I think that even if you buy that, Will’s behavior is still alarming, just in a different way. Why exactly should we, as a community, think of ourselves as being fitted to steer public opinion? Weren’t we just meant to be experts on charity, rather than everything under the sun? (Not to mention that Musk is not the person I would choose to collaborate with on that, but that’s for another day.) Will complains about Sam’s hubris, but what could be more hubristic than that?
I remember feeling nervous when I first started working in EA that (otherwise very sober seeming) people were taking it as read that we were somehow important to the future of the whole world. That just seemed crazy and ominous to me. (And quite different from when I first became a GWWC member in 2012, where it was all just “give to good charities, be humble epistemically”; which to be clear was compatible with taking weird ideas seriously and I think people were doing that; I recall long conversations about Pascal’s Wager, people already talking about AI risk etc.).
Trying to steer opinion in this way also just seems very manipulative to me. (I probably have unusually strong feelings about this because I’m autistic, but I think the autistic attitude is just better on average here.) In line with Will talking internally about “controlling the narrative” around EA and FTX https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1712282768091042029 Some people will probably just shrug and say this is just PR, and I get that there is massive hindsight bias here, but reading this made me genuinely cringe.
Yeah, I think just buying Twitter to steer the narrative seems quite bad. But like, I have spent a large fraction of my career trying to think of mechanism design for discussion and social media platforms and so my relation to Twitter is I think a pretty healthy “I think I see lots of ways in which you could make this platform much more sanity-promoting” in a way that isn’t about just spreading my memes and ideologies.
Will has somewhat less of that background, and I think would have less justified confidence in his ability to actually make the platform better from a general sanity perspective, though still seems pretty plausible to me he saw or sees genuine ways to make the platform better for humanity.
I must say that, given that I know from prior discussion on here that you are not Will’s biggest fan, your attempt to be fair here is quite admirable. There should maybe be an “integrity” react button?
I think that even if you buy that, Will’s behavior is still alarming, just in a different way. Why exactly should we, as a community, think of ourselves as being fitted to steer public opinion? Weren’t we just meant to be experts on charity, rather than everything under the sun? (Not to mention that Musk is not the person I would choose to collaborate with on that, but that’s for another day.) Will complains about Sam’s hubris, but what could be more hubristic than that?
I remember feeling nervous when I first started working in EA that (otherwise very sober seeming) people were taking it as read that we were somehow important to the future of the whole world. That just seemed crazy and ominous to me. (And quite different from when I first became a GWWC member in 2012, where it was all just “give to good charities, be humble epistemically”; which to be clear was compatible with taking weird ideas seriously and I think people were doing that; I recall long conversations about Pascal’s Wager, people already talking about AI risk etc.).
Trying to steer opinion in this way also just seems very manipulative to me. (I probably have unusually strong feelings about this because I’m autistic, but I think the autistic attitude is just better on average here.) In line with Will talking internally about “controlling the narrative” around EA and FTX https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1712282768091042029 Some people will probably just shrug and say this is just PR, and I get that there is massive hindsight bias here, but reading this made me genuinely cringe.
Yeah, I think just buying Twitter to steer the narrative seems quite bad. But like, I have spent a large fraction of my career trying to think of mechanism design for discussion and social media platforms and so my relation to Twitter is I think a pretty healthy “I think I see lots of ways in which you could make this platform much more sanity-promoting” in a way that isn’t about just spreading my memes and ideologies.
Will has somewhat less of that background, and I think would have less justified confidence in his ability to actually make the platform better from a general sanity perspective, though still seems pretty plausible to me he saw or sees genuine ways to make the platform better for humanity.
I must say that, given that I know from prior discussion on here that you are not Will’s biggest fan, your attempt to be fair here is quite admirable. There should maybe be an “integrity” react button?