They do not have a similar kind of danger; you are making false equivalences. Thank you for ceasing your censorious fearmongering.
dirk
Karma: 229
It’s not “perilously close”, because it’s very different from incitement to violence. I have explained that incitement to violence requires a call for violence which is time-scoped to the near future; Sherman’s statement did not include a call for violence at all. You are correct that he bears no moral responsibility for the actions of people who heard his statements.
No, actually; the legal standard used in courts is what was actually said, which needs to include a clear call for violence to be carried out at some point in the near future. It’s extremely frustrating to me that you’re misusing legal terms to lend your arguments weight they don’t hold; please cease to do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio contains plenty of helpful information if you’d like to learn more about what “incitement to violence” means in America.
I don’t think you’re familiar with what actually constitutes incitement to violence.
They don’t come remotely close to it. That’s a wildly dishonest characterization.
Was titotal’s post not a critique of 2027′s models of the bad timeline? I had not interpreted it in the way you’re describing.
Egg producers vary in their treatment of hens; as eggs are a major part of your diet, I think it’s worth looking into whether there’s a brand that meets your ethical standards you could switch to before deciding to cut them out entirely.
Holly herself believes standards of criticism should be higher than what (judging by the comments here without being familiar with the overall situation) she seems to have employed here; see Criticism is sanctified in EA, but, like any intervention, criticism needs to pay rent.
I was extremely disappointed to see this tweet from Liron Shapira revealing that the Centre for AI Safety fired a recent hire, John Sherman, for stating that members of the public would attempt to destroy AI labs if they understood the magnitude of AI risk. Capitulating to this sort of pressure campaign is not the right path for EA, which should have a focus on seeking the truth rather than playing along with social-status games, and is not even the right path for PR (it makes you look like you think the campaigners have valid points, which in this case is not true). This makes me think less of CAIS’ decision-makers.
Another Jhourney attendee, Nadia Asparouhova, has done a writeup of her experiences with some instructions for hopefully achieving the jhanas, which seems potentially helpful; the instructions are nicely succinct and concrete.
Why aren’t there more organizations within EA that are trying to be extremely hardcore and totalizing, to the level of religious orders, the Navy SEALs, the Manhattan Project, or even a really intense start-up? It seems like that that is the kind of organization you would want to join, if you truly internalize the stakes here.
There was an attempt at that in rationalism, Dragon Army, though it didn’t ultimately succeed; you can find the postmortem at https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/dragon-army-retrospective-597faf182e50.
I’m skeptical of metrics like “x% of people involved said they were satisfied” for estimating cost-effectiveness. Customer satisfaction doesn’t really connect very well to any of the things I care about; in most cases I’m happier with a rough estimate of lives saved/units of suffering prevented/QALYs purchased/etc. per dollar than with a more precise accounting of things that touch less directly on the end goal.
dirk’s Quick takes
Thanks for including the fish-per-dollar estimate! I know it doesn’t account for the value of your speculative work, but having the number at all makes it a lot easier for me to reason about it.
(Also also, it isn’t only the poster who has to worry about the truth of what they say? It’s everyone? Comments also receive criticism all the time. I don’t think this poster/commenter divide cuts reality at the joints.)
(Also, I understand the comment was not phrased helpfully to you, but for my part I felt that it communicated the errors clearly enough that I could understand them easily, and appreciate having the false dichotomy especially pointed out without having to discover it myself).
Thank you for sharing, but I’ve read your post and am not convinced (either in this instance or in general). I think it was a fine comment to which you reacted with unwarranted negativity. Or, in short: no, you’re wrong.
I think if your arguments are locally invalid, that is something important about your post. High standards of accuracy and quality are something I value about Less Wrong and EA, and to me part of having high standards is trying to avoid even small mistakes.
Dunno if it’s still helpful, but https://www.highimpactprofessionals.org/talent-directory is a directory of EAs looking for work and contained several each of lawyers and accountants on a quick search.
I mean, presumably they meant he hadn’t actually harmed someone in real life yet.