This feels somehow like a straw, but reflecting on it briefly it also feels like a hole in my explanation, and maybe that I'm just wrong here.

Maybe a different story I could tell would be that it's more like "if you want, you can join us in trying to do something really hard, which has power law returns, knowing that the modal outcome is burnout and some psychological damage", so comparable to competitive bodybuilding, or maybe classical musical training, or doing a startup. (Edit: note, Maple doesn't include the "modal outcome is moderate psychological damage" part, though neither do the examples really.)

Thanks for an object level response!

Yup, that's an accurate enough paraphrase. 

I'll say first, I... don't actually endorse their model, maybe at all, but this post was to contextualize what the model even is, and that it's maybe in principle plausible, and that their choices are made with respect to that, rather than just random-spiritual-community-is-bad-just-because-they're-bad.

(1), people who greatly inspire others almost never started out as followers in a school for how to become inspiring (this is similar to the issues with CFAR, although I'd say it was less outlandish to assume that rationality is teachable rather than sainthood).

I think this is kind of wrong, lots of religious leaders trained within standard institutions within established traditions, lots of musicians get extensive training/coaching in all the aspects of performance besides their instrument etc. This also isn't really a crux, because:

(2), even if you could create a bunch of particularly virtuous and x-risk-concerned individuals, the path to impact would remain non-obvious from there, since they'd neither be famous nor powerful nor particularly smart or rational or skilled, so how are they going to have an outsized impact later? 

So Maple's theory of change is not necessarily "get people enlightened, and then make sure they're as agentic as possible", but more like, get people enlightened, and then some combination of:

• use whatever wisdom they gain to solve technical alignment
  • (this seems mostly just silly to me)
• have them diffuse that wisdom into eg. tech culture, "purifying it from the inside-out'"
  • (again, I don't think this is likely at all, like I said, but maybe more plausible)
• resolve the incentives of the AI race domestically and internationally... somehow

Er, well, it was that plus stuff like this post that Ray linked above (I didn't necessarily remember this exactly, maybe there was just this one post.) If my gloss landed wrong I'm mostly glad to defer to you there.

I'm also pretty displeased with him as a philosopher and sociologist or whatever. I think when he says things like what you're referring to, it's both rhetorical abuse, and he's trying to do something like evoke the "functional core" or "revealed affective posture" or maybe just "vibe", regardless of whatever the explicit arguments are that some ideology uses. I think this is definitely the right move sometimes but I agree that Soryu kind of sucks at it, or is using mostly inappropriately.

Is this an example of my failing to meet him where he's at? 

Fair, no, obviously giving people a normal kind of fair shot is fine, though this wasn't really what I meant. The thing that I was criticizing in that line would be more like "criticizing the output of his views without addressing the generators" (which is sorta what you've done here, but I'm not bothered by in context), vs "addressing the conception of value in which his claims are made." So specifically, eg. that awakening is more valuable than ~all kinds of material wealth, that species extinction and also just killing of animals generically are a kind of extreme moral injury, etc. Those are fine to disagree with, and I disagree with them, but ignoring those kinds of cruxes makes the critiques mostly sort of useless/irrelevant.

(I might just be wrong here. I had some memory that after the Brent Dill affair there were some "we bungled the whole thing, actually, and people were harmed as a result" type posts on facebook.)

FWIW there's a large number of lay Buddhist teachers in the West, many of them formerly ordained, without lineage transmission. The thing that's weird in Soryu's case is that he's teaching outside of his lineage, without having disrobed. My understanding is that his permission to teach was through Shinzen Young, and I'm not aware of that having been revoked. I expect rats don't really care about lineage, but eg. Shinzen also gave permission to teach to Michael Taft, who teaches meditation in the Bay, and no one seems to be bothered by.

This is very in the weeds but I think the transmission thing mostly hardly matters, if you're not already pilled on the tradition in its own (again, mythologized) framework here, then mostly each teacher has to independently demonstrate their reliability and authority, etc. 

No mostly that was Vaniver having been confusing in context. Like, if you just leave out the Catholic part of the explanation it's just "(mythologized) transmission of authority from the Buddha", which Soryu doesn't have and isn't being misleading about. Even within Catholicism, monastic ordination != priestly ordination, IIRC you can't have both, but in Orthodoxy you can, but they're still orthogonal etc.

In this case neither misleading nor a lie. Ordination in Zen is generally a much lower threshold, and sometimes orthogonal from Dharma Transmission, and just requires a commitment to the tradition, not some demonstrated understanding.

I had that in mind, and some things people wrote after the Brent Dill stuff.

this feels like a simplistic model of what's going on with learning an instrument. iirc in the "principles of SR" post from 20 years ago wozniak makes a point that you essentially can't start doing SR until you've already learned an item, this being obviously for purely sort of "fact" based learning. SR doesn't apply in the way you've described for all of the processes of tuning, efficiency, and accuracy gains that you need for learning an instrument. my sloppy model here is that formal practice eg for music is something like priming the system to spend optimization cycles on that etc--I assume cognitive scientists claim to have actual models here which I suppose are >50% fake lol.

also, separately, professional musicians in fact do a cheap SR for old repertoire, where they practice only intermittently to keep it in memory once it's been established.