people who dislike AI, and therefore could be taking risks from AI seriously, are instead having reactions like this. https://blue.mackuba.eu/skythread/?author=brooklynmarie.bsky.social&post=3lcywmwr7b22i why? if we soberly evaluate what this person has said about AI, and just, like, think about why they would say such a thing - well, what do they seem to mean? they typically say "AI is destroying the world", someone said that in the comments; but then roll their eyes at the idea that AI is powerful. They say the issue is water consumption - why would someone repeat that idea? Under what framework is that a sensible combination of things to say? what consensus are they trying to build? what about the article are they responding to?
I think there are straightforward answers to these questions that are reasonable and good on behalf of the people who say these things, but are not as effective by their own standards as they could be, and which miss upcoming concerns. I could say more about what I think, but I'd rather post this as leading questions, because I think the reading of the person's posts you'd need to do to go from the questions I just asked to my opinions will build more of the model I want to convey than saying it directly.
But I think the fact that articles like this get reactions like this is an indication that orgs like Anthropic or PauseAI are not engaging seriously with detractors, and trying seriously to do so seems to me like a good idea. It's not my top priority ask for Anthropic, but it's not very far down the virtual list.
But it's just one of many reactions of this category I've seen that seem to me to indicate that people engaging with a rationalist-type negative attitude towards their observations of AI are not communicating successfully with people who have an ordinary-person-type negative attitude towards what they've seen of AI. I suspect that at least a large part of the issue is that rationalists have built up antibodies to a certain kind of attitude and auto-ignore it, despite what I perceive to be its popularity, and as a result don't build intuitive models about how to communicate with such a person.
I don't think the answer is as simple as changing terminology or carefully modelling their current viewpoints and bridging the inferential divides.
Indeed, and I think that-this-is-the-case is the message I want communicators to grasp: I have very little reach, but I have significant experience talking to people like this, and I want to transfer some of the knowledge from that experience to people who can use it better.
The thing I've found most useful is to be able to express that significant parts of their viewpoint are reasonable. Eg, one thing I've tr... (read more)
From today's perspective, Marx is just another old white cishet tech bro. (something something swims left)
I never expected that one day I would miss the old-style Marxists, but God forgive me, I do. We disagreed on many things, but at least we were able to have an intelligent debate.
3Milan W
Political positions are inherently high-dimensional, and "leftward" is constantly being rotated around according to where the set of people and institutions considered to be "the left" seem to be moving to.