cata

Programmer, rationalist, chess player, father, altruist.

Comments

Thanks, I didn't realize that this PC fan idea had made air purifiers so much better since I bought my Coway, so this post made me buy one of the Luggable kits. I'll share this info with others.

I disagree with the summarization suggestion for the same reason that I disagree with many of the items -- I don't have (much of) the problem they are trying to solve, so why would I expend effort to attack a problem I don't have?

The most obvious is "carrying extra batteries for my phone." My phone never runs out of battery; I should not carry batteries that I will never use. Similarly: I don't have a problem with losing things, such that I need extra. (If I had extra, I would plausibly give them away to save physical space!) I don't find myself wishing I remembered more of my thoughts, such that I should take the effort to capture and retain them. And I don't feel the need to remember more than I already do about the stuff that I read, so that makes me not inclined to take time away from the rest of my life and spend it remembering more things.

Are you really saying you think everything on this list is "obviously" beneficial? I probably only agree with half the stuff on the list. For example, I certainly disagree that I should "summarize things that I read" (?) or that I should have a "good mentor" by emailing people to request that they mentor me.

I specifically think it's well within the human norm, i.e. that most of the things I read are written by a person who has done worse things, or who would do worse things given equal power. I have done worse things, in my opinion. There's just not a blog post about them right now.

Speaking for myself, I don't agree with any of it. From what I have read, I don't agree that the author's personal issues demonstrate "some amount of poison in them" outside the human norm, or in some way that would make me automatically skeptical of anything they said "entwined with soulcrafting." And I certainly don't agree that a reader "should be aware" of nonspecific problems that an author has which aren't even clearly relevant to something they wrote. I would give the exact opposite advice -- to try to focus on the ideas first before involving preconceptions about the author's biases.

If you wanted other people to consider this remark, you shouldn't have deleted whatever discussion you had that prompted it, so that we could go look.

Yes, I basically am not considering that because I am not aware of the arguments for why that's a likely kind of risk (vs. the risk of simple annihilation, which I understand the basic arguments for.) If you think the future will be super miserable rather than simply nonexistent, then I understand why you might not have a kid.

I don't agree with that. I'm a parent of a 4-year-old who takes AI risk seriously. I think childhood is great in and of itself, and if the fate of my kid is to live until 20 and then experience some unthinkable AI apocalypse, that was 20 more good years of life than he would have had if I didn't do anything. If that's the deal of life it's a pretty good deal and I don't think there's any reason to be particularly anguished about it on your kid's behalf.

Thanks for the post. Your intuition as someone who has observed lots of similar arguments and the people involved in them seems like it should be worth something.

Personally as a non-involved party following this drama the thing I updated the most about so far was the emotional harm apparently done by Ben's original post. Kat's descriptions of how stressed out it made her were very striking and unexpected to me. Your post corroborates that it's common to take extreme emotional damage from accusations like this.

I am sure that LW has other people like me who are natural psychological outliers on "low emotional affect" or maybe "low agreeableness" who wouldn't necessarily intuit that it would be a super big deal for someone to publish a big public post accusing you of being an asshole. Now I understand that it's a bigger deal than I thought, and I am more open to norms that are more subtle than "honestly write whatever you think."

I am skeptical of the gender angle, but I think it's being underdiscussed that, based on the balance of evidence so far, the person with the biggest, most effective machine gun is $5000 to the richer and still anonymous, whereas the people hit by their bullets are busy pointing fingers at each other. Alice's alleged actions trashing Nonlinear (and 20-some former people???) seem IMO much worse than anything Lightcone or Nonlinear is being even accused of.

(Not that this is a totally foregone conclusion - I noticed that Nonlinear didn't provide any direct evidence on the claim that Alice was a known serial liar outside of this saga.)

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