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Reflections on a Personal Public Relations Failure: A Lesson in Communication

Related To: Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?, Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale, How to Not Lose an Argument Eliezer's excellent article Are Your Enemies Innately Evil? points to the fact that when two people have a strong disagreement it's often the case that each person sincerely believes that he or she is on the right side. Yvain's excellent article Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale highlights that the fact that to each such person, without knowledge of the larger context that the other person's beliefs fit into, the other person's beliefs can appear to be absurd. The frequency with which this phenomenon occurs is sufficiently high so that it's important for each participant in an argument to make a strong effort to understand where the other person is coming from and to frame one's own ideas with the other person's perspective in mind. Last month I made a sequence of posts [1], [2], [3], [4] raising concerns about the fruitfulness of SIAI's approach to reducing existential risk. My concerns were sincere and I made my sequence of postings in good faith. All the same, there's a sense in which my sequence of postings was a failure. In the first of these I argued that the SIAI staff should place greater emphasis on public relations. Ironically, in my subsequent postings I myself should have placed greater emphasis on public relations. I made mistakes which damaged my credibility and barred me from serious consideration by some of those who I hoped to influence. In the present posting I catalog these mistakes and describe the related lessons that I've learned about communication. Mistake #1: Starting during the Singularity Summit I started my string of posts during the Singularity Summit. This was interpreted by some to be underhanded and overly aggressive. In fact, the coincidence of my string of posts with the Singularity Summit was influenced more by the appearance of XiXiDu's Should I Believe What the SIAI claims? than anything else, but it's understandable

51Oct 1, 2010

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Last chance to donate for 2011

Many LW readers choose to direct their charitable donations to SingInst with a view toward reducing existential risk. Others do not, whether because they feel they lack an understanding of the relevant issues, because they value present day humans more than future humans or because they have concern as to...

Dec 30, 20117

[Link] New arm of GiveWell Research: GiveWell Labs

Announcing GiveWell Labs > We’re now launching a new initiative within GiveWell that will not be subject to either of these constraints. We plan to invest about 25% of our research time in what we’re calling GiveWell Labs: an arm of our research process that will be open to any...

Sep 8, 201121

Impact of India-Pakistan nuclear war on x-risk?

Last month I was involved in a conversation thread about what the impact of a hypothetical nuclear war would be on existential risk. There are many potential nuclear war scenarios which would have varying impacts on existential risk. It's difficult to know where to start to gain an understanding of...

Sep 3, 201110

[LINK] Brief Discussion of Asteroid & Nuclear Risk from paper by Hellman

From Risk Analysis of Nuclear Deterrence by Martin Hellman. See also http://nuclearrisk.org/ > A full-scale nuclear war is not the only threat to humanity’s continued existence, and we should allocate resources commensurate with the various risks. A large asteroid colliding with the Earth could destroy humanity in the same way...

Aug 17, 201110

Decimal digit computations as a testing ground for reasoning about probabilities

Points in this article emerged from a conversation with Anna Salamon I think that thinking about decimal expansions of real numbers provides a good testing ground for one's intuition about probabilities. The context of computation is very different from most of the contexts that humans deal with; in particular it's...

Jul 15, 201110

Efficient philanthropy: local vs. global approaches

Edit: Carl Shulman made some remarks that have caused me to seriously question the soundness of the final section of this post. More on this at the end of the post. Consider the following two approaches to philanthropy: The “local” approach (associated with "satisficing") is to consider those philanthropic opportunities...

Jun 16, 201113

Model Uncertainty, Pascalian Reasoning and Utilitarianism

Related to: Confidence levels inside and outside an argument, Making your explicit reasoning trustworthy A mode of reasoning that sometimes comes up in discussion of existential risk is the following. Person 1: According to model A (e.g. some Fermi calculation with probabilities coming from certain reference classes), pursuing course of...

Jun 14, 201135

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multifoliaterose

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Reflections on a Personal Public Relations Failure: A Lesson in Communication

Existential Risk and Public Relations

Efficient Charity

Other Existential Risks

multifoliaterose

Last chance to donate for 2011

[Link] New arm of GiveWell Research: GiveWell Labs

Impact of India-Pakistan nuclear war on x-risk?

[LINK] Brief Discussion of Asteroid & Nuclear Risk from paper by Hellman

Decimal digit computations as a testing ground for reasoning about probabilities

Efficient philanthropy: local vs. global approaches

Model Uncertainty, Pascalian Reasoning and Utilitarianism

Reflections on a Personal Public Relations Failure: A Lesson in Communication

Existential Risk and Public Relations

Efficient Charity

Other Existential Risks

Last chance to donate for 2011

[Link] New arm of GiveWell Research: GiveWell Labs

Impact of India-Pakistan nuclear war on x-risk?

[LINK] Brief Discussion of Asteroid & Nuclear Risk from paper by Hellman

Decimal digit computations as a testing ground for reasoning about probabilities

Efficient philanthropy: local vs. global approaches

Model Uncertainty, Pascalian Reasoning and Utilitarianism