Telling people you’re the responsible adult, or the only one who notices things, still means telling them you’re smarter than them and they should just defer to you.
Those are four very different claims. In general, I think it’s bad to collapse all (real or claimed) differences in ability into a single status hierarchy, for the reasons stated in Inadequate Equilibria.
Eliezer is claiming that other people are not taking the problem sufficiently seriously, claiming ownership of it, trying to form their own detailed models of the full problem, and applying enough rigor and clarity to make real progress on the problem.
He is specifically not saying “just defer to me”, and in fact is saying that he and everyone else is going to die if people rely on deference here. A core claim in AGI Ruin is that we need more people with “not the ability to read this document and nod along with it, but the ability to spontaneously write it from scratch without anybody else prompting you”.
Deferring to Eliezer means that Eliezer is the bottleneck on humanity solving the alignment problem; which means we die. The thing Eliezer claims we need is a larger set of people who arrive at true, deep, novel insights about the problem on their own —without Eliezer even mentioning the insights, much less spending a ton of time trying to persuade anyone of them—and writing them up.
It’s true that Eliezer endorses his current stated beliefs; this goes without saying, or he obviously wouldn’t have written them down. It doesn’t mean that he thinks humanity has any path to survival via deferring to him, or that he thinks he has figured out enough of the core problems (or ever could conceivably could do so, on his own) to give humanity a significant chance of surviving. Quoting AGI Ruin:
It’s guaranteed that some of my analysis is mistaken, though not necessarily in a hopeful direction. The ability to do new basic work noticing and fixing those flaws is the same ability as the ability to write this document before I published it[.]
The end of the “death with dignity” post is also alluding to Eliezer’s view that it’s pretty useless to figure out what’s true merely via deferring to Eliezer.
Those are four very different claims. In general, I think it’s bad to collapse all (real or claimed) differences in ability into a single status hierarchy, for the reasons stated in Inadequate Equilibria.
Eliezer is claiming that other people are not taking the problem sufficiently seriously, claiming ownership of it, trying to form their own detailed models of the full problem, and applying enough rigor and clarity to make real progress on the problem.
He is specifically not saying “just defer to me”, and in fact is saying that he and everyone else is going to die if people rely on deference here. A core claim in AGI Ruin is that we need more people with “not the ability to read this document and nod along with it, but the ability to spontaneously write it from scratch without anybody else prompting you”.
Deferring to Eliezer means that Eliezer is the bottleneck on humanity solving the alignment problem; which means we die. The thing Eliezer claims we need is a larger set of people who arrive at true, deep, novel insights about the problem on their own —without Eliezer even mentioning the insights, much less spending a ton of time trying to persuade anyone of them—and writing them up.
It’s true that Eliezer endorses his current stated beliefs; this goes without saying, or he obviously wouldn’t have written them down. It doesn’t mean that he thinks humanity has any path to survival via deferring to him, or that he thinks he has figured out enough of the core problems (or ever could conceivably could do so, on his own) to give humanity a significant chance of surviving. Quoting AGI Ruin:
The end of the “death with dignity” post is also alluding to Eliezer’s view that it’s pretty useless to figure out what’s true merely via deferring to Eliezer.
Thanks, those are some good counterpoints.