Matthew’s comment was on −1 just now. I’d like to encourage people not to vote his post into the negative. Even though I don’t find his defense at all persuasive, I still think it deserves to be heard.
What I perceive as a measured, academic disagreement
This isn’t merely an “academic disagreement” anymore. You aren’t just writing posts, you’ve actually created a startup. You’re doing things in the space.
As an example, it’s neither incoherent nor hypocritical to let philosophers argue “Maybe existence is negative, all things considered” whilst still cracking down on serial killers. The former is necessary for academic freedom, the latter is not.
The point of academic freedom is to ensure that the actions we take in the world are as well-informed as possible. It is not to create a world without any norms at all.
It appears that advocating for slowing AI development has become a “sacred” value… Such reactions frankly resemble the behavior of a cult
Honestly, this is such a lazy critique. Whenever anyone disagrees with a group, they can always dismiss them as a “cult” or “cult-adjacent”, but this doesn’t make it true.
I think Ozzie’s framing of cooperativeness is much more accurate. The unilateralist’s curse very much applies to differential technology development, so if the community wants to have an impact here, it can’t ignore the issue of “cowboys” messing things up by rowing in the opposite direction, especially when their reasoning seems poor. Any viable community, especially one attempting to drive change, needs to have a solution to this problem.
Having norms isn’t equivalent to being a cult. When Fair Trade started taking off, I shared some of my doubts with some people who were very committed to it. This went poorly. They weren’t open-minded at all, but I wouldn’t run around calling Fair Trade a cult or even cult adjacent. They were just… a regular group.
And if I had run around accusing them of essentially being a “cult” that would have reflected poorly on me rather than on them.
I have been publicly labeled a “sellout and traitor”… simply because I cofounded an AI startup
This is also a massive burning of the commons. It is valuable for forecasting/evals orgs to be able to hire people with a diversity of viewpoints in order to counter bias. It is valuable for folks to be able to share information freely with folks at such forecasting orgs without having to worry about them going off and doing something like this.
However, this only works if those less worried about AI risks who join such a collaboration don’t use the knowledge they gain to cash in on the AI boom in an acceleratory way. Doing so undermines the very point of such a project, namely, to try to make AI go well. Doing so is incredibly damaging to trust within the community.
I concede that there wasn’t a previous well-defined norm against this, but norms have to get started somehow. And this is how it happens, someone does something, people are like wtf and then, sometimes, a consensus forms that a norm is required.
Matthew’s comment was on −1 just now. I’d like to encourage people not to vote his post into the negative. Even though I don’t find his defense at all persuasive, I still think it deserves to be heard.
This isn’t merely an “academic disagreement” anymore. You aren’t just writing posts, you’ve actually created a startup. You’re doing things in the space.
As an example, it’s neither incoherent nor hypocritical to let philosophers argue “Maybe existence is negative, all things considered” whilst still cracking down on serial killers. The former is necessary for academic freedom, the latter is not.
The point of academic freedom is to ensure that the actions we take in the world are as well-informed as possible. It is not to create a world without any norms at all.
Honestly, this is such a lazy critique. Whenever anyone disagrees with a group, they can always dismiss them as a “cult” or “cult-adjacent”, but this doesn’t make it true.
I think Ozzie’s framing of cooperativeness is much more accurate. The unilateralist’s curse very much applies to differential technology development, so if the community wants to have an impact here, it can’t ignore the issue of “cowboys” messing things up by rowing in the opposite direction, especially when their reasoning seems poor. Any viable community, especially one attempting to drive change, needs to have a solution to this problem.
Having norms isn’t equivalent to being a cult. When Fair Trade started taking off, I shared some of my doubts with some people who were very committed to it. This went poorly. They weren’t open-minded at all, but I wouldn’t run around calling Fair Trade a cult or even cult adjacent. They were just… a regular group.
And if I had run around accusing them of essentially being a “cult” that would have reflected poorly on me rather than on them.
As I described in my previous comment, the issue is more subtle than this. It’s about the specific context:
I concede that there wasn’t a previous well-defined norm against this, but norms have to get started somehow. And this is how it happens, someone does something, people are like wtf and then, sometimes, a consensus forms that a norm is required.