I disagree. I think the standard of "Am I contributing anything of substance to the conversation, such as a new argument or new information that someone can engage with?" is a pretty good standard for most/all comments to hold themselves to, regardless of the amount of engagement that is expected.

[Edit: Just FWIW, I have not voted on any of your comments in this thread.]

I’d say it’s slightly more like “Labor vs Conservatives”, where I’ve seen politicians deflect criticisms of their behavior by arguing about that the other side is worse, instead of evaluating their policies or behavior by objective standards (where both sides can typically score exceedingly low).

Well, but you didn’t give a take on why it’s pragmatically a bad idea. If you’d written a comment with a pointer to something else worth pressuring them on, or gave a reason why publishing all the safety research doesn’t help very much / has hidden costs, I would’ve thought it a fine contribution to the discussion. Without that, the comment read to me as dismissive of the idea of exploring this question.

Of course it has impacts on others in society! In finding out the truth and investigating and finding strong arguments and evidence. The overall effect of a lot of high quality, curious, public investigation is to greatly improve others maps of the world in surprising ways and help people make better decisions, and this is true even if no individual thread of questioning is primarily optimized to help people make better decisions.

Re censoriousness: I think your question of how best to pressure an unethical company to be less unethical is a fine question, but to imply it’s the only good question (which I read into your comment, perhaps inaccurately) goes against the spirit of intellectual discourse.

I agree! I hope people regularly ask questions about Anthropic that they feel curious about, as well as questions that seem important to them :)

To be clear, I wish more LW users had Patreons linked to from their profiles/posts. I would like people to have the option of financially supporting great writers and thinkers on LessWrong.

I agree that the second thing sounds v damaging to public discourse.

Why not?

I believe the implied next step is for you to cold email a YouTuber you think is interested in that :-)

Glad you came! I'm excited to keep these going, I really had some excellent conversations, and came up with ways to better practice several virtues (curiosity, argument, noticing confusion).

I liked reading this philosophical and sociological history!

Some others, such as Wei Dai and Michel Vassar, had called even earlier the infeasibility of completing the philosophy with a small technical team.

Indeed, it's hard to reliably do groundbreaking scientific and philosophical research with a team of ~10 people over the course of ~10 years. I think it was well worth the effort and did far better than one would naively expect of such a team — especially given that the natural project-lead was plagued by so many chronic health issues as to be ~entirely unable to do any management. I will continue to support further efforts of this sort e.g. Orthogonal.