This comment fills in more of the gaps I see that I didn’t get time to fill out above. It fleshes out more of the connection between the advice “be less weird” and “communicate reasoning over conclusions”.
Doing my best to be legible to the person I am talking to is, in practice, what I do to avoid coming across as weird/alienating.
there is a trade-off between contextualizing and getting to the final point
we could be in danger of never risking saying anything controversial so we do need to encourage people to still get to the bottom line after giving the context that makes it meaningful
right now, we seem to often state an insufficiently contextualized conclusion in a way that seems net negative to me
we cause bad impressions
we cause bad impressions while communicating points I see as less fundamentally important to communicate
communicating reasoning/our way of thinking seems more important than the bottom line without the reasoning
AI risk can often take more than a single conversation to contextualize well enough for it to move from a meaningless topic to an objectionable claim that can be discussed with scepticism but still some curiosity
I think we’re better off trying to get community builders to be more patient and jump the gun less on the alienating bottom line
The soundbite “be less weird” probably does move us in a direction I think is net positive
I suspect that this is what most community builders will lay the groundwork to more legibly support conclusions when given advice like “get to the point if you can, don’t beat around the bush, but don’t be weird and jump the gun and say something without the needed context for the person you are talking to to make sense of what you are saying”
I feel like making arguments about stuff that is true is a bit like sketching out a maths proof for a maths student. Each link in the chain is obvious if you do it well, at the level of the person with whom you are taking through the proof, but if you start with the final conclusion, they are completely lost.
You have to make sure they’re with you every step of the way because everyone gets stuck at a different step.
You get away with stating your conclusion without the proof in maths because there is a lot of trust that you can back up your claim (the worst thing that happens is the person you are talking to loses confidence in their ability to understand maths if you start with the conclusion before walking them through it at a pace they can follow).
We don’t have that trust with newcomers until we build it. They won’t suspect we’re right unless we can show we’re right in the conversation we made the claim in.
They’ll lose trust and therefore interest very fast if we make a claim that requires at least 3 months of careful thought to come to a nuanced view on it. AI risk takes a tonne of time to develop inside views on. There is a lot of deference because it’s hard to think the whole sequence through yourself for yourself and explore various objections until you feel like it’s your view and not just something dictated to you. Deference is weird too (and gets a whole lot less weird when you just admit that you’re deferring a bit and what exactly made you trust the person you are deferring to to come to reasonable views in the first place).
I feel like “don’t sound weird” ends up translating to “don’t say things you can’t backup to the person you are talking to”. In my mind, “don’t sound weird” sounds a lot like “don’t make the person you are talking to feel alienated”, which in practice means “be legible to the person you are talking to”.
People might say much less when they have to make the person they are talking to understand all the steps along the way, but I think that’s fine. We don’t need everyone to get to the bottom line. It’s also often worse than neutral to communicate the bottom line without everything above it that makes it reasonable.
Ideally, community builders don’t go so glacially slowly that they are at a standstill, never getting to any bottom lines that sound vaguely controversial, but while we’ve still got a decent mass of people who know the bottom line and enough of the reasoning paths that can take people there, it seems fine to increase the number of vague messages in order to decrease the number of negativeimpressions.
I still want lots of people who understand the reasoning and the current conclusions, I just don’t think starting with an unmotivated conclusion is the best strategy for achieving this and I think “don’t be weird” plus some other advice to stop community builders from literally stagnating and never getting to the point seems much better than the current status quo.
Goal of this comment:
This comment fills in more of the gaps I see that I didn’t get time to fill out above. It fleshes out more of the connection between the advice “be less weird” and “communicate reasoning over conclusions”.
Doing my best to be legible to the person I am talking to is, in practice, what I do to avoid coming across as weird/alienating.
there is a trade-off between contextualizing and getting to the final point
we could be in danger of never risking saying anything controversial so we do need to encourage people to still get to the bottom line after giving the context that makes it meaningful
right now, we seem to often state an insufficiently contextualized conclusion in a way that seems net negative to me
we cause bad impressions
we cause bad impressions while communicating points I see as less fundamentally important to communicate
communicating reasoning/our way of thinking seems more important than the bottom line without the reasoning
AI risk can often take more than a single conversation to contextualize well enough for it to move from a meaningless topic to an objectionable claim that can be discussed with scepticism but still some curiosity
I think we’re better off trying to get community builders to be more patient and jump the gun less on the alienating bottom line
The soundbite “be less weird” probably does move us in a direction I think is net positive
I suspect that this is what most community builders will lay the groundwork to more legibly support conclusions when given advice like “get to the point if you can, don’t beat around the bush, but don’t be weird and jump the gun and say something without the needed context for the person you are talking to to make sense of what you are saying”
I feel like making arguments about stuff that is true is a bit like sketching out a maths proof for a maths student. Each link in the chain is obvious if you do it well, at the level of the person with whom you are taking through the proof, but if you start with the final conclusion, they are completely lost.
You have to make sure they’re with you every step of the way because everyone gets stuck at a different step.
You get away with stating your conclusion without the proof in maths because there is a lot of trust that you can back up your claim (the worst thing that happens is the person you are talking to loses confidence in their ability to understand maths if you start with the conclusion before walking them through it at a pace they can follow).
We don’t have that trust with newcomers until we build it. They won’t suspect we’re right unless we can show we’re right in the conversation we made the claim in.
They’ll lose trust and therefore interest very fast if we make a claim that requires at least 3 months of careful thought to come to a nuanced view on it. AI risk takes a tonne of time to develop inside views on. There is a lot of deference because it’s hard to think the whole sequence through yourself for yourself and explore various objections until you feel like it’s your view and not just something dictated to you. Deference is weird too (and gets a whole lot less weird when you just admit that you’re deferring a bit and what exactly made you trust the person you are deferring to to come to reasonable views in the first place).
I feel like “don’t sound weird” ends up translating to “don’t say things you can’t backup to the person you are talking to”. In my mind, “don’t sound weird” sounds a lot like “don’t make the person you are talking to feel alienated”, which in practice means “be legible to the person you are talking to”.
People might say much less when they have to make the person they are talking to understand all the steps along the way, but I think that’s fine. We don’t need everyone to get to the bottom line. It’s also often worse than neutral to communicate the bottom line without everything above it that makes it reasonable.
Ideally, community builders don’t go so glacially slowly that they are at a standstill, never getting to any bottom lines that sound vaguely controversial, but while we’ve still got a decent mass of people who know the bottom line and enough of the reasoning paths that can take people there, it seems fine to increase the number of vague messages in order to decrease the number of negative impressions.
I still want lots of people who understand the reasoning and the current conclusions, I just don’t think starting with an unmotivated conclusion is the best strategy for achieving this and I think “don’t be weird” plus some other advice to stop community builders from literally stagnating and never getting to the point seems much better than the current status quo.