Consider the reaction my comment from three months ago got.

I think being a Catholic with no connection to living leaders makes more sense than being an EA who doesn't have a leader they trust and respect, because Catholicism has a longer tradition

As an additional comment, few organizations have splintered more publicly than Catholicism; it seems sort of surreal to me to not check whether or not you ended up on the right side of the splintering. [This is probably more about theological questions than it is about leadership, but as you say, the leadership is relevant!]

I don’t think Duncan knows what “a boundary” is.

General Semantics has a neat technology, where they can split out different words that normally land on top of each other. If boundary_duncan is different from boundary_segfault, we can just make each of the words more specific, and not have to worry about whether or not they're the same.

I've read thru your explainer of boundary_segfault, and I don't see how Duncan's behavior is mismatched. It's a limit that he set for himself that defines how he interacts with himself, others, and his environment. My guess is that the disagreement here is that under boundary_segfault, describing you as having "poor boundaries" is saying that your limits are poorly set. (Duncan may very well believe this! Tho the claim that you set them for yourself makes judging the limits more questionable. ) 

That said, "poor boundaries" is sometimes used to describe a poor understanding or respect of other people's boundaries. It seems to me like you are not correctly predicting how Duncan (or other people in your life!) will react to your messages and behavior, in a way that aligns with you not accurately predicting their boundaries (or predicting them accurately, and then deciding to violate them anyway).

This isn’t something that I do. This is something that I have done

I don't understand this combination of sentences. Isn't he describing the same observations you're describing?

There is a point here that he's describing it as a tendency you have, instead of an action that happened. But it sure seems like you agree that it's an action that happened, and I think he's licensed to believe that it might happen again. As inferences go, this doesn't seem like an outlandish one to make.

The friends who know me well know that I am a safe person. Those who have spent even a day around me know this, too!

The comments here seem to suggest otherwise.

You talk about consent as being important to you; let's leave aside questions of sexual consent and focus just on the questions: did Duncan consent to these interactions? Did Duncan ask you to leave him alone? Did you leave him alone?

I wasn't sure what search term to use to find a good source on this but Claude gave me this:

I... wish people wouldn't do this? Or, like, maybe you should ask Claude for the search terms to use, but going to a grounded source seems pretty important to staying grounded.

I think Six Dimensions of Operational Adequacy was in this direction; I wish we had been more willing to, like, issue scorecards earlier (like publishing that document in 2017 instead of 2022). The most recent scorecard-ish thing was commentary on the AI Safety Summit responses.

I also have the sense that the time to talk about unpausing is while creating the pause; this is why I generally am in favor of things like RSPs and RDPs. (I think others think that this is a bit premature / too easy to capture, and we are more likely to get a real pause by targeting a halt.)

Similarly for the Sierra Club, I think their transition from an anti-immigration org to a pro-immigration org seems like an interesting political turning point that could have failed to happen in another timeline.

From the outside, Finnish environmentalism seems unusually good--my first check for this is whether or not environmentalist groups are pro-nuclear, since (until recently) it was a good check for numeracy.

Note that the 'conservation' sorts of environmentalism are less partisan in the US, or at least, are becoming partisan later. (Here's an article in 2016 about a recent change of a handful of Republicans opposed to national parks, in the face of bipartisan popular support for them.) I think the thing where climate change is a global problem instead of a local problem, and a conflict between academia and the oil industry, make it particularly prone to partisanship in the US. [Norway also has significant oil revenues--how partisan is their environmentalism, and do they have a similar detachment between conservation and climate change concerns?]

I think this is true of an environmentalist movement that wants there to be a healthy environment for humans; I'm not sure this is true of an environmentalist movement whose main goal is to dismantle capitalism. I don't have a great sense of how this has changed over time (maybe the motivations for environmentalism are basically constant, and so it can't explain the changes), but this feels like an important element of managing to maintain alliances with politicians in both parties.

(Thinking about the specifics, I think the world where Al Gore became a Republican (he was a moderate for much of his career) or simply wasn't Clinton's running mate (which he did in part because of HW Bush's climate policies) maybe leads to less partisanship. I think that requires asking why those things happened, and whether there was any reasonable way for them to go the other way. The oil-republican link seems quite strong during the relevant timeframe, and you either need to have a strong oil-democrat link or somehow have a stronger climate-republican link, both of which seem hard.)

I get that this is the first post out of 4, and I'm skimming the report to see if you address this, but it sounds like you're using historical data to try to prove a counterfactual claim. What alternative do you think was possible? (I assume the presence of realistic alternatives is what you mean by 'not inevitable', but maybe you mean something else.)