IIRC commenters disputed whether / to which degree MIRI’s secrecy & infohazards policy was in any way worse than typical NDAs for big companies.
IIRC re: Michael Vassar, the problem was not so much the connection to him, but that several people around Vassar (the author included) had experienced drug-induced psychosis, which made their criticisms and reported experiences suspect. My sense of the post was that it described innocuous facts and then considered them to be bad by analogy to e.g. Leverage.
Re: mental health, I agree that the MIRI world view is likely not good for one’s mental health, but I wouldn’t consider that a “ground fact” about MIRI, but rather (assuming one buys into that worldview) a problem with the world being the way it is. For instance, it sure would be better for everyone’s mental health if AI alignment were universally agreed upon to be trivially easy, but unfortunately that’s not the case.
based on what I see to be a fairly superficial reading of karma/comment count.
I read a significant fraction of the comments in that thread when it first appeared (though not all of them). I’m stressing those data points so much because that thread is still getting cited to this day as if it’s undisputed, legitimate and broadly community-endorsed criticism, merely because it has positive karma. Hence I think stressing how to interpret the karma score and number of comments is a very important point, not a superficial one.
To their credit, the EA and LW communities love to question and criticize themselves, and to upvote all criticism. Unfortunately, that lends credence to weak or epistemically dubious criticisms far beyond what would be merited.
I should emphasize that I agree with the point about mental health here, I more noted it as one of the major points of the post that was not really disputable. If MIRI is one of the only orgs making a truly decent effort to save the world, then that’s just the way things are. Dealing with that fact in a way that promotes a healthy culture/environment, if it is true, is inherently very difficult, and I don’t blame MIRI leadership for the degree to which they fail at it given that they do seem to try.
IIRC commenters disputed whether / to which degree MIRI’s secrecy & infohazards policy was in any way worse than typical NDAs for big companies.
IIRC re: Michael Vassar, the problem was not so much the connection to him, but that several people around Vassar (the author included) had experienced drug-induced psychosis, which made their criticisms and reported experiences suspect. My sense of the post was that it described innocuous facts and then considered them to be bad by analogy to e.g. Leverage.
Re: mental health, I agree that the MIRI world view is likely not good for one’s mental health, but I wouldn’t consider that a “ground fact” about MIRI, but rather (assuming one buys into that worldview) a problem with the world being the way it is. For instance, it sure would be better for everyone’s mental health if AI alignment were universally agreed upon to be trivially easy, but unfortunately that’s not the case.
I read a significant fraction of the comments in that thread when it first appeared (though not all of them). I’m stressing those data points so much because that thread is still getting cited to this day as if it’s undisputed, legitimate and broadly community-endorsed criticism, merely because it has positive karma. Hence I think stressing how to interpret the karma score and number of comments is a very important point, not a superficial one.
To their credit, the EA and LW communities love to question and criticize themselves, and to upvote all criticism. Unfortunately, that lends credence to weak or epistemically dubious criticisms far beyond what would be merited.
I should emphasize that I agree with the point about mental health here, I more noted it as one of the major points of the post that was not really disputable. If MIRI is one of the only orgs making a truly decent effort to save the world, then that’s just the way things are. Dealing with that fact in a way that promotes a healthy culture/environment, if it is true, is inherently very difficult, and I don’t blame MIRI leadership for the degree to which they fail at it given that they do seem to try.