TsviBT's Shortform

TsviBT

This is a special post for quick takes by TsviBT. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

There are two days left to get a standard-price ticket for Reproductive Frontiers Summit 2026. It will be June 16–18 at Lighthaven in Berkeley.

We have over 30 speakers from academia and industry, including pioneering in vitro gametogenesis research groups (Sasaki, Hayashi, Ovelle, Paterna), stem cell and embryo editing researchers (Amato, Hysolli, Hockemeyer), polygenic embryo screening researchers (Carmi, Herasight, Orchid, Progenic), our very own GeneSmith, and other experts in law, ethics, artificial wombs, in vitro maturation, etc. See the full schedule here: https://www.reproductivefrontiers.org/

3TsviBT5mo

You may be right, I'm not confident. I would have said something like 70%, maybe more during doubled talks, with wide error bars. I think to a significant extent, I want to trust people's self-governance. I (and maybe you too) tend to be much more interested in small conversations, but other people like talks. I think they serve several functions that I'm less attuned to, e.g. around common knowledge creation, communicating info efficiently from a perspective where the speakers have very valuable + hard to get information and their time is very scarce (which I think is, on the whole, much more true of biology than of something like alignment research), signaling epistemic authority, things like that. Yes, I disagree voted; if I were to verbalize the disagreement, it would be something like "I disagree that you understand the context / goals of the conference enough to make reasonable suggestions about it like this, and this particular suggestion is probably quantitatively pretty incorrect (though as I noted, in a sense slightly directionally correct)". I would strongly agree with your suggestion if this were a workshop, in the sense of wanting lots of people to develop new deep-context researchy threads and to collaborate about that; e.g. for the MSFP/AISFPs that I played some role in running, I believe I would have pushed against having lots of talks and in favor of 1-on-1s / breakout sessions / etc., and that's generally what I have suggested to people running deep-work workshops in alignment.

4Richard_Ngo5mo

Got it. On a meta level I don't think you're using the disagree vote correctly. The point of disagree votes IMO is to disentangle "am I glad this comment was made" from "is this comment factually correct". In this case it seems like you thought my comment was at least somewhat correct, but that you thought I didn't have the standing required to make this kind of comment. I would suggest that downvoting the comment is a better way to convey your position. Though I also think that it's one of LW's most valuable norms that it doesn't gatekeep very much who has social permission to make comments or criticisms, so in your position I wouldn't downvote. My main takeaway here is that I should probably write about updates that I made based on running the Alignment Workshop (which, despite its name, was closer in function to what you're calling a "conference"), so I have a canonical thing to point people to.

In this case it seems like you thought my comment was at least somewhat correct, but that you thought I didn't have the standing required to make this kind of comment.

I'm saying the comment is (2) incorrect and (1) seems to indicate that you're incorrectly assuming that you have the context that would be needed to make this sort of call; my earlier comment "I slightly agree" is, when expanded, "I slightly directionally agree", which is a more complicated kind of agreement which is consistently with strongly disagreeing overall. I also think it's fine to... (read more)

TsviBT's Shortform

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TsviBT's Shortform

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