(Edit- I changed the title to better reflect the post contents and what I currently think happened; this comment doesn’t represent my views on the current post title or my current estimates of what happened)
I believe there’s a chance that protest organisers understood their phrasing could potentially cause people to have an impression (OpenAI is working with the military) not informed by details (on cybersecurity and veteran suicide prevention) but kept the phrasing because they thought it suited their goals better.
I don’t expect them to have an active malicious intent (I don’t think they wanted to do something bad). But I think it’s likely enough they were acting deceptively. I consider the chance of them thinking it’s not “misleading” in a bad way and it’s alright to do if it suits the goals to be much higher than what I would be comfortable with. (And people who attended the protest told me that yeah, this is deceptive, after familiarising themselves with the details.)
The title of the post is chosen because I think that regardless of the above, the community (as a whole/as an entity/agent) locally expected to benefit from people having this impression, while knowing it to be a misled impression, and went on with the messaging. Even if individual actors did not take decisions they knew would create impressions they knew were different from what reality is, I think community as a whole can still be deceptive in the sense of having the ability to realise all that and prevent misleading messaging, but not having done so. I think the community should work on strengthening and maybe institutionalising this ability, with the goal of being able to prevent even actively deceptive messaging, where the authors might hope to achieve something good but violate deontology.
I believe there’s a chance that protest organisers understood their phrasing could potentially cause people to have an impression not informed by details but kept the phrasing because they thought it suited their goals better...I think it’s likely enough they were acting deceptively.
Is accusing someone in the community of deliberately lying, and you seem to equivocate on that in other comments. Even earlier in this thread you say to Holly that “To be clear, in the post, I’m not implying that you, personally, tried to deceive people.” But to me this clearly is you implying that quite obviously, even with caveats. To then go back and talk about how this refers to the community as a whole feels really off to me.
I know that I am very much a contextualiser instead of a decoupler[1] but using a term like ‘deception’ is not something that you can neatly carve out from its well-understood social meaning as referring to a person’s character and instead use it to talk about a social movement as an agent.
I’d very much suggest you heed Jason’s advice earlier in the thread.
The messaging wasn’t technically false; it was just misleading, while saying technically true things. I’m not sure why you’re using “lying” here.
I would guess you’d agree organisations can use deceptive messaging? I’m pretty sure communities can also do that, including with dynamics where a community is deceptive but all parts have some sort of deniability/intentionlessness.
I think it’d be sad to have to discuss the likelihood of specific people of being deceptive. It would be making their lives even worse. If people Google their names, they’re going to find this. And it’s not really going to help with the problem, so this is not what I want to focus on. I titled the post this way because the community acted deceptively, regardless of how deceptive it’s members were.
I’m saying what I think in the comments and in the post, while avoiding, to the possible extent, talking about my current views of specific people’s actions or revealing the messages/words sent/said to me in private by these people.
And I don’t at all understand why we both are exchanging comments focusing on the words (that I thought were pretty clear, that I ran just before publishing pass a bunch of people, including protest participants, who told me they agreed with what I wrote) instead of focusing on the problems raised in the post.
(Edit- I changed the title to better reflect the post contents and what I currently think happened; this comment doesn’t represent my views on the current post title or my current estimates of what happened)
I believe there’s a chance that protest organisers understood their phrasing could potentially cause people to have an impression (OpenAI is working with the military) not informed by details (on cybersecurity and veteran suicide prevention) but kept the phrasing because they thought it suited their goals better.
I don’t expect them to have an active malicious intent (I don’t think they wanted to do something bad). But I think it’s likely enough they were acting deceptively. I consider the chance of them thinking it’s not “misleading” in a bad way and it’s alright to do if it suits the goals to be much higher than what I would be comfortable with. (And people who attended the protest told me that yeah, this is deceptive, after familiarising themselves with the details.)
The title of the post is chosen because I think that regardless of the above, the community (as a whole/as an entity/agent) locally expected to benefit from people having this impression, while knowing it to be a misled impression, and went on with the messaging. Even if individual actors did not take decisions they knew would create impressions they knew were different from what reality is, I think community as a whole can still be deceptive in the sense of having the ability to realise all that and prevent misleading messaging, but not having done so. I think the community should work on strengthening and maybe institutionalising this ability, with the goal of being able to prevent even actively deceptive messaging, where the authors might hope to achieve something good but violate deontology.
Sorry Mikhail, but this:
Is accusing someone in the community of deliberately lying, and you seem to equivocate on that in other comments. Even earlier in this thread you say to Holly that “To be clear, in the post, I’m not implying that you, personally, tried to deceive people.” But to me this clearly is you implying that quite obviously, even with caveats. To then go back and talk about how this refers to the community as a whole feels really off to me.
I know that I am very much a contextualiser instead of a decoupler[1] but using a term like ‘deception’ is not something that you can neatly carve out from its well-understood social meaning as referring to a person’s character and instead use it to talk about a social movement as an agent.
I’d very much suggest you heed Jason’s advice earlier in the thread.
At least in EA-space, I think I’m fairly average for the general population if not maybe more decoupling than average
The messaging wasn’t technically false; it was just misleading, while saying technically true things. I’m not sure why you’re using “lying” here.
I would guess you’d agree organisations can use deceptive messaging? I’m pretty sure communities can also do that, including with dynamics where a community is deceptive but all parts have some sort of deniability/intentionlessness.
I think it’d be sad to have to discuss the likelihood of specific people of being deceptive. It would be making their lives even worse. If people Google their names, they’re going to find this. And it’s not really going to help with the problem, so this is not what I want to focus on. I titled the post this way because the community acted deceptively, regardless of how deceptive it’s members were.
I’m saying what I think in the comments and in the post, while avoiding, to the possible extent, talking about my current views of specific people’s actions or revealing the messages/words sent/said to me in private by these people.
And I don’t at all understand why we both are exchanging comments focusing on the words (that I thought were pretty clear, that I ran just before publishing pass a bunch of people, including protest participants, who told me they agreed with what I wrote) instead of focusing on the problems raised in the post.