I have a comment on specifically the part about AGI discourse.
Imagine there’s a community that seems unusually concerned about the risk that some asteroid will soon hit the Earth and kill every person (you, your parents, your friends, your country members, members of every other country, etc.).
If I became aware of that community, the question I’d be most interested in answering is “are they correct about the asteroid?”
It wouldn’t occur to me to make confident statements about how the community is biased or ill-intentioned in various ways before having assessed their object-level arguments.
Maybe if I could persuasively refute the arguments and it would be so easy to do that and I couldn’t help but wonder how someone could think something so deeply flawed, maybe then would I engage in speculation about what might be going wrong with people’s thinking. Even so, I’d still bother to put up a thorough refutation of their arguments at the start of my critique.
I have a comment on specifically the part about AGI discourse.
Imagine there’s a community that seems unusually concerned about the risk that some asteroid will soon hit the Earth and kill every person (you, your parents, your friends, your country members, members of every other country, etc.).
If I became aware of that community, the question I’d be most interested in answering is “are they correct about the asteroid?”
It wouldn’t occur to me to make confident statements about how the community is biased or ill-intentioned in various ways before having assessed their object-level arguments.
Maybe if I could persuasively refute the arguments and it would be so easy to do that and I couldn’t help but wonder how someone could think something so deeply flawed, maybe then would I engage in speculation about what might be going wrong with people’s thinking. Even so, I’d still bother to put up a thorough refutation of their arguments at the start of my critique.