Jackson Silver
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Jackson Silver has not written any posts yet.
Jackson Silver has not written any posts yet.
Thanks - appreciate the upvote and encouragement to discuss. I'll take this opportunity to point out some observations about rationalist communities:
The response from Habryka points out several factual inaccuracies, but I don't see anything that directly refutes the core issue the article brings up. I recognize that engaging with the substance of the allegations might be awkward and difficult, not constituting "winning" in the rationalist sense.
My experience and observations of the rationalist community have been completely resonant with this section:
... (read more)Daniel HoSang, a professor of American studies at Yale University and a part of the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, said: “The ties between a sector of Silicon Valley investors, effective altruism and a kind of neo-eugenics are subtle but unmistakable. They converge around a belief that nearly everything in society can be reduced
At least one of them has explicitly indicated they left because of AI safety concerns, and this thread seems to be insinuating some concern - Ilya Sutskever's conspicuous silence has become a meme, and Altman recently expressed that he is uncertain of Ilya's employment status. There still hasn't been any explanation for the boardroom drama last year.
If it was indeed run-of-the-mill office politics and all was well, then something to the effect of "our departures were unrelated, don't be so anxious about the world ending, we didn't see anything alarming at OpenAI" would obviously help a lot of people and also be a huge vote of confidence for OpenAI.
It seems more likely that there is some (vague?) concern but it's been overridden by tremendous legal/financial/peer motivations.
I've been thinking about these allegations often in the context of Altman's firing circus a few months ago. I've known multiple people who suffered early childhood abuse/sexual trauma - and even dated one for a few tumultuous years a decade ago. I had a perfectly normal, happy childhood myself, and eventually came to learn that this disconnect between who they were most times vs times of high-stress was tremendously unintuitive (and initially intriguing) for me. It also seemed to facilitate an certain meticulousness in duplicity/compartmentalization of presenting the required image and confidently saying whatever needed to be said, which often yielded great success in many situations.
Elon Musk, as another example, has been... (read more)
I see a response to my reply above saying "This seems to misunderstand the thing that it argues against". I wasn't arguing against anything specific - this was my attempt to understand why rationalists repeatedly fall into this pattern, but I must have missed something.
I spent a few difficult hours today reading through the discussion on the Manifest allegations on the EA forum and Twitter (figured it's an appropriate way to spend Juneteenth) and my thoughts have converged to this tweet by Shakeel.
I'm done with reading or posting on LW (like I mentioned, I've had past in-person experience in this realm), but I'm leaving this suggestion here for any person of color or anyone who is firmly opposed to racism trying to disambiguate the extent of racism in the rationalist community - RUN!