I know politics is the mindkiller and arguments are soldiers yet still the question looms large: What makes some people more suceptible to arguing about politics and ideology? I know of people I can talk to while having differing points of view and just go "well, seems like we disagree" and carry on a conversation. Conversations with other people invariably disintegrate into political discussion with neither side yielding.

Why?

Are there any resources (on lesswrong or elsewhere) , I can use for improving my social effectiveness and social intelligence ? Its something I'd really like to improve on so I can understand social situations better and perhaps improve the quality of my social interactions.

Assuming you meant for the comment section to be used to convince you. Not necessarily because you meant it, but because making that assumption means not willfully acting against your wishes on what normally would be a trivial issue that holds no real preference for you. Maybe it would be better to do it with private messages, maybe not. There's a general ambient utility to just making the argument here, so there shouldn't be any fault in doing so.

Since this is a real-world issue rather than a simple matter of crunching numbers, what you're really asking for here isn't merely to be convinced, but to be happy with whatever decision you make. Ten months worth of payment for the relief of not having to pay an entirely useless cost every month, and whatever more immediate utility will accompany that "extra" 50$/month. If 50$ doesn't buy much immediate utility for you, then a compelling argument needs to encompass in-depth discussion of trivial things. It would mean having to know precise information about what you actually value. Or at the very least, an accurate heuristic about how you feel about trivial decisions. As it stands, you feel the 50$/month investment is worth it for a very narrow type of investment: Cryonics.

This is simply restating the knowns in a particular format, but it emphasizes what the core argument needs to be here: Either that the investment harbors even less utility than 50$/month can buy, or that there are clearly superior investments you can make at the same price.

Awareness of just how severely confirmation bias exists in the brain (despite any tactics you might suspect would uproot it) should readily show that convincing you that there are better investments to make (and therefore to stop making this particular investment) is the route most likely to produce payment. Of course, this undermines the nature of the challenge: A reason to not invest at all.

I do not understand why MIRI hasn’t produced a non-technical (pamphlet/blog post/video) to persuade people that UFAI is a serious concern.

It would be far more useful if MIRI provided technical argumentation for its Scary Idea. There are a lot of AGI researchers, myself included, which remain entirely unconvinced. AGI researchers - the people who would actually create an UFAI - are paying attention and not sufficiently convinced to change their behavior. Shouldn't that be of more concern than a non-technical audience?

A decade of effort on EY's part has taken the idea of friendliness mainstream. It is now accepted as fact by most AGI researchers that intelligence and morality are orthonormal concepts, despite contrary intuition, and that even with the best of intentions a powerful, self-modifying AGI could be a dangerous thing. The degree of difference in belief is in the probability assigned to that could.

Has the community responded? Yes. Quite a few mainstream AGI researchers have proposed architectures for friendly AGI, or realistic boxing/oracle setups, or a friendliness analysis of their own AGI design. To my knowledge MIRI has yet to engage with any of these proposals. Why?

I want a believable answer to that before a non-technical pamphlet or video, please.

Based on my (subjective and anecdotal, I'll admit) personal experiences, I think it would be bad. Look at climate change.

Thanks, Luke. This is an informative reply, and it's great to hear you have a standard talk! Is it publicly available, and where can I see it if so? Maybe MIRI should ask FOAFs to publicise it?

It's also great to hear that MIRI has tried one pamphlet. I would agree that "This one pamphlet we tried didn't work" points us in the direction that "No pamphlet MIRI can produce will accomplish much", but that proposition is far from certain. I'd still be interested in the general case of "Can MIRI reduce the chance of UFAI x-risk through pamphlets?"

Pamphlets...don't work for MIRI's mission. The inferential distance is too great, the ideas are too Far, the impact is too far away.

You may be right. But, it is possible to convince intelligent non-rationalists to take UFAI x-risk seriously in less than an hour (I've tested this), and anything that can do that process in a manner that scales well would have a huge impact. What's the Value of Information on trying to do that? You mention the Sequences and HPMOR (which I've sent to a number of people with the instruction "set aside what you're doing and read this"). I definitely agree that they filter nicely for "able to think". But they also require a huge time commitment on the part of the reader, whereas a pamphlet or blog post would not.

why not put out pamphlets in which Jesus, Muhammad and Krishna discuss AGI?

Jesus: We excel at absorbing external influences and have no problems with setting up new cults (just look at Virgin Mary) -- so we'll just make a Holy Quadrinity! Once you go beyond monotheism there's no good reason to stop at three...

Muhammad: Ah, another prophet of Allah! I said I was the last but maybe I was mistaken about that. But one prophet more, one prophet less -- all is in the hands of Allah.

Krishna: Meh, Kali is more impressive anyways. Now where are my girls?

Right, but what damage is really being done to GE? Does all the FUD stop the people who go into the science from understanding the dangers?

Letting plants grow their own pesticides for killing of things that eat the plants sounds to me like a bad strategy if you want healthy food. It makes things much easier for the farmer, but to me it doesn't sound like a road that we should go on.

I wouldn't want to buy such food in the supermarket but I have no problem with buying genetic manipulated that adds extra vitamins.

Then there are various issues with introducing new species. Issues about monocultures. Bioweapons.

after it's known and taken seriously, the people who work on AI will be under intense pressure to ensure they're avoiding the dangers here.

The whole work is dangerous. Safety is really hard.

Overexposure of an idea can be harmful as well. Look at how Kurzweil promoted his idea of the singularity. While many of the ideas (such as intelligence explosion) are solid, people don't take Kurzweil seriously anymore, to a large extent.

It would be useful debating why Kurzweil isn't taken seriously anymore. Is it because of the fraction of wrong predictions? Or is it simply because of the way he's presented them? Answering these questions would be useful to avoid ending up like Kurzweil has.

Politically people who fear AI might go after companies like google.

but if the public at large started really worrying about uFAI, that's kind of the goal here.

I don't think that the public at large is the target audience. The important thing is that the people who could potential build an AGI understand that they are not smart enough to contain the AGI.

If you have a lot of people making bad arguments for why UFAI is a danger, smart MIT people might just say, hey those people are wrong I'm smart enough to program an AGI that does what I want.

I mean take a topic like genetic engineering. There are valid dangers involved in genetic engineering. On the other hand the people who think that all gene manipulated food is poisons are wrong. As a result a lot of self professed skeptics and Atheists see it as their duty to defend genetic engineering.