Splendid post. I am generally pro CFAR being alive; I was also pleased to read that the new workshops will still be ~2/3rds the good content from the original workshops, not exclusively new and experimental stuff, which makes me more confident in encouraging people to go (i.e. that the floor on the experience will still be quite good). Many things in this post seem to me to accurately address pathologies in CFAR 1.0; here's to CFAR 2.0 having even more success in developing an art of human rationality than CFAR 1.0.
Ways to help CFAR or to connect to CFAR besides donating:
[...]
- Book our venue (or help a friend realize they’d enjoy booking the venue, if they would)
I'll also let people know that I had a great experience renting the CFAR venue in Bodega Bay. I took the Inkhaven residents there for a weekend off-site, and the participants rated it really highly. It was a great bonding experience to be in a single house altogether, we had nice daily walks to the ocean, and Jack & Sunny were lovely hosts with their two adorable kittens. Endorsed as a good getaway space for up to ~50 people.
(And we do still need money to be viable, because being a custodian of such a community requires staff time and money for food/lodging/staff flights/etc.)
As a minor issue, I think I'm failing to understand this parenthetical. I already believe that many good non-profits need donations to live, and cannot sustain themselves fully on sales and revenue. This seemed to read to me though that aCFAR is justifying itself as needing funds primarily because of trying to sustain a community. Slightly earlier you wrote about the alumni community, which you felt was originally quite generative, then became lower quality, and you'd like to do something to get life into one again. But I don't think you mean to imply that the alumni community is the sole purpose of donations. What did you mean here?
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1I'm sorry to hear about your health/fatigue. That's a very unfortunate turn of events, for everyone really.
It’s actually been this way the whole time. When I first met Eliezer 10 years ago at a decision theory workshop at Cambridge University, I asked him what his AI timelines were over lunch; he promptly blew a raspberry as his answer and then fell asleep.
@dirk Anti-reacts aren't for disagreement, they're for "this is an inappropriate use of the react" (e.g. if someone writes "haha" on something that wasn't meant as a joke, or someone hits "typo" on something that is actually correctly spelled).
So please don't anti-react my "Plus One" react if you strongly disagree with it. You can just react to the claim with your epistemic state (as you have done with your disagree-react).
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1I'm not interested in making such a request for expanding on it, thanks for the offer. (I'm not asking you not to, to be clear.)
To respond to your point, you may be aware that there's a large class of Singerian EAs that are pathologically self-guilting and taking-personal-responsibility-for-the-bad-things-in-the-world, and it was kind to some of them to point out what was believed to be a true argument for why that was not the case here. I don't think it is primarily explained by self-serving motivation; and as evidence you can see from the comments that Eliezer was perfectly open to evidence he was mistaken (via encouraging Habryka to post their chat publicly where Habryka gave counterevidence), so I think it's unfair to read poor intent into this, as opposed to genuine empathy/sympathy for people who are renowned for beating themselves up about things in the world that they are barely responsible for and have relatively little agency over.
(Small suggestion of the call being recorded and transcript linked from a quick take or comment. I'm happy to pay for rev.com to make a transcription.)
As a relevant point, he also writes things like this where he tries to reduce EAs unnecessarily beating themselves up. (I disagree with him on the facts, but I think it was a kind thing to do.)
FWIW I almost missed the moderation guidelines for this post, it's rare that people actually edit them.
1A bunch of points that are kind of the same point:
- Not suffering fools gladly is a common way to punish people for wasting your time or strategically misunderstanding you. Expecting that you will lose status for doing this to someone is an incentive to, if you're going to engage, actually engage with what they said, rather than to misread them. (It's also an incentive not to engage with them.)
- Similarly it's a common dynamic that powerful people will pretend to like people who are interesting but don't cost them political points to endorse, while kind of ignoring them, but once they're actually costing you politically then the pretense will go away, and I do think this pretense is bad for actually engaging with ideas and positions (e.g. I think many religious people might have said that Richard Dawkins was a polite debate partner if he stuck to just saying that, and didn't have more fiery rhetoric that was causing a movement to build, even though his position didn't change).
- I think Eliezer has said he took a more polite and hopeful tone in the past (e.g. this and this and this versus this and this and this), and felt that people basically didn't engage with him and did whatever they were going to do anyway. So he thought he should try something different, and it indeed has been more successful at causing people to engage with the perspective that AI is by-default going to be an extinction-level bad event.
- I think that broadly, Eliezer is more hostile due to feeling like he's in a hostile epistemic environment. Personally I take this as a cue to more seriously consider that the hostility is appropriate to the world we find ourselves in (which also is a world where people have seemingly had their head in the sand for over a decade and very powerful people are racing to build doomsday machines while largely not openly engaging with this fact nor the arguments that this is an atrocity).
Some other factors that are relevant:
- I think it's accurate to model Eliezer as having a chronic illness to do with fatigue, which means he just doesn't have a lot of time/effort to put into lots of public dialogues. This is a factor that makes him less invest in back-and-forths and understanding others.
- Eliezer's internal thoughts are also in a pretty different language to others, which can lead to miscommunications. I think in the example you give, with the potted plant, the questioner kind of indicated that they hadn't clearly read the post, where explicitly says he's asking about pre-ChatGPT, and the person asks whether a statement made today would count; if you assume that they did read the post then his reply makes more sense (it wasn't intended primarily as an insult, as much as an attempt to to give a short answer to a somewhat pointless and irrelevant question).
To be clear I think he could do a better job of understanding people he's writing with via text format, and I am still confused about why he seems (to me) below average at this.
Hm. I have been interpreting it as having more of a 'concerning!' element to it. More like when your arch-nemesis surprisingly moves into a house on the same street as you than when your true love does. Am I wrong?
FWIW the prestigious Clarion West writers' workshop gives out a lot of scholarships, I think this is pretty normal for writers' events:
My process for financial aid was essentially to accept everyone who we clearly wanted to accept based on their writing, and then figure out what they could afford (to be clear I was unwilling to offer anyone a full scholarship, all had to pay something, and I believe I understood their financial situations well enough to believe they were genuinely paying what they could afford—I understand the financial situation of students, of people in certain industries, of people between jobs, etc). Then we looked at the marginal cases, and selected in favor of those who were able to pay full or near-full. Looking through my initial votes on people now, I don't see anyone who I thought was marginal who didn't pay full or at least >50% of the price. And to be clear, marginal costs of such Inkhaven Residents aren't that high, as long as their contributions to the program are net positive.
My point being, I think there was little to be gained by being stricter on the margin—and much value to miss out on in terms of interesting and valuable writing from those who wouldn't have joined the cohort.