I suspect the real disagreement between you and Anthropic-blamers like me is downstream of a P(Doom) disagreement (where yours is pretty low and others’ is high), since I’ve seen this is often the case with various cases of smart people disagreeing.

Realistically/pragmatically balanced moves in a lowish-P(Doom) world are unacceptable in a high-P(Doom) world.

I just noticed the LessWrong site loads a lot faster than it used to. Very cool!

Makes sense. Only problem is, bear fat + sugar + salt seems qualitatively pretty similar to ice cream. It doesn't seem like it neglected the qualitative spirit of why ice cream is good, which just adds to the fine parsing needed to get value out of this.

The fact still stands that ice cream is what we mass produce and send to grocery stores.

Yeah, I guess this exact observation is critical to making Eliezer's analogy accurate.

IMO "predicting that bear fat with honey and salt tastes good" is analogous to "predicting that harnessing a star's power will be an optimization target" — something we probably can successfully do.

And "predicting bear fat (or some kind of rendered animal fat) with honey and salt will be a popular treat" - the thing we couldn't have done a-priori - is analogous to "predicting solar-to-electricity generator panels will be a popular fixture on many planets" (since the details probably will turn out to have some unpredictable twists), and also to "predicting that making humans satisfied with outcomes will be an optimization target for AIs in the production environment as a result of their training".

I think this analogy is probably right, but the sense in which it's right seems sufficiently non-obvious/detailed/finicky that I don't think we can expect most people to get it?

Plus IMO it further undermines the pedagogical value of this example to observe that a drinkable form of ice cream (shakes) is also popular, plus there's gelato / frozen yogurt / soft serve, and then thick sweet yogurts and popsicles... it's a pretty continuous treat-fitness landscape.

I do think Eliezer is importantly right that the exact peak market-winning point in this landscape, would be hard to predict a-priori. But is the hardness also explained by the peak being dependent on chaotic historical/cultural forces?

And that's why I personally don't bring up the bear fat thing in my AI danger explanations.

Seems like the rapid-fire nature of an InkHaven writing sprint is a poor fit for a public post under a personally-charged summary bullet like “Oliver puts personal conflict ahead of shared goals”.

High-quality discourse means making an effort to give people the benefit of the doubt when making claims about their character. It’s worth taking time to carefully follow our rationalist norms of epistemic rigor, productive discourse, and personal charity.

I’d expect a high-evidence post about a very non-consensus topic like this to start out in a more norm-calibrated and self-aware epistemic tone, e.g. “I have concerns about Oliver’s decisionmaking as leader of Lightcone based on a pattern of incidents I’ve witnessed in his personal conflicts (detailed below)”.

Maybe Lightcone Infrastructure can just allow earmarking donations for LessWrong, if enough people care about that criticism.

Thanks. The reactions to such a post would constitute a stronger common knowledge signal of community agreement with the book (to the degree that such agreement is in fact present in the community).

I wonder if it would be better to make the agree-voting anonymous (like LW post voting) or with people's names attached to their votes (like react-voting).

I'm sure this is going too far for you, but I also personally wish LW could go even further toward turning a sufficient amount of mutual support expressed in that form (if it turns out to exist) into a frontpage that actually looks like what most humans expect a supportive front page around a big event to look like (moreso than having a banner mentioning it and discussion mentioning it).

> nor is my argument even "mutual knowledge is bad".

For example, I really like the LessWrong surveys! I take those every year!

What's the minimally modified version of posting this "Statement of Support for IABIED" you'd feel good about? Presumably the upper bound for your desired level of modification would be if we included a yearly survey question about whether people agree with the quoted central claim from the book?

Again, the separate tweet about LW crab-bucketing in my Twitter thread wasn't meant as a response to to you in this LW thread.

I agree that "room for disagreement does not imply any disagreement is valid", and am not seeing anything left to respond to on that point.

Ah yeah that'd probably be better