A friend advised me to provide the context that I had spent maybe 6 hours helping Mikhail with his moratorium-related project (a website that I was going over for clarity as a native English speaker) and perhaps an additional 8 hours over the last few months answering questions about the direction I had taken with the protests. Mikhail had a number of objections which required a lot of labor on my part to understand to his satisfaction, and he usually did not accept my answers when I gave them but continued to argue with me, either straight up or by insisting I didn’t really understand his argument or was contradicting myself somehow.
After enough of this, I did not think it was worth my time to engage further (EDIT: on the general topic of this post, protest messaging for 2/12— we continued to be friends and talk about other things), and I told him that I made my decisions and didn’t need any more of his input a few weeks before the 2⁄12 protest. He may have had useful info that I didn’t get out of him, and that’s a pity because there are a few things that I would absolutely have done differently if I had realized at the time (such as removing language that implied OpenAI was being hypocritical that didn’t apply when I realized we were only talking about the usage policies changing but which didn’t register to me as needing to be updated when I corrected the press release) but I would make the same call again about how to spend my time.
I will not be replying to replies on this comment.
Huh. There are false claims in your comment, which is easily verifiable. I’m happy to share the messages that show that with anyone interested; please DM or email me. I saved the comment to the Web Archive.
I told him that I made my decisions and didn’t need any more of his input a few weeks before the 2⁄12 protest
This is not true. She didn’t tell me anything like that a few weeks before the protest.
he usually did not accept my answers when I gave them but continued to argue with me, either straight up or by insisting I didn’t really understand his argument or was contradicting myself somehow.
I couldn’t find any examples of before the protest, no matter how I interpret the messages we exchanged about her strategy etc.
The context:
We last spoke for a significant amount of time in October[1]. You mentioned you’d be down to do an LW dialogue.
After that, in November, you messaged me on Twitter, asking for the details of the OpenAI situation. I then messaged you on Christmas (nothing EA/AI related).
On January 31 (a few weeks before the protest), I shared my concerns about the messaging being potentially misleading. You asked for advice on how you should go about anticipating misunderstandings like that. You said that you won’t say anything technically false and asked what solutions I propose. Among more specific things, I mentioned that “It seems generally good to try to be maximally honest and non-deceptive”.
At or before this point, you didn’t tell me anything about “not needing more of my input”. And you didn’t tell me anything like “I made my decisions”.
On February 4th, I attended your EAG talk, and on February 5th, I messaged you that it was great and that I was glad you gave it.
Then, on February 6, you invited me to join your Twitter space (about this protest) and I got promoted to a speaker. I didn’t get a chance to share my thoughts about allying with people promoting locally invalid views, and I shared them publicly on Twitter and privately with you on Messenger, including a quote I was asked to not share publicly until an LW dialogue is up. We chatted a little bit about general goals and allying with people with different views. You told me, “You have a lot of opinions and I’d be happy to see you organize your own protests”. I replied, “Sure, I might if I think it’s useful:)” and after a message sharing my confusion regarding one of your previous messages, didn’t share any more “opinions”. This could be interpreted as indirectly telling me you didn’t need my input, but that was a week after I shared my concerns about the messaging being misleading, and you still didn’t tell me anything about having made your decisions.
A day before the protest, I shared a picture of a sign I wanted to bring to the protest, and asked “Hey, is it alright if I print and show up to the protest with something like this?”, because I wouldn’t want to attend the protest if you weren’t ok with the sign. You replied that it was ok, shared some thoughts, and told me that you liked the sentiment as it supports the overall impression that you want, so I brought the sign to the protest:
After the protest, I shared the draft of this post with you. After a short conversation, you told me lots of things and blocked me, and I felt like I should expect retaliation if I published the post.
Please tell me if I’m missing something. If I’m not, you’re either continuing to be inattentive to the facts, or you’re directly lying.
I’d be happy to share all of our message exchanges with interested third parties, such as CEA Community Health, or share them publicly, if you agree to that.
Before that, as I can tell from Google Docs edits and comments, you definitely spent more than an hour on the https://moratorium.ai text back in August; I’m thankful for that; I accepted four of your edits and found some of your feedback helpful. We’ve also had 4 calls, mostly about moratorium.ai and the technical problem (and my impression was that you found these calls helpful), and went on a walk in Berkeley, mostly discussing strategy. Some of what you told me during the walk was concerning.
A hypothesis you do not seem to consider is that she did make an attempt at communicating “I made my decision and do not need more of your input”, and that you did not understand this message.
This hypothesis seems more probable to me than her straightforwardly saying a false thing, as there seems to be multiple similar misunderstandings of the sort between you.
Another misunderstanding example:
he usually did not accept my answers when I gave them but continued to argue with me, either straight up or by insisting I didn’t really understand his argument or was contradicting myself somehow.
It seems to me that this quote points to another similar misunderstanding, and that it was this misunderstanding that lead to a breakdown in communication initially.
Please tell me if I’m missing something. If I’m not, you’re either continuing to be inattentive to the facts, or you’re directly lying.
I’d be happy to share all of our message exchanges with a third party, such as CEA Community Health, or share them publicly, if you agree to that.
You seem to be paying lip service to the “missing something” hypothesis, but framing this as an issue of someone deliberately lying is not cooperative with Holly in the world where you are in fact missing something.
Asking to share messages publicly or showing them to a third party seems to unnecessarily up the stakes. I’m not sure why you’re suggesting that.
I carefully looked through all of our messages (there weren’t too many) a couple of times, because that was pretty surprising and I considered it to be more likely that I don’t remember something than her saying something directly false. But there’s nothing like that and she’s, unfortunately, straightforwardly saying a false thing.
he usually did not accept my answers when I gave them but continued to argue with me, either straight up or by insisting I didn’t really understand his argument or was contradicting myself somehow.
This is also something I couldn’t find any examples of before the protest, no matter how I interpret the messages we have exchanged about her strategy etc.
I’m >99% sure that I’m not missing anything. Included it because it’s not a mathematical truth, and because adding “Are you sure? What am I missing, if you are?” is more polite than just saying “this is clearly false and we both know it and any third party can verify the falsehood; why are you saying that? Is there some other platform we exchanged messages on, that I somehow totally forgot about?”. It’s technically possible I’m just blind at something- I can imagine a conceivable universe where I’m wrong about this. But I’m confident she’s saying a straightforwardly false thing. I’d feel good about betting up to $20k at 99:1 odds on this.
Like, “missing something” isn’t a hypothesis with any probability mass, really, I’m including it because it is a part of my epistemic situation and seems nicer to include in the message.
Asking to share messages publicly or showing them to a third party seems to unnecessarily up the stakes. I’m not sure why you’re suggesting that
When someone is confidently saying false things about the contents of the messages we exchanged, it seems reasonable to suggest publishing them or having a third party look at them. I’m not sure how it’s “upping the stakes”. It’s a natural thing to do.
A friend advised me to provide the context that I had spent maybe 6 hours helping Mikhail with his moratorium-related project (a website that I was going over for clarity as a native English speaker) and perhaps an additional 8 hours over the last few months answering questions about the direction I had taken with the protests. Mikhail had a number of objections which required a lot of labor on my part to understand to his satisfaction, and he usually did not accept my answers when I gave them but continued to argue with me, either straight up or by insisting I didn’t really understand his argument or was contradicting myself somehow.
After enough of this, I did not think it was worth my time to engage further (EDIT: on the general topic of this post, protest messaging for 2/12— we continued to be friends and talk about other things), and I told him that I made my decisions and didn’t need any more of his input a few weeks before the 2⁄12 protest. He may have had useful info that I didn’t get out of him, and that’s a pity because there are a few things that I would absolutely have done differently if I had realized at the time (such as removing language that implied OpenAI was being hypocritical that didn’t apply when I realized we were only talking about the usage policies changing but which didn’t register to me as needing to be updated when I corrected the press release) but I would make the same call again about how to spend my time.
I will not be replying to replies on this comment.
Huh. There are false claims in your comment, which is easily verifiable. I’m happy to share the messages that show that with anyone interested; please DM or email me. I saved the comment to the Web Archive.
This is not true. She didn’t tell me anything like that a few weeks before the protest.
I couldn’t find any examples of before the protest, no matter how I interpret the messages we exchanged about her strategy etc.
The context:
We last spoke for a significant amount of time in October[1]. You mentioned you’d be down to do an LW dialogue.
After that, in November, you messaged me on Twitter, asking for the details of the OpenAI situation. I then messaged you on Christmas (nothing EA/AI related).
On January 31 (a few weeks before the protest), I shared my concerns about the messaging being potentially misleading. You asked for advice on how you should go about anticipating misunderstandings like that. You said that you won’t say anything technically false and asked what solutions I propose. Among more specific things, I mentioned that “It seems generally good to try to be maximally honest and non-deceptive”.
At or before this point, you didn’t tell me anything about “not needing more of my input”. And you didn’t tell me anything like “I made my decisions”.
On February 4th, I attended your EAG talk, and on February 5th, I messaged you that it was great and that I was glad you gave it.
Then, on February 6, you invited me to join your Twitter space (about this protest) and I got promoted to a speaker. I didn’t get a chance to share my thoughts about allying with people promoting locally invalid views, and I shared them publicly on Twitter and privately with you on Messenger, including a quote I was asked to not share publicly until an LW dialogue is up. We chatted a little bit about general goals and allying with people with different views. You told me, “You have a lot of opinions and I’d be happy to see you organize your own protests”. I replied, “Sure, I might if I think it’s useful:)” and after a message sharing my confusion regarding one of your previous messages, didn’t share any more “opinions”. This could be interpreted as indirectly telling me you didn’t need my input, but that was a week after I shared my concerns about the messaging being misleading, and you still didn’t tell me anything about having made your decisions.
A day before the protest, I shared a picture of a sign I wanted to bring to the protest, and asked “Hey, is it alright if I print and show up to the protest with something like this?”, because I wouldn’t want to attend the protest if you weren’t ok with the sign. You replied that it was ok, shared some thoughts, and told me that you liked the sentiment as it supports the overall impression that you want, so I brought the sign to the protest:
After the protest, I shared the draft of this post with you. After a short conversation, you told me lots of things and blocked me, and I felt like I should expect retaliation if I published the post.
Please tell me if I’m missing something. If I’m not, you’re either continuing to be inattentive to the facts, or you’re directly lying.
I’d be happy to share all of our message exchanges with interested third parties, such as CEA Community Health, or share them publicly, if you agree to that.
Before that, as I can tell from Google Docs edits and comments, you definitely spent more than an hour on the https://moratorium.ai text back in August; I’m thankful for that; I accepted four of your edits and found some of your feedback helpful. We’ve also had 4 calls, mostly about moratorium.ai and the technical problem (and my impression was that you found these calls helpful), and went on a walk in Berkeley, mostly discussing strategy. Some of what you told me during the walk was concerning.
It seems to me that you’re not maintaining at least two hypotheses consistent with the data.
A hypothesis you do not seem to consider is that she did make an attempt at communicating “I made my decision and do not need more of your input”, and that you did not understand this message.
This hypothesis seems more probable to me than her straightforwardly saying a false thing, as there seems to be multiple similar misunderstandings of the sort between you.
Another misunderstanding example:
It seems to me that this quote points to another similar misunderstanding, and that it was this misunderstanding that lead to a breakdown in communication initially.
You seem to be paying lip service to the “missing something” hypothesis, but framing this as an issue of someone deliberately lying is not cooperative with Holly in the world where you are in fact missing something.
Asking to share messages publicly or showing them to a third party seems to unnecessarily up the stakes. I’m not sure why you’re suggesting that.
I carefully looked through all of our messages (there weren’t too many) a couple of times, because that was pretty surprising and I considered it to be more likely that I don’t remember something than her saying something directly false. But there’s nothing like that and she’s, unfortunately, straightforwardly saying a false thing.
This is also something I couldn’t find any examples of before the protest, no matter how I interpret the messages we have exchanged about her strategy etc.
I’m >99% sure that I’m not missing anything. Included it because it’s not a mathematical truth, and because adding “Are you sure? What am I missing, if you are?” is more polite than just saying “this is clearly false and we both know it and any third party can verify the falsehood; why are you saying that? Is there some other platform we exchanged messages on, that I somehow totally forgot about?”. It’s technically possible I’m just blind at something- I can imagine a conceivable universe where I’m wrong about this. But I’m confident she’s saying a straightforwardly false thing. I’d feel good about betting up to $20k at 99:1 odds on this.
Like, “missing something” isn’t a hypothesis with any probability mass, really, I’m including it because it is a part of my epistemic situation and seems nicer to include in the message.
When someone is confidently saying false things about the contents of the messages we exchanged, it seems reasonable to suggest publishing them or having a third party look at them. I’m not sure how it’s “upping the stakes”. It’s a natural thing to do.