Call me a hater, and believe me, I am, but maybe someone who went to university at 16 and clearly spent most of their time immersed in books is not the most socially developed.
Maybe after they are implicated in a huge scandal that destroyed our movement’s reputation we should gently nudge them to not go on popular podcasts and talk fantastically and almost giddily about how world war 3 is just around the corner. Especially when they are working in a financialcapacity in which they would benefit from said war.
Many of the people we have let be in charge of our movement and speak on behalf of it don’t know the first thing about optics or leadership or politics. I don’t think Elizier Yudowsky could win a middle school class president race with a million dollars.
I know your point was specifically tailored toward optics and thinking carefully about what we say when we have a large platform, but I think looking back and forward bad optics and a lack of real politik messaging are pretty obvious failure modes of a movement filled with chronically online young males who worship intelligence and research output above all else. I’m not trying to sh*t on Leopold and I don’t claim I was out here beating a drum about the risks of these specific papers but yea I do think this is one symptom of a larger problem. I can barely think of anyone high up (publicly) in this movement who has risen via organizing.
(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”.
The thing about Yudkowsky is that, yes, on the one hand, every time I read him, I think he surely must be coming across as super-weird and dodgy to “normal” people. But on the other hand, actually, it seems like he HAS done really well in getting people to take his ideas seriously? Sam Altman was trolling Yudkowsky on twitter a while back about how many of the people running/founding AGI labs had been inspired to do so by his work. He got invited to write on AI governance for TIME despite having no formal qualifications or significant scientific achievements whatsoever. I think if we actually look at his track record, he has done pretty well at convincing influential people to adopt what were once extremely fringe views, whilst also succeeding in being seen by the wider world as one of the most important proponents of those views, despite an almost complete lack of mainstream, legible credentials.
Hmm, I hear what you are saying but that could easily be attributed to some mix of
(1) he has really good/convincing ideas
(2) he seems to be a a public representative for the EA/LW community for a journalist on the outside.
And I’m responding to someone saying that we are in “phase 3”—that is to say people in the public are listening to us—so I guess I’m not extremely concerned about him not being able to draw attention or convince people. I’m more just generally worried that people like him are not who we should be promoting to positions of power, even if those are de jure positions.
Yeah, I’m not a Yudkowsky fan. But I think the fact that he mostly hasn’t been a PR disaster is striking, surprising and not much remarked upon, including by people who are big fans.
I guess in thinking about this I realize it’s so hard to even know if someone is a “PR disaster” that I probably have just been confirming my biases. What makes you say that he hasn’t been?
Just the stuff I already said about the success he seems to have had. It is also true that many people hate him and think he’s ridiculous, but I think that makes him polarizing rather than disastrous. I suppose you could phrase it as “he was a disaster in some ways but a success in others” if you want to.
Call me a hater, and believe me, I am, but maybe someone who went to university at 16 and clearly spent most of their time immersed in books is not the most socially developed.
Maybe after they are implicated in a huge scandal that destroyed our movement’s reputation we should gently nudge them to not go on popular podcasts and talk fantastically and almost giddily about how world war 3 is just around the corner. Especially when they are working in a financial capacity in which they would benefit from said war.
Many of the people we have let be in charge of our movement and speak on behalf of it don’t know the first thing about optics or leadership or politics. I don’t think Elizier Yudowsky could win a middle school class president race with a million dollars.
I know your point was specifically tailored toward optics and thinking carefully about what we say when we have a large platform, but I think looking back and forward bad optics and a lack of real politik messaging are pretty obvious failure modes of a movement filled with chronically online young males who worship intelligence and research output above all else. I’m not trying to sh*t on Leopold and I don’t claim I was out here beating a drum about the risks of these specific papers but yea I do think this is one symptom of a larger problem. I can barely think of anyone high up (publicly) in this movement who has risen via organizing.
(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”.
The thing about Yudkowsky is that, yes, on the one hand, every time I read him, I think he surely must be coming across as super-weird and dodgy to “normal” people. But on the other hand, actually, it seems like he HAS done really well in getting people to take his ideas seriously? Sam Altman was trolling Yudkowsky on twitter a while back about how many of the people running/founding AGI labs had been inspired to do so by his work. He got invited to write on AI governance for TIME despite having no formal qualifications or significant scientific achievements whatsoever. I think if we actually look at his track record, he has done pretty well at convincing influential people to adopt what were once extremely fringe views, whilst also succeeding in being seen by the wider world as one of the most important proponents of those views, despite an almost complete lack of mainstream, legible credentials.
Hmm, I hear what you are saying but that could easily be attributed to some mix of
(1) he has really good/convincing ideas
(2) he seems to be a a public representative for the EA/LW community for a journalist on the outside.
And I’m responding to someone saying that we are in “phase 3”—that is to say people in the public are listening to us—so I guess I’m not extremely concerned about him not being able to draw attention or convince people. I’m more just generally worried that people like him are not who we should be promoting to positions of power, even if those are de jure positions.
Yeah, I’m not a Yudkowsky fan. But I think the fact that he mostly hasn’t been a PR disaster is striking, surprising and not much remarked upon, including by people who are big fans.
I guess in thinking about this I realize it’s so hard to even know if someone is a “PR disaster” that I probably have just been confirming my biases. What makes you say that he hasn’t been?
Just the stuff I already said about the success he seems to have had. It is also true that many people hate him and think he’s ridiculous, but I think that makes him polarizing rather than disastrous. I suppose you could phrase it as “he was a disaster in some ways but a success in others” if you want to.