I do think it’s more about whether you’re doing things in such a way that if they knew why you were doing them, they’d mostly not be bothered (ie passing the red face test). But that doesn’t really solve the problem that digital sentience is a weird reason to do a lot of things, and there are lots of things I endorse it being inappropriate to be too explicit about.
Of course this is a spectrum, and we shouldn’t put up a public website listing all our beliefs including the most controversial ones or something like that (no one in EA is very close to this extreme). But the implicit jump from “some things shouldn’t be explicit” to “digital sentience might weird some people out so there’s a decent chance we shouldn’t be that explicit about it” seems very non-obvious to me, given how central it is to a lot of longtermist’s worldviews and honestly I think it wouldn’t turn off many of the most promising people (in the long run; in the short run, it might get an initial “huh??” reaction).
Oh, sorry, those were two different thoughts. “digital sentience is a weird reason to do a lot of things” is one thing, where it’s not most people’s crux and so maybe not the first thing you say, but agree, should definitely come up, and separately, “there are lots of things I endorse it being inappropriate to be too explicit about”, like the granularity of assessment you might be making of a person at any given time (though possibly more transparency about the fact that you’re being assessed in a bunch of contexts would be very good!)
Of course this is a spectrum, and we shouldn’t put up a public website listing all our beliefs including the most controversial ones or something like that (no one in EA is very close to this extreme). But the implicit jump from “some things shouldn’t be explicit” to “digital sentience might weird some people out so there’s a decent chance we shouldn’t be that explicit about it” seems very non-obvious to me, given how central it is to a lot of longtermist’s worldviews and honestly I think it wouldn’t turn off many of the most promising people (in the long run; in the short run, it might get an initial “huh??” reaction).
Oh, sorry, those were two different thoughts. “digital sentience is a weird reason to do a lot of things” is one thing, where it’s not most people’s crux and so maybe not the first thing you say, but agree, should definitely come up, and separately, “there are lots of things I endorse it being inappropriate to be too explicit about”, like the granularity of assessment you might be making of a person at any given time (though possibly more transparency about the fact that you’re being assessed in a bunch of contexts would be very good!)