Then the post gives some evidence that, at each stage of his career, Yudkowsky has made a dramatic, seemingly overconfident prediction about technological timelines and risks—and at least hasn’t obviously internalised lessons from these apparent mistakes.
I am confused about you bringing in the claim of “at each stage of his career”, given that the only two examples you cited that seemed to provide much evidence here were from the same (and very early) stage of his career. Of course, you might have other points of evidence that point in this direction, but I did want to provide some additional pushback on the “at each stage of his career” point, which I think you didn’t really provide evidence for.
I do think finding evidence for each stage of his career would of course be time-consuming, and I understand that you didn’t really want to go through all of that, but it seemed good to point out explicitly.
Ultimately, I don’t buy the comparison. I think it’s really out-of-distribution for someone in their late teens and early twenties to pro-actively form the view that an emerging technology is likely to kill everyone within a decade, found an organization and devote years of their professional life to address the risk, and talk about how they’re the only person alive who can stop it.
FWIW, indeed in my teens I basically did dedicate a good chunk of my time and effort towards privacy efforts out of a concern for US and UK-based surveillance-state concerns. I was in high-school, so making it my full-time efforts was a bit hard, though I did help found a hackerspace in my hometown that had a lot of privacy concerns baked into the culture, and I did write a good number of essays on this. I think the key difference between me and Eliezer here is more the fact that Eliezer was home-schooled and had experience doing things on his own, and not some kind of other fact about his relationship to the ideas being very different.
It’s plausible you should update similarly on me, which I think isn’t totally insane (I do think I might have, as Luke put it, the “taking ideas seriously gene”, which I would also associate with taking other ideas to their extremes, like religious beliefs).
I appreciate this update!
I am confused about you bringing in the claim of “at each stage of his career”, given that the only two examples you cited that seemed to provide much evidence here were from the same (and very early) stage of his career. Of course, you might have other points of evidence that point in this direction, but I did want to provide some additional pushback on the “at each stage of his career” point, which I think you didn’t really provide evidence for.
I do think finding evidence for each stage of his career would of course be time-consuming, and I understand that you didn’t really want to go through all of that, but it seemed good to point out explicitly.
FWIW, indeed in my teens I basically did dedicate a good chunk of my time and effort towards privacy efforts out of a concern for US and UK-based surveillance-state concerns. I was in high-school, so making it my full-time efforts was a bit hard, though I did help found a hackerspace in my hometown that had a lot of privacy concerns baked into the culture, and I did write a good number of essays on this. I think the key difference between me and Eliezer here is more the fact that Eliezer was home-schooled and had experience doing things on his own, and not some kind of other fact about his relationship to the ideas being very different.
It’s plausible you should update similarly on me, which I think isn’t totally insane (I do think I might have, as Luke put it, the “taking ideas seriously gene”, which I would also associate with taking other ideas to their extremes, like religious beliefs).