“Yep I get that this argument is only one consideration, but my point extends to “trying less hard” as well I think.” I’m not sure I understand what you mean, could you explain it more?
”Something something marketplace of ideas?” Yeah, this is an empirical question—theoretically, we might see better arguments rise in status and influence people more, and of course to some extent we do (e.g. AI risk rising in status over the last 10 years). But there are other factors influencing the status of ideas too, like some kind of general action-bias / power-seeking-bias. Concretely, I feel that most of the bullet points in the “uncertainty” section of the post are underrepresented in the discourse—curious if you disagree.
Also, one more point on the deferral thing—one way in which I think I’m weird is that I would genuinely raise my esteem of someone (on a gut-level) if they said “I’m hopelessly biased on this topic, I can’t think about it, don’t listen to me”. Unfortunately, you never see this. I would really like to see that more. E.g. if someone who tries extremely hard said “I can’t really clearly think about what I’m doing because I’m working so hard, so be careful about listening to me” it would be very beautiful to me. Poetically speaking, it would be… accepting that they are a human weapon, forged for a purpose, impaired by that sacrifice, baring it for the world to see. There would be a slight feeling of heartbreak and love for them in me, and I might very well value them more than before. As I argue in the “Epistemic distortion” section, there’s at least to some extent a deep tradeoff between doing and thinking—so admitting that they are trading off against thinking, crippling their mind on a deep level, could make people respect them more by showing how much they are sacrificing for the “doing” status hierarchy. It could be heroic. That’s just a fantasy I have about how things could work.
“Yep I get that this argument is only one consideration, but my point extends to “trying less hard” as well I think.” I’m not sure I understand what you mean, could you explain it more?
”Something something marketplace of ideas?”
Yeah, this is an empirical question—theoretically, we might see better arguments rise in status and influence people more, and of course to some extent we do (e.g. AI risk rising in status over the last 10 years). But there are other factors influencing the status of ideas too, like some kind of general action-bias / power-seeking-bias. Concretely, I feel that most of the bullet points in the “uncertainty” section of the post are underrepresented in the discourse—curious if you disagree.
Also, one more point on the deferral thing—one way in which I think I’m weird is that I would genuinely raise my esteem of someone (on a gut-level) if they said “I’m hopelessly biased on this topic, I can’t think about it, don’t listen to me”. Unfortunately, you never see this. I would really like to see that more.
E.g. if someone who tries extremely hard said “I can’t really clearly think about what I’m doing because I’m working so hard, so be careful about listening to me” it would be very beautiful to me. Poetically speaking, it would be… accepting that they are a human weapon, forged for a purpose, impaired by that sacrifice, baring it for the world to see. There would be a slight feeling of heartbreak and love for them in me, and I might very well value them more than before. As I argue in the “Epistemic distortion” section, there’s at least to some extent a deep tradeoff between doing and thinking—so admitting that they are trading off against thinking, crippling their mind on a deep level, could make people respect them more by showing how much they are sacrificing for the “doing” status hierarchy. It could be heroic.
That’s just a fantasy I have about how things could work.