Yeah, I see what you're seeing. Someone without anxiety to flinch away from would be behaving very differently, and the tells are unambiguous. To start with, they either wouldn't post about it at all, or they'd make a post that couldn't be accurately mocked as "Oh, you're afraid of impending doom? Which stocks have you shorted?".
If you aren't flinching from anxiety, you can see a turn or two ahead and address the glaring weaknesses before they're used against you. If you're as willing to put your money where your mouth is as you think the other side isn't, then you can bet on that. Not "How do you explain banana? Checkmate atheists!" before atheists get a chance to explain banana, stick your neck out and predict crickets.
Show me how to collect on my shorts when the world ends. Better yet, show me how to collect on my shorts when the world doesn't end because I took the dangerous trajectory seriously, and helped to avert disaster. Or at least don't open with "doom" in the first five words and close on "what are you shorting" so any real point doesn't get buried in nonsense.
If he were to make it obvious how to actually profit, so that the doomers can actually recognize "Huh, that would work", then it gets interesting if doomers don't place the bets. At which point his implicit accusation actually lands, because he would have tested it. And if bets get made, he gets a chance to learn.
Yet he chose not to do the thing that would give either "makes his point land" or "learn he's wrong", and chose to do the thing that changes no minds, gets him mocked in the comments, and allows him to not engage any more deeply.
Revealed preferences.
Stronger, he could actually be correct that most attempts to analyse such risks via rationalist style arguments will be distorted by fear.
This is absolutely to be expected. It's not exactly easy to avoid, given how much is at stake here. "Lol, you scared bro?". Yes.
The unfortunate thing is that these flinches are so ubiquitous that noticing them is like a fish noticing water. Where have we seen someone not flinch? Seen someone smiling in the face of likely doom without inaction? It's rare, especially where things are scariest.
It's actually plausible that maintaining such a strong epistemic bar for such fears makes sense for Tyler personally[..]However, neither of these means that his decision to run from anxiety is necessarily correct. And insofar as this is choice is unconscious, he won't know what trade-off he's making. This is rarely a good place to find yourself.
I think it's easy for people to take this as lip service, but it's seriously important.
The temptation here is to think "Ah, Cowen is irrational, it's important to be rational, I should face reality", but that is itself a flinch from reality any time you don't know you're prepared to handle reality. Which turns out to be every time you're saying "I should face reality" because if it were unambiguously clear[1] to you that facing reality would be a winning move for you, you'd have done it already.
And that's why despite mocking Cowen a bit above, I actually sympathize quite a lot. I don't think "pretending not to be avoiding" is a winning move for him there (lol), but the avoiding itself is most likely completely reasonable, and I mean that sincerely.
I definitely choose not to engage with scary things, at times. If I try to force myself to engage too far I can feel the distortionary pressures, and my own inability to handle them all indefinitely without loss. Since it's gonna happen either way, I'd rather it be on my terms, in my accounting book, while I work on the capacity to handle more.
I don't think there's any other option, really.
Meaning no part of you, which you take seriously enough to act on, is still predicting you'd lose by facing it
Revealed preferences indeed.
By being provocative, he gets to tell himself that almost no-one is addressing his core point.
Pychoanalysing others is slightly uncouth, but Tyler started it[1], so I don't feel bad here.
I don't even disagree with the points you're making, I just really don't like "he started it!" as a justification. If you believe that this post will be good for discourse / the world, you should just say so and write it in that vein; if you don't think it will be good and wrote it purely to strike back at Tyler, I think you should maybe reconsider whether this was a good idea or not.
("it is useless to be superior...")
I wouldn't have written it if I didn't think it provided an opportunity to raise interesting points in general.
EDIT: Oops, looks like I did actually state this explicitly:
Epistemic status: Speculative psychoanalysis to illustrate a point
Thanks for this reminder. I myself am someone who's prone to this sort of thing, so I don't recognize it in others' writings (I just sort of mentally snicker, amused at the comeuppance) without someone else pointing it out.
Just a side note: the "correct" way to deal with irrational thoughts is to find the feeling in your body that is creating that thought, and then sitting with that feeling nonreactively until it dissolves into insight.
I don't necessarily have an argument, just years of practice and plenty of practitioners around me that would attest for this method. Go try it!
Would you consider yourself worried about AI cybersecurity in the near term?
If so, do you have an approximate answer for his question 2? (Even a very vague estimate such as: Percent increase in costs of cybersecurity attacks and/or hardening over the next 3 years)
Your current numerical estimate of what those costs might end up being, of course to be tested against what actually happens over time. Obviously, you can do this for a few different regulatory/safety scenarios. This is one simple way to prove yourself largely correct, albeit with a lag.
I am worried, but I am also aware that my understanding of cybersecurity is quite limited.
There's no point in producing numerical figures unless you're going to invest more than a certain amount of time (no numerical analysis is better than poor numerical analysis) and unfortunately this doesn't seem like the best use of my time esp. since the situation is so fluid that any analysis I did conduct would likely be outdated soon and I suspect my marginal time would be better spent understanding qualitative considerations better first.
Epistemic status: Speculative psychoanalysis to illustrate a point
Many people have observed that Tyler Cowen's Act Like it is science is a clear case of an isolated demand for rigor.
I agree, but I feel it's worth trying to understand how he ended up there. Tyler Cowen is clearly extremely intelligent, so he's unlikely to have written such a howler without something interesting going on.
Psychoanalysing others is slightly uncouth, but Tyler started it[1], so I don't feel bad here.
My intuition is that when Tyler imagines certain scenarios he becomes anxious. The longer he engages with these thoughts, the more anxious he becomes. It's hard to be completely rational when you're anxious and it's quite natural simplify this to "all these thoughts are irrational".
Now, when someone is suffering from irrational anxiety, the typical advice isn't "keep thinking about it until you realise where you're being irrational", but "don't engage with those thoughts, it's a trap".
Cognitive behavioral therapy may seem like a counter-example, but it's the exception that proves the rule[2]. It pretends to be about challenging yourself to ask whether your negative assumptions are based in fact, but as far as I can tell, it appears to be about wielding isolated demands of rigor as mantras to provide your over-active mind a convenient excuse to believe what it wants. If it were really about rationality, it would ask you whether the situation was even worse than you thought and whether you were simply telling yourself it was only manageably bad as a form of cope (please don't throw away your cope if it is psychologically load-bearing).
So I expect that from the inside, dismissing such thoughts feels like just performing the obviously healthy behavior. After all, these thoughts are irrational (though perhaps this only applies to the versions that his mind generates). And surely you shouldn't let irrational thoughts dominate you.
Unfortunately, reversed stupidity is not intelligence and rationality is not reversed irrationality. From the inside, running away from irrational thoughts feels like the most rational thing you could be doing. After all, you aren't just rejecting them, you're extra, double, triple, special, quadruple rejecting them. What better way could there be to truly demonstrate your commitment to rationality (Robin Hanson would interpret this as social signalling, whilst The Last Psychiatrist would describe this as narcissism)?
Sadly, life doesn't work that way. The best way to be absolutely certain that you don't make one kind of error is to fully embrace making the opposite kind of error. You can avoid ever trusting someone undeserving by never trusting anyone, you can avoid incorrectly being biased against someone by being strongly biased in their favor, you can avoid overspending by never spending more than necessary.
However, there's no lever to just "reject all irrationality". There's a lever called "reject all irrationality", but that's not the same thing. This lever takes you as far away as possible from the forms of irrationality that loom largest in your mind, such that introspecting after pulling it feels like you just pulled the true lever, but feelings aren't always accurate.
Now, this kind of reactivity isn't always problematic. Perhaps erring one way is much worse than erring the other. Perhaps you're faced with a slope that is slippery. Perhaps, you've implemented a temporary measure to break from your previous way of being. In these kinds of cases, erring all the way to one side may make sense.
It's actually plausible that maintaining such a strong epistemic bar for these fears makes sense for Tyler personally and that rejecting this rule would simply make him more irrational insofar as any gain in accuracy could be negated if he let himself become consumed by his fears about this topic (or others).
Stronger, he could actually be correct that most attempts to analyse these risks via rationalist style arguments will be distorted by fear. After all, you're much more likely to engage in such discourse insofar as you're scared and if you're drawn into a community, these fears will likely be amplified. So it's plausible that if Tyler's proposed restrictions were universally followed then people's estimates would improve on average, even though I'd suggest that this would ultimately be a form of leveling mediocrity.
However, neither of these considerations mean that his decision to run from anxiety is necessarily correct. Insofar as this is choice is unconscious, he won't know what trade-offs he's committed himself too. And this is rarely a good place to be.
This post described how rejecting catastrophic risk can be a form of cope. However, you can turn this argument around and use it to explain how adopting rules of rationality—as though life could be reduced to rules—can also serve as a form of cope (anyone who knows me won't be surprised that I'm overly proud of this judo move). This could be fear of being wrong, fear of not knowing what to do or fear that humanity will ultimately be destroyed. In the face of this, it is easy to lose oneself in a system and, no, name-dropping the concept of the nameless virtue does not guarantee protection. It might even make things worse insofar as it provides a fig leaf of plausible deniability. Rationalism is counterproductive insofar as it leads to people attempting to impose a greater degree rationality than they're capable of.
This commentary should be understood to implicate myself—and not just others!
By describing the discourse as, "an extended exercise in personal anxiety management." He's welcome to that opinion, but he can't complain about some turnaround.
Okay, an exception can't actually "prove the rule", but it can wink and nudge.