Great reply! In fact, I think that the speech you wrote for the police reformer is probably the best way to advance the police corruption cause in that situation, with one change: they should be very clear that they don’t think that demons exist.
I think there is an aspect where the AI risk skeptics don’t want to be too closely associated with ideas they think are wrong: because if the AI x-riskers are proven to be wrong, they don’t want to go down with the ship. IE: if another AI winter hits, or an AGI is built that shows no sign of killing anyone, then everyone who jumped on the x-risk train might look like fools, and they don’t want to look like fools (for both personal and cause related reasons).
I think there definitely is an aspect of “AI x-risk people suck”, but I worry that casting it as a team sports thing makes it seem overly irrational. When Timnit Gebru says that AI x-risk people suck, she’s saying they are net negative: they do far more harm in promoting the incorrect x-risk idea and the actions they take (for example, helping start openAI) than they do incidental good in raising AI ethics awareness. You might think this belief is wrong, but the resulting actions make perfect sense, given this belief.
To modify the Gaia example, it’d be like if the Gaia people were trying to block all renewable energy building because it interrupted the chakras of the earth, and also loudly announcing that an earth spirit will become visible to the whole planet in 5 years. Yes, they are objectively increasing attention to your actual cause, but debunking them is still the correct move here. They’ve moved from on your team to not on your team because of objective object level disagreements over what beliefs are true and what actions should be taken.
Great reply! In fact, I think that the speech you wrote for the police reformer is probably the best way to advance the police corruption cause in that situation, with one change: they should be very clear that they don’t think that demons exist.
I think there is an aspect where the AI risk skeptics don’t want to be too closely associated with ideas they think are wrong: because if the AI x-riskers are proven to be wrong, they don’t want to go down with the ship. IE: if another AI winter hits, or an AGI is built that shows no sign of killing anyone, then everyone who jumped on the x-risk train might look like fools, and they don’t want to look like fools (for both personal and cause related reasons).
I think there definitely is an aspect of “AI x-risk people suck”, but I worry that casting it as a team sports thing makes it seem overly irrational. When Timnit Gebru says that AI x-risk people suck, she’s saying they are net negative: they do far more harm in promoting the incorrect x-risk idea and the actions they take (for example, helping start openAI) than they do incidental good in raising AI ethics awareness. You might think this belief is wrong, but the resulting actions make perfect sense, given this belief.
To modify the Gaia example, it’d be like if the Gaia people were trying to block all renewable energy building because it interrupted the chakras of the earth, and also loudly announcing that an earth spirit will become visible to the whole planet in 5 years. Yes, they are objectively increasing attention to your actual cause, but debunking them is still the correct move here. They’ve moved from on your team to not on your team because of objective object level disagreements over what beliefs are true and what actions should be taken.