(I think the issue with Leopold is somewhat precisely that he seems to be quite politically savvy in a way that seems likely to make him a deca-multi-millionaire and politically influental, possibly at the cost of all of humanity. I agree Eliezer is not the best presenter, but his error modes are clearly enormously different)
I don’t think I was claiming they have the exact same failure modes—do you want to point out where I did that? Rather they both have failure modes that I would expect to happen as a result of selecting them to be talking heads on the basis of wits and research output. Also I feel like you are implying Leopold is evil or something like that and I don’t agree but maybe I’m misinterpretting.
He seems like a smooth operator in some ways and certainly is quite different than Elizier. That being said I showed my dad (who has become an oddly good litmus test for a lot of this stuff for me as someone who is somewhat sympathethic to our movement but also a pretty normal 60 year old man in a completely different headspace) the Dwarkesh episode and he thought Leopold was very, very, very weird (and not because of his ideas). He kind of reminds me of Peter Thiel. I’ll completely admit I wasn’t especially clear in my points and that mostly reflects my own lack of clarity on the exact point I was trying to getting across.
I think I take back like 20% of what I said (basically to the extent I was making a very direct stab at what exactly that failure mode is) but mostly still stand by the original comment, which again I see as being approximately ~ “Selecting people to be the public figureheads of our movement on the basis wits and research output is likely to be bad for us”.
(I think the issue with Leopold is somewhat precisely that he seems to be quite politically savvy in a way that seems likely to make him a deca-multi-millionaire and politically influental, possibly at the cost of all of humanity. I agree Eliezer is not the best presenter, but his error modes are clearly enormously different)
I don’t think I was claiming they have the exact same failure modes—do you want to point out where I did that? Rather they both have failure modes that I would expect to happen as a result of selecting them to be talking heads on the basis of wits and research output. Also I feel like you are implying Leopold is evil or something like that and I don’t agree but maybe I’m misinterpretting.
He seems like a smooth operator in some ways and certainly is quite different than Elizier. That being said I showed my dad (who has become an oddly good litmus test for a lot of this stuff for me as someone who is somewhat sympathethic to our movement but also a pretty normal 60 year old man in a completely different headspace) the Dwarkesh episode and he thought Leopold was very, very, very weird (and not because of his ideas). He kind of reminds me of Peter Thiel. I’ll completely admit I wasn’t especially clear in my points and that mostly reflects my own lack of clarity on the exact point I was trying to getting across.
I think I take back like 20% of what I said (basically to the extent I was making a very direct stab at what exactly that failure mode is) but mostly still stand by the original comment, which again I see as being approximately ~ “Selecting people to be the public figureheads of our movement on the basis wits and research output is likely to be bad for us”.