My model of Eliezer thinks relatively carefully about most of his comms, but sometimes he gets triggered and says some things in ways that seem quite abrasive (like the linked EA Forum comment). I think this is a thing that somewhat inevitably happens when you are online a lot, and end up arguing with a lot of people who themselves are acting quite unreasonably.

Like, if you look at almost anyone who posts a lot online in contexts that aren't purely technical discussion, they almost all end up frequently snapping back at people. This is true of Gwern, Zvi, Buck, and to a lesser degree even Scott Alexander if you look at a bunch of his older writing, and most recently I can see even Kelsey Piper who has historically been extremely measured end up snapping back at people on Twitter in ways that suggests to me a lot of underlying agitation. I also do this not-too-infrequently.

I feel pretty confused about the degree to which this is just a necessary part of having conversations on the internet, or to what degree this is a predictable way people make mistakes. I am currently tending towards the former, but it seems like a hard question I would like to think more about.

I'm not sure if his approach is actually productive for this, but for the longest time, the standard response to Eliezer's concerns was that they're crazy sci-fi. Now that they're not crazy sci-fi, the response is that they're obvious. Constantly reminding people that his crazy predictions were right (and everyone else was wrong in predictable ways) is a strategy to get people to actually take his future predictions seriously (even though they're obviously crazy sci-fi).

A bunch of points that are kind of the same point:

• Not suffering fools gladly is a common way to punish people for wasting your time or strategically misunderstanding you. Expecting that you will lose status for doing this to someone is an incentive to, if you're going to engage, actually engage with what they said, rather than to misread them. (It's also an incentive not to engage with them.)
• Similarly it's a common dynamic that powerful people will pretend to like people who are interesting but don't cost them political points to endorse, while kind of ignoring them, but once they're actually costing you politically then the pretense will go away, and I do think this pretense is bad for actually engaging with ideas and positions (e.g. I think many religious people might have said that Richard Dawkins was a polite debate partner if he stuck to just saying that, and didn't have more fiery rhetoric that was causing a movement to build, even though his position didn't change).
• I think Eliezer has said he took a more polite and hopeful tone in the past (e.g. this and this and this versus this and this and this), and felt that people basically didn't engage with him and did whatever they were going to do anyway. So he thought he should try something different, and it indeed has been more successful at causing people to engage with the perspective that AI is by-default going to be an extinction-level bad event.
• I think that broadly, Eliezer is more hostile due to feeling like he's in a hostile epistemic environment. Personally I take this as a cue to more seriously consider that the hostility is appropriate to the world we find ourselves in (which also is a world where people have seemingly had their head in the sand for over a decade and very powerful people are racing to build doomsday machines while largely not openly engaging with this fact nor the arguments that this is an atrocity).

Some other factors that are relevant:

• I think it's accurate to model Eliezer as having a chronic illness to do with fatigue, which means he just doesn't have a lot of time/effort to put into lots of public dialogues. This is a factor that makes him less invest in back-and-forths and understanding others.
• Eliezer's internal thoughts are also in a pretty different language to others, which can lead to miscommunications. I think in the example you give, with the potted plant, the questioner kind of indicated that they hadn't clearly read the post, where explicitly says he's asking about pre-ChatGPT, and the person asks whether a statement made today would count; if you assume that they did read the post then his reply makes more sense (it wasn't intended primarily as an insult, as much as an attempt to to give a short answer to a somewhat pointless and irrelevant question).

To be clear I think he could do a better job of understanding people he's writing with via text format, and I am still confused about why he seems (to me) below average at this.

I'm not aware of good reason to believe 1. 2 seems likely; MIRI has a number of different people working on its public communications, which I would expect to produce more conservative decisions than Eliezer alone, and which means that some of its communications will likely be authored by people less inclined to abrasiveness. (Also, I have the feeling that Eliezer's abrasive comments are often made in his personal capacity rather than qua MIRI representative, which I think makes them weaker evidence about the org).

The world needs all types of activism: from the firebrands to the bridge-builders. I too find his tone to be abrasive at times. He can be self-aggrandizing, pompous, and downright insulting. In my experience this is not uncommon for people (most typically men) who believe they’re the smartest person in the room. 

Personally, I try to live by, “first, be kind.” I’ve found the most success with leading with empathy, but it’s not effective in every circumstance. Some people you can reach better by showing them our commonalities. Some people need to be shocked into thinking about what the implications of their beliefs are. Sometimes a sit-in is effective in bringing about needed change, other times it takes a riot. 

As far as I understand, Eliezer is abrasive for these reasons:

1. If a misaligned ASI is created without an aligned counterpart, the ASI will have no reason to keep us alive.
2. Mankind isn't on track to solve alignment BEFORE creating the ASI.
3. Normally, THAT high stakes would prompt anyone to think twice of anything related to the issue. But Eliezer has seen things like many obviously stupid approaches to alignment^[1], a high-level official at GDM building a model which predicts that mankind will be left with jobs^[2] after the ASI's rise or OpenPhil (seemingly?) basing its position about AGI timelines on the approach of Ajeya Cotra^[3] 

1. ^{^}

   As evidenced by him claiming that an approach is "Not obviously stupid on a very quick skim" and congratulating  the author on eliciting a THAT positive review. Alas, I also have seen obviously stupid alignment-related ideas make their way at least to LessWrong.

2. ^{^}

   However, it would be possible if the ASIs required OOMs more resources per token than humans. In this case applying the ASIs would be too expensive. Alas, this is unlikely.

3. ^{^}

   IMO Eliezer also believes that the entire approach is totally useless. However, a case against this idea is found in comments mentioning Kokotajlo (e.g. mine)