn't that great, I think there's reason to hope that it can be great if some other causal factors are flipped the right way (e.g. mastery over akrasia). Here are some detailed examples I can share because they're from my own life...
But some people seem to have read it and heard this instead:
I'm super-awesome. Don't you wish you were more like me? Yay rationality!
This failure (on my part) fits into a larger pattern of the Singularity Institute seeming too arrogant and (perhaps) being too arrogant. As one friend recently told me:
At least among Caltech undergrads and academic mathematicians, it's taboo to toot your own horn. In these worlds, one's achievements speak for themselves, so whether one is a Fields Medalist or a failure, one gains status purely passively, and must appear not to care about being smart or accomplished. I think because you and Eliezer don't have formal technical training, you don't instinctively grasp this taboo. Thus Eliezer's claim of world-class mathematical ability, in combination with his lack of technical publications, make it hard for a mathematician to take him seriously, because his social stance doesn't pattern-match to anything good. Eliezer's arrogance as evidence of technical cluelessness, was one of the reasons I didn't donate until I met [someone at SI in person]. So for instance, your boast that at SI discussions "everyone at the table knows and applies an insane amount of all the major sciences" would make any Caltech undergrad roll their eyes; your standard of an "insane amount" seems to be relative to the general population, not relative to actual scientists. And posting a list of powers you've acquired doesn't make anyone any more impressed than they already were, and isn't a high-status move.
So, I have a few questions:
- What are the most egregious examples of SI's arrogance?
- On which subjects and in which ways is SI too arrogant? Are there subjects and ways in which SI isn't arrogant enough?
- What should SI do about this?
I'm sort of pleased to see that I guessed roughly what this episode was about despite having arrived at LessWrong well after it unhappened.+ But if the Rationalwiki description is accurate, I'm now really confused about something new.
I was under the impression that Lesswrong was fairly big on the Litany of Gendlin. But an AI that could do the things Roko proposed (something I place vanishingly small probability, fortunately) could also retrospectively figure out who was being willfully ignorant or failing to reach rational conclusions for which they had sufficient priors.
It's disconcerting, after watching so much criticism of the rest of humanity finding ways to rationalize around the "inevitability" of death, to see transhumanists finding ways to hide their minds from their own "inevitable" conclusions.
+Since most people who would care about this subject at all have probably read Three Worlds Collide, I think this episode should be referred to as The Confessar Vanishes, but my humor may be idiosyncratic even for this crowd.
The primary issue with the Roko matter wasn't as much that an AI might actually do but that the relevant memes could cause some degree of stress in neurotic individuals. At the time when it occurred there were at least two people in the general SI/LW cluster who were apparently deeply disturbed by the thought. I expect that the sort who would be vulnerable would be the same sort who if they were religious would lose sleep over the possibility of going to hell.