I apologize for phrasing my comment in a way that made you feel like that. I certainly didn’t mean to insinuate that rationalists lack “agency and ability to think critically”—I actually think rationalists are better at this than almost any other group! I identify as a rationalist myself, have read much of the sequences, and have been influenced on many subjects by Eliezer’s writings.
I think your critique that my writing gave the impression that my claims were all self-evident is quite fair. Even I don’t believe that. Please allow me to enumerate my specific claims and their justifications:
Caring about animal welfare is important (99% confidence): Here’s the justification I wrote to niplav. Note that this confidence is greater than my confidence that animal suffering is real. This is because I think moral uncertainty means caring about animal welfare is still justified in most worlds where animals turn out not to suffer.
Rationalist culture is less animal-friendly than highly engaged EA culture (85% confidence): I think this claim is pretty evident, and it’s corroborated here by many disinterested parties.”
Eliezer’s views on animal welfare have had significant influence on views of animal welfare in rationalist culture” (75% confidence):
A fair critique is that sure, the sequences and HPMOR have had huge influence on rationalist culture, but the claim that Eliezer’s views in domains that have nothing do with rationality (like animal welfare) have had outsize influence on rationalist culture is much less clear.
My only pushback is the experience I’ve had engaging with rationalists and reading LessWrong, where I’ve just seen rationalists reflecting Eliezer’s views on many domains other than “rationality: A-Z” over and over again. This very much includes the view that animals lack consciousness. Sure, Eliezer isn’t the only influential EA/rationalist who believes this, and he didn’t originate that idea either. But I think that in the possible world where Eliezer was a staunch animal activist, rationalist discourse around animal welfare would look quite different.
Rationalist culture has significant influence on those who could steer future TAI (80% confidence):
NYT: “two of the world’s prominent A.I. labs — organizations that are tackling some of the tech industry’s most ambitious and potentially powerful projects — grew out of the Rationalist movement...Elon Musk — who also worried A.I. could destroy the world and met his partner, Grimes, because they shared an interest in a Rationalist thought experiment — founded OpenAI as a DeepMind competitor. Both labs hired from the Rationalist community.”
Sam Altman:”certainly [Eliezer] got many of us interested in AGI, helped deepmind get funded at a time when AGI was extremely outside the overton window, was critical in the decision to start openai, etc”.
On whether aligned TAI would create a utopia for humans and animals, I think the arguments for pessimism—especially about the prospects for animals—are serious enough that having TAI steerers care about animals is very important.
Thank you. I don’t have any strong objections to these claims, and I do think pessimism is justified. Though my guess is that a lot of people at places like OpenAI and DeepMind do care about animal welfare pretty strongly already. Separately, I think that it would be much better in expectation (for both humans and animals) if Eliezer’s views on pretty much every other topic were more influential, rather than less, inside those places.
My negative reaction to your initial comment was mainly due to the way critiques (such as this post) of Eliezer are often framed, in which the claims “Eliezer’s views are overly influential” and “Eliezer’s views are incorrect / harmful” are combined into one big attack. I don’t object to people making these claims in principle (though I think they’re both wrong, in many cases), but when they are combined it requires more effort to separate and refute.
(Your comment wasn’t a particularly bad example of this pattern, but it was short and crisp and I didn’t have any other major objections to it, so I chose to express the way it made me feel on the expectation that it would be more likely to be heard and understood compared to making the point in more heated disagreements.)
I apologize for phrasing my comment in a way that made you feel like that. I certainly didn’t mean to insinuate that rationalists lack “agency and ability to think critically”—I actually think rationalists are better at this than almost any other group! I identify as a rationalist myself, have read much of the sequences, and have been influenced on many subjects by Eliezer’s writings.
I think your critique that my writing gave the impression that my claims were all self-evident is quite fair. Even I don’t believe that. Please allow me to enumerate my specific claims and their justifications:
Caring about animal welfare is important (99% confidence): Here’s the justification I wrote to niplav. Note that this confidence is greater than my confidence that animal suffering is real. This is because I think moral uncertainty means caring about animal welfare is still justified in most worlds where animals turn out not to suffer.
Rationalist culture is less animal-friendly than highly engaged EA culture (85% confidence): I think this claim is pretty evident, and it’s corroborated here by many disinterested parties.”
Eliezer’s views on animal welfare have had significant influence on views of animal welfare in rationalist culture” (75% confidence):
A fair critique is that sure, the sequences and HPMOR have had huge influence on rationalist culture, but the claim that Eliezer’s views in domains that have nothing do with rationality (like animal welfare) have had outsize influence on rationalist culture is much less clear.
My only pushback is the experience I’ve had engaging with rationalists and reading LessWrong, where I’ve just seen rationalists reflecting Eliezer’s views on many domains other than “rationality: A-Z” over and over again. This very much includes the view that animals lack consciousness. Sure, Eliezer isn’t the only influential EA/rationalist who believes this, and he didn’t originate that idea either. But I think that in the possible world where Eliezer was a staunch animal activist, rationalist discourse around animal welfare would look quite different.
Rationalist culture has significant influence on those who could steer future TAI (80% confidence):
NYT: “two of the world’s prominent A.I. labs — organizations that are tackling some of the tech industry’s most ambitious and potentially powerful projects — grew out of the Rationalist movement...Elon Musk — who also worried A.I. could destroy the world and met his partner, Grimes, because they shared an interest in a Rationalist thought experiment — founded OpenAI as a DeepMind competitor. Both labs hired from the Rationalist community.”
Sam Altman:”certainly [Eliezer] got many of us interested in AGI, helped deepmind get funded at a time when AGI was extremely outside the overton window, was critical in the decision to start openai, etc”.
On whether aligned TAI would create a utopia for humans and animals, I think the arguments for pessimism—especially about the prospects for animals—are serious enough that having TAI steerers care about animals is very important.
Thank you. I don’t have any strong objections to these claims, and I do think pessimism is justified. Though my guess is that a lot of people at places like OpenAI and DeepMind do care about animal welfare pretty strongly already. Separately, I think that it would be much better in expectation (for both humans and animals) if Eliezer’s views on pretty much every other topic were more influential, rather than less, inside those places.
My negative reaction to your initial comment was mainly due to the way critiques (such as this post) of Eliezer are often framed, in which the claims “Eliezer’s views are overly influential” and “Eliezer’s views are incorrect / harmful” are combined into one big attack. I don’t object to people making these claims in principle (though I think they’re both wrong, in many cases), but when they are combined it requires more effort to separate and refute.
(Your comment wasn’t a particularly bad example of this pattern, but it was short and crisp and I didn’t have any other major objections to it, so I chose to express the way it made me feel on the expectation that it would be more likely to be heard and understood compared to making the point in more heated disagreements.)