Briefly, I think SI/MIRI would have mostly attracted criticism for being weird in various ways.
They’ve attracted criticism for more substantial reasons; many academics didn’t and still don’t take them seriously because they have an unusual point of view. And other people believe that they are horrible people who are in between neoreactionary racists and a Silicon Valley conspiracy to take people’s money. It’s easy to pick up on something being a little off-putting and then get carried down the spiral of looking for and finding other problems. The original and underlying reason people have been pissed about InIn this entire time is that they are aesthetically displeased by their content. “It comes across as spammy and promotional”. An obvious typical mind fallacy. If you can fall for that then you can fall for “Eliezer’s writing style is winding and confusing.”
it’s also possible that the EA movement excluding SI/MIRI at some point would have been a reasonable move in expectation.
Highly implausible.
AI safety is a large issue. MIRI has done great work and has itself benefited tremendously from its involvement. Besides that, there have been many benefits to EA for aligning with rationalists more generally.
Any policy for deciding who to kick out necessarily runs the risk of both false positives and false negatives, and pointing out that a particular policy would have caused some false positive or false negative in the past is not a strong argument against it in isolation.
Yes, but people are taking this case to be a true positive that proves the rule, which is no better.
Some of the criticisms I’ve read of MIRI are so nasty that I hesitate to rehash them all here for fear of changing the subject and side tracking the conversation. I’ll just say this:
MIRI has been accused of much worse stuff than this post is accusing Gleb of right now. Compared to that weird MIRI stuff, Gleb looks like a normal guy who is fumbling his way through marketing a startup. The weird stuff MIRI / Eliezer did is really bizarre. For just one example, there are places in The Sequences where Eliezer presented his particular beliefs as The Correct Beliefs. In the context of a marketing piece, that would be bad (albeit in a mundane way that we see often), but in the context of a document on how to think rationally, that’s more like… egregious blasphemy. It’s a good thing the guy counter-balanced whatever that behavior was with articles like “Screening Off Authority” and “Guardians of the Truth”.
Do some searches for web marketing advice sometime, and you’ll see that Gleb might have actually been following some kind of instructions in some of the cases listed above. Not the best instructions, mind you… but somebody’s serious attempt to persuade you that some pretty weird stuff is the right thing to do. This is not exactly a science… it’s not even psychology. We’re talking about marketing. For instance, paying Facebook to promote things can result in problems… yet this is recommended by a really big company, Facebook. :/
There are a few complaints against him that stand out as a WTF… (Then again, if you’re really scouring for problems, you’re probably going to find the sorts of super embarrassing mistakes people only make when they’re really exhausted or whatever. I don’t know what to make of every single one of these examples yet.)
Anyway, MIRI / Eliezer can’t claim stuff like “I was following some marketing instructions I read on the Internet somewhere.”, which, IMO, would explain a lot of this stuff that Gleb did—which is not to say I think copying him is an effective or ethical way of promoting things! The Eliezer stuff was, like self-contradictory enough that it was weird to the point of being original. It took me forever to figure that guy out. There were several years where I simply had no cogent opinion on him.
The stuff Gleb is doing is just so commonly bad. It’s not an excuse. I still want to see InIn shape up or ship out. I think EA can and should have higher standards than this. I have read and experienced a lot in the area of promoting things, and I know there are ways of persuading through making people think that don’t bias them or mislead them, but by getting them more in touch with reality. I think it takes a really well thought out person to accomplish that because seeing reality is only the first step… then, you need to know how to deal with it, and you need to encourage the person to do something constructive with the knowledge as well. Sometimes bare information can leave people feeling pretty cynical, and it’s not like we were all taught how to be creative and resourceful and lead ourselves in situations that are unexpectedly different from what we believed.
I really believe there are better ways to be memorable other than making claims about how much attention you’re getting. Providing questionable info of this type is certainly bad. The way I’m seeing it, wasting time on such uninspired attempts involves such a large quantity of lost potential that questionable info is almost silly by comparison. I feel like we’re worried about a guy who says he has the best lemonade stand ever, but what we should be worried about is why he hasn’t managed to move up to selling at the grocery store yet.
I can very clearly envision the difference between what Gleb has been doing, and specific awesome ways in which it is possible to promote rationality. I can’t condemn Gleb as some sort of bad guy when what he’s doing wrong betrays such deep ignorance about marketing. I feel like: surely, a true villain would have taken over the beverage aisle at the grocery store by now.
They’ve attracted criticism for more substantial reasons; many academics didn’t and still don’t take them seriously because they have an unusual point of view. And other people believe that they are horrible people who are in between neoreactionary racists and a Silicon Valley conspiracy to take people’s money. It’s easy to pick up on something being a little off-putting and then get carried down the spiral of looking for and finding other problems. The original and underlying reason people have been pissed about InIn this entire time is that they are aesthetically displeased by their content. “It comes across as spammy and promotional”. An obvious typical mind fallacy. If you can fall for that then you can fall for “Eliezer’s writing style is winding and confusing.”
Highly implausible.
AI safety is a large issue. MIRI has done great work and has itself benefited tremendously from its involvement. Besides that, there have been many benefits to EA for aligning with rationalists more generally.
Yes, but people are taking this case to be a true positive that proves the rule, which is no better.
Some of the criticisms I’ve read of MIRI are so nasty that I hesitate to rehash them all here for fear of changing the subject and side tracking the conversation. I’ll just say this:
MIRI has been accused of much worse stuff than this post is accusing Gleb of right now. Compared to that weird MIRI stuff, Gleb looks like a normal guy who is fumbling his way through marketing a startup. The weird stuff MIRI / Eliezer did is really bizarre. For just one example, there are places in The Sequences where Eliezer presented his particular beliefs as The Correct Beliefs. In the context of a marketing piece, that would be bad (albeit in a mundane way that we see often), but in the context of a document on how to think rationally, that’s more like… egregious blasphemy. It’s a good thing the guy counter-balanced whatever that behavior was with articles like “Screening Off Authority” and “Guardians of the Truth”.
Do some searches for web marketing advice sometime, and you’ll see that Gleb might have actually been following some kind of instructions in some of the cases listed above. Not the best instructions, mind you… but somebody’s serious attempt to persuade you that some pretty weird stuff is the right thing to do. This is not exactly a science… it’s not even psychology. We’re talking about marketing. For instance, paying Facebook to promote things can result in problems… yet this is recommended by a really big company, Facebook. :/
There are a few complaints against him that stand out as a WTF… (Then again, if you’re really scouring for problems, you’re probably going to find the sorts of super embarrassing mistakes people only make when they’re really exhausted or whatever. I don’t know what to make of every single one of these examples yet.)
Anyway, MIRI / Eliezer can’t claim stuff like “I was following some marketing instructions I read on the Internet somewhere.”, which, IMO, would explain a lot of this stuff that Gleb did—which is not to say I think copying him is an effective or ethical way of promoting things! The Eliezer stuff was, like self-contradictory enough that it was weird to the point of being original. It took me forever to figure that guy out. There were several years where I simply had no cogent opinion on him.
The stuff Gleb is doing is just so commonly bad. It’s not an excuse. I still want to see InIn shape up or ship out. I think EA can and should have higher standards than this. I have read and experienced a lot in the area of promoting things, and I know there are ways of persuading through making people think that don’t bias them or mislead them, but by getting them more in touch with reality. I think it takes a really well thought out person to accomplish that because seeing reality is only the first step… then, you need to know how to deal with it, and you need to encourage the person to do something constructive with the knowledge as well. Sometimes bare information can leave people feeling pretty cynical, and it’s not like we were all taught how to be creative and resourceful and lead ourselves in situations that are unexpectedly different from what we believed.
I really believe there are better ways to be memorable other than making claims about how much attention you’re getting. Providing questionable info of this type is certainly bad. The way I’m seeing it, wasting time on such uninspired attempts involves such a large quantity of lost potential that questionable info is almost silly by comparison. I feel like we’re worried about a guy who says he has the best lemonade stand ever, but what we should be worried about is why he hasn’t managed to move up to selling at the grocery store yet.
I can very clearly envision the difference between what Gleb has been doing, and specific awesome ways in which it is possible to promote rationality. I can’t condemn Gleb as some sort of bad guy when what he’s doing wrong betrays such deep ignorance about marketing. I feel like: surely, a true villain would have taken over the beverage aisle at the grocery store by now.