All of Ori Nagel's Comments + Replies

Really interesting project, Mordechai! Have you seen some of Geoffrey Hinton's latest remarks? He's said some things along these lines actually. Feel free to message me and I can point you to it.

1Mordechai Rorvig
Thanks - didn't see his remarks about this, specifically. I'll try to look them up, thanks.

What is the appropriate emotional response? It sounds like you're saying the appropriate one is denial, which, fair enough, is what some may choose. 

Really appreciate this response, I think you nailed it! A general superintelligence is unseeable so you have to use one of those analogies. 

Whoops! I definitely posted this second one to Alignment Forum but I guess it got cross posted back to LW. 

Well I appreciate your comment but I think something's missing as far as conveying the emotions of the situation. I can imagine a death, a car crash for example, or imagine death on an even bigger scale like a nuclear weapon. I can imagine a disaster movie before it resolves on a happy ending. But I think those conceptions don't convey much, because I acknowledge that superintelligence can be destructive and can even envision what the end state of destruction would look like. Just envisioning that end state without explaining superintelligence that caused us to get to that end state doesn't do much for me though. 

Ah yes, Rational Animations did a great video of that story. That did make superintelligence more graspable, but you know I had watched it and forgotten about it. I think it showed how our human civilization is vulnerable to other intelligences (aliens), but didn't still made the superintelligence concept one that that easy to grok. 

When we got drill down into the crux of disagreement you walk away because it's not a good use of time/energy. Of course you're welcome to do that, but unfortunate.

Ori Nagel8-2

I think you should uplevel the discourse by changing the title of the post and maybe deleting it. You're just allowing vibes-based bullying, which is pretty toxic. Here's why: 

She elevated Kat's name to the headline; used the entire post to insult her writing; drew on ageist tropes and perjoratives like "cringe" to make her case; explicitly chose to share the message not with the writing's intended audience but rather an in-group who shares a distaste for lower-brow content; did so in an effort to rile up pressure to change the behavior on the other s... (read more)

Ori Nagel0-1

Let me get this straight. 

After she elevates Kat's name to the headline; uses the entire post to insult her writing; draws on ageist tropes and perjoratives like "cringe" to make her case; explicitly chooses to share the message not with the writing's intended audience but rather a specific in-group who shares a distaste for Reddit's lower-brow content; doing so in an effort to rile up pressure to change her behavior on the other site; an all the more potent strike considering the context that Kat is already a well-known figure who presumably cares ab... (read more)

0WilliamKiely
I'm going to withdraw from this comment thread since I don't think my further participation is a good use of time/energy. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and sorry we didn't come to agreement.

I'm confident in saying that the information here is not sufficient to conclude she was making a personal attack.

A wild claim to make about a post that explictly centers around shaming Kat for her posting style predominantly because it's "cringe", by putting her name in  the headline (what I meant by name-calling) and orienting the entire argument around her. If it wasn't meant to tarnish her reputation, why not instead make the post about just her issues with the disagreeable content? 

If she said that was her intent, I'd change my mind. Or if sh

... (read more)
2WilliamKiely
Gotcha, that's fair. I can think of multiple possible reasons. E.g. If OP sees a pattern of several bad or problematic posts, it can make sense to go above the object-level criticisms of those posts and talk about the meta-level questions. Maybe, but in my view accusing someone of making personal attacks is a serious thing, so I'd rather be cautious, have a high bar of evidence, and take an "innocent until proven guilty" approach. Maybe I'll be too charitable in some cases and fail to condemn someone for making a personal attack, but that's worth it to avoid making the opposite mistake: accusing someone of making a personal attack who was doing no such thing. That stated fun motivation did bother me. Obviously given that people feel the post is attacking Kat personally making the post for fun isn't a good enough reason. However, I do also see the post as raising legitmate questions about whether the sort of content that Kat produces and promotes a lot of is actually helping to raise the quality of discourse on EA and AI safety, etc, so it's clearly not just a post for fun. The OP seemed to be fustrated and venting when writing the post, resulting in it having an unnecessarily harsh tone. But I don't think this makes it amount to bullying. I try to. I guess we just disagree about which kind of mistake (described above) is worse. In the face of uncertainty, I think it's better to caution on the side of not mistakenly accusing someone of bullying and engaging in a personal attack than on the side of mistakenly being too charitable and failing to call out someone who actually said something mean (especially when there are already a lot of other people in the comments like you doing that).

This wasn't criticism of just the project (e.g. her content), it was criticism of the person because of the content they make, because let’s be real a personal attack is much more damaging. And yes, it was meant to tarnish her reputation because, well, did you not read the headline of the post? 

Sure, consumers may form their opinion of a person, their reputation, based on a composite knowledge of their professional or personal behavior, so the post’s caveat factors in one small way to the equation. But what drove reputation change here much more signi... (read more)

1WilliamKiely
The headline I see is "Everywhere I Look, I See Kat Woods". What name is this calling Kat? Am I missing something? And why do you think that you can infer that the OP's intent was to tarnish Kat's peraonal reputation from that headline? That doesn't make any sense. Anyway, I don't know the OP, but I'm confident in saying that the information here is not sufficient to conclude she was making a personal attack. If she said that was her intent, I'd change my mind. Or if she said something that was unambiguously a personal attack I'd change my mind, but at the moment I see no reason not to read the post as well meaning innocent criticism. I also don't think it's very appropriate for this forum (largely because the complaint is not about Kat's posting stlye on LessWrong). I didn't downvote it because it seemed like it had already received a harsh enough reaction, but I didn't upvote it either.

What does it mean to tarnish the reputation of someone as a "public figure" and not as a person? 

He's a dick politician (but a great husband)? 

Consumers are only aware of whatever is publicly known to them, so their reputation is entirely depenedent of what one thinks about the "public figure."

Herego, his actions expressly are meant to tarnish her reputation. 

0WilliamKiely
OP is a woman not a man.
3WilliamKiely
I don't think you're being charitable. There is an important difference between a personal attack and criticism of the project someone is engaging in. My reading of the OP is that it's the latter, while I understand you to be accusing the OP of the former. "Dick" is a term used for personal attacks. If you said "He's a bad politician; He's a good husband and good man, and I know he's trying to do good, but his policies are causing harm to the world" so we really shouldn't support Pro-America Joe (or whatever--assume Pro-America is a cause we support and we just don't agree with the way Joe goes about trying to promote America) then I'd say yes, that's how we criticize Pro-America Joe without attacking him as a person.

Let's just observe that your "fun" is policing someone's popular memes, on an entirely different social media site that's not LessWrong, because you find them cringe.

And what was all the more "fun" for you was to psychoanalyze and essentially pressure her to cut back with cancel culture tactics.

I say that because if you wanted to question the merits of the content and it being net-positive, wouldn't you just post the memes themselves? 

Trying to police a seperate site on LessWrong, and doing so by going after the poster for "fun" on the basis of diverg... (read more)

7WilliamKiely
I don't think that's accurate. The OP clearly states:

Kat Woods often doesn’t give proper credit when spreading memes.

Truly wild to expect "memes" to be properly credited. 

The rest of the Internet does not work like LessWrong, which is intentionally so, and expecting otherwise is unrealistic.