Yes, agreed with the substance of your points (I try to be more diplomatic about this, but it roughly lines up with my impressions).
If the objective is to persuade this community to pay attention to your work, then even if in some platonic sense their bar is ‘too high’ is neither here nor there: you still have to meet it else they will keep ignoring you.
Rather than helping encourage reasonable evaluations in the community (no isolated demands for rigour for judging long-term safe AGI impossibility formal reasoning compared to intuitions about AGI safety being possible in principle), this is saying that a possibly unreasonable status quo is not going to be changed, so therefore people should just adjust to the status quo if they want to make any headway.
The issue here is that the inferential distance is already large enough as it is, and in most one-on-ones I don’t get further than discussing basic premises before my interlocutor side-tracks or cuts off the conversation. I was naive 11 months ago to believe that many people would actually just dig into the reasoning steps with us, if we found a way to translate them nearer to Alignment Forum speak to be easier to comprehend and follow step-by-step.
In practice, I do think it’s correct that we need to work with the community as it is. It’s on us to find ways to encourage people to reflect on their premises and to detail and discuss the formal reasoning from there.
Yes, agreed with the substance of your points (I try to be more diplomatic about this, but it roughly lines up with my impressions).
Rather than helping encourage reasonable evaluations in the community (no isolated demands for rigour for judging long-term safe AGI impossibility formal reasoning compared to intuitions about AGI safety being possible in principle), this is saying that a possibly unreasonable status quo is not going to be changed, so therefore people should just adjust to the status quo if they want to make any headway.
The issue here is that the inferential distance is already large enough as it is, and in most one-on-ones I don’t get further than discussing basic premises before my interlocutor side-tracks or cuts off the conversation. I was naive 11 months ago to believe that many people would actually just dig into the reasoning steps with us, if we found a way to translate them nearer to Alignment Forum speak to be easier to comprehend and follow step-by-step.
In practice, I do think it’s correct that we need to work with the community as it is. It’s on us to find ways to encourage people to reflect on their premises and to detail and discuss the formal reasoning from there.
Also thinking of doing an explanatory talk about this!
Yesterday, I roughly sketched out the “stepping stones” I could talk about to explain the arguments: