Thank you for this useful content and explaining your beliefs.
don’t follow Timnit closely, but I’m fairly unconvinced by much of what I think you’re referring to RE: “Timnit Gebru-style yelling / sneering”, and I don’t want to give the impression that my uncertainties are strongly influenced by this, or by AI-safety community pushback to those kinds of sneering.
My comment is claiming a dynamic that is upstream of, and produces the information environment you are in. This produces your “skepticism” or “uncertainty”. To expand on this, without this dynamic, the facts and truth would be clearer and you would not be uncertain or feel the need to update your beliefs in response to a forum post.
My comment is not implying you are influenced by “Gebru-style” content directly. It is sort of implying the opposite/orthogonal. The fact you felt it necessary to distance yourself from Gebru several times in your comment, essentially because a comment mentioned her name, makes this very point itself.
don’t really know what you are referring to RE: folks who share “the same skepticism” (but some more negative version), but I’d be hesitant to agree that I share these views that you are attributing to me, since I don’t know what their views are.
Yes, I affirm that “skepticism” or “uncertainty” are my words. (I think the nature of this “skepticism” is secondary to the main point in my comment and the fact you brought this up is symptomatic of the point I made).
At the same time, I think the rest of your comment suggests my beliefs/representation of you was fair (e.g. sometimes uncharitably seeing 80KH as a recruitment platform for “AI/LT” would be consistent with skepticism).
In some sense, my comment is not a direct reply to you (you are even mentioned in third person). I’m OK with this, or even find the resulting response desirable, and it may have been hard to achieve in any other way.
Here is a post by Scott Alexander which I think might be pointing to a similar phenomenon as what you are hinting at. Money quote:
Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Taken as a meme, it’s a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs.
From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.
Thank you for this useful content and explaining your beliefs.
My comment is claiming a dynamic that is upstream of, and produces the information environment you are in. This produces your “skepticism” or “uncertainty”. To expand on this, without this dynamic, the facts and truth would be clearer and you would not be uncertain or feel the need to update your beliefs in response to a forum post.
My comment is not implying you are influenced by “Gebru-style” content directly. It is sort of implying the opposite/orthogonal. The fact you felt it necessary to distance yourself from Gebru several times in your comment, essentially because a comment mentioned her name, makes this very point itself.
Yes, I affirm that “skepticism” or “uncertainty” are my words. (I think the nature of this “skepticism” is secondary to the main point in my comment and the fact you brought this up is symptomatic of the point I made).
At the same time, I think the rest of your comment suggests my beliefs/representation of you was fair (e.g. sometimes uncharitably seeing 80KH as a recruitment platform for “AI/LT” would be consistent with skepticism).
In some sense, my comment is not a direct reply to you (you are even mentioned in third person). I’m OK with this, or even find the resulting response desirable, and it may have been hard to achieve in any other way.
Here is a post by Scott Alexander which I think might be pointing to a similar phenomenon as what you are hinting at. Money quote: