On 4, my impression of the controversy over this piece is just that it makes comparisons to both Leverage, and standard start up culture, in a way that seemed inapt and overly generous to Leverage to many people. The on the ground facts about MIRI in it are mostly undisputed from what I can tell, and many of them are governance issues worth criticizing, and relevant to a post like this.
The on the ground facts about MIRI in it are mostly undisputed from what I can tell
They absolutely are in no way undisputed, and I don’t understand why anyone would possibly think that, given that the post has a crazy 956 comments. And again, there’s a reason why the post is much much lower-karma than tons of the comments.
In fact, I had the opposite impression: that the author saw Zoe’s legitimate grievances about Leverage and drew spurious parallels to MIRI.
Which parts? I completely agree that the controversy is in large part over comparisons to Leverage, and that there is a great deal of controversy, but I’m not aware of a major factual point of the piece that is widely contested. Much of the post, where it gets specific, concentrates on things like internal secrecy to avoid infohazards, MIRI thinking they are saving the world, and are one of the only groups putting a serious effort towards it, and serious mental health issues many people around these groups experienced, all things I think are just true and publicly available. I also take it that the piece was substantially playing down the badness of Leverage, at least implicitly, for instance by invoking similarities between both and the culture of normal start-ups and companies. Much of the controversy seems to be over this, some over the author’s connections to Michael Vassar, some over interpretations of facts that seem much less sinister to others (like the idea that if the author had been open about paranoid fantasies with MIRI employees, they might be disturbed and even try to report her for this, which others pointed out was pretty normal and probably more healthy than the Leverage approach Zoe described). I’m not saying that none of the controversy was related to contested facts, or that everything in the piece is on the ball, just that you seem to be giving it too little credit as an account of governance/culture problems worth considering based on what I see to be a fairly superficial reading of karma/comment count.
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.
On 4, my impression of the controversy over this piece is just that it makes comparisons to both Leverage, and standard start up culture, in a way that seemed inapt and overly generous to Leverage to many people. The on the ground facts about MIRI in it are mostly undisputed from what I can tell, and many of them are governance issues worth criticizing, and relevant to a post like this.
They absolutely are in no way undisputed, and I don’t understand why anyone would possibly think that, given that the post has a crazy 956 comments. And again, there’s a reason why the post is much much lower-karma than tons of the comments.
In fact, I had the opposite impression: that the author saw Zoe’s legitimate grievances about Leverage and drew spurious parallels to MIRI.
Which parts? I completely agree that the controversy is in large part over comparisons to Leverage, and that there is a great deal of controversy, but I’m not aware of a major factual point of the piece that is widely contested. Much of the post, where it gets specific, concentrates on things like internal secrecy to avoid infohazards, MIRI thinking they are saving the world, and are one of the only groups putting a serious effort towards it, and serious mental health issues many people around these groups experienced, all things I think are just true and publicly available. I also take it that the piece was substantially playing down the badness of Leverage, at least implicitly, for instance by invoking similarities between both and the culture of normal start-ups and companies. Much of the controversy seems to be over this, some over the author’s connections to Michael Vassar, some over interpretations of facts that seem much less sinister to others (like the idea that if the author had been open about paranoid fantasies with MIRI employees, they might be disturbed and even try to report her for this, which others pointed out was pretty normal and probably more healthy than the Leverage approach Zoe described). I’m not saying that none of the controversy was related to contested facts, or that everything in the piece is on the ball, just that you seem to be giving it too little credit as an account of governance/culture problems worth considering based on what I see to be a fairly superficial reading of karma/comment count.
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.