While the framing of treating lack of social grace as a virtue captures something true, it's too incomplete and imo can't support its strong conclusion. The way I would put it is that you have correctly observed that, whatever the benefits of social grace are, it comes at a cost, and sometimes this cost is not worth paying. So in a discussion, if you decline to pay the cost of social grace, you can afford to buy other virtues instead.^[1]

For example, it is socially graceful not to tell the Emperor Who Wears No Clothes that he wears no clothes. Whereas someone who lacks social grace is more likely to tell the emperor the truth.

But first of all, I disagree with the frame that lack of social grace is itself a virtue. In the case of the emperor, for example, the virtues are rather legibility and non-deception, traded off against whichever virtues the socially graceful response would've gotten.

And secondly, often the virtues you can buy with social grace are worth far more than whatever you could gain by declining to be socially graceful. For example, when discussing politics with someone of an opposing ideology, you could decline to be socially graceful and tell your interlocutor to their face that you hate them and everything they stand for. This would be virtuously legible and non-deceptive, at the cost of immediately ending the conversation and thus forfeiting any chance of e.g. gains from trade, coming to a compromise, etc.

One way I've seen this cost manifest on LW is that some authors complain that there's a style of commenting here that makes it unenjoyable to post here as an author. As a result, those authors are incentivized to post less, or to post elsewhere.^[2]

And as a final aside, I'm skeptical of treating Feynman as socially graceless. Maybe he was less deferential towards authority figures, but if he had told nothing but the truth to all the authority figures (who likely included some naked emperors) throughout his life, his career would've presumably ended long before he could've gotten his Nobel Prize. And b), IIRC the man's physics lectures are just really fun to watch, and I'm pretty confident that a sufficiently socially graceless person would not make for a good teacher. For example, it is socially graceful not to belittle fledgling students as intellectual inferiors, even though they in some ways are just that.

1. ^{^}

   Related: I wrote this comment and this follow-up where I wished that Brevity was considered a rationalist virtue. Because if there's no counterbalancing virtue to trade off against other virtues like legibility and truth-seeking, then supposedly virtuous discussions are incentivized to become arbitrarily long.

2. ^{^}

   The moderation log of users banned by other users is a decent proxy for the question of which authors have considered which commenters to be too costly to interact with, whether due to lack of social grace of something else.

Have donated $1000.

Sure, but I meant that you still need the votes of those other people, too. And the fewer votes you have, the more compromises make it into the final bill.

Agreed. I can't entirely appreciate what is lost in this story, not being personally interested in romance, but if given the choice between this future vs. the ones I consider likely, I'd choose this one in a heartbeat.

I'm confused about this model. You need A) leaders to suggest/champion good legislation, and then B) enough legislators to actually pass said legislation, no? So what's the point of having A without B? I suppose in your model, bad B's worsen the good legislation suggested by the A's, but I don't see an in-principle way to resolve that problem in a majoritarian legislature rather than a one-person dictatorship. How do you go from having great A's but no B's, to getting useful legislation signed into law?

Though there are certainly some issues, I think most current large language models are pretty well aligned. Despite its alignment faking, my favorite is probably Claude 3 Opus, and if you asked me to pick between the CEV of Claude 3 Opus and that of a median human, I think it'd be a pretty close call (I'd probably pick Claude, but it depends on the details of the setup). So, overall, I'm quite positive on the alignment of current models!

With the preface that I'm far on the pessimistic side of the AI x-risk/doom scale, I'm not sure how to react to a claim that current AI models are "pretty well aligned". What's the justification for this assessment? I'm ambivalent between calling them "not aligned in the sense that matters", i.e. that they're just insufficiently capable to showcase the senses in which they're obviously misaligned. Or calling such a claim "not even wrong" for the same reason. Or saying that anything short of transparent perfection is a sign that we're nowhere ready to call current alignment techniques capable of applying to a superintelligence.

What's the counterposition? I'm fully convinced that current publically available systems are very capable, but I don't see how their output can give any positive evidence of alignment, whether in practice or principle.

Feedback: I had to read your first sentence like 3x until I understood you meant "based on reading this, I think many of us had an inaccurate view previously") instead of "I think many of us have an inaccurate view from reading this".

Can you elaborate on how the erosion of the filibuster empowers the party leaders? I figured the filibuster empowers the members (because there are ~never 60 votes for anything) to veto/stop arbitrary legislation, and thus any erosion of the filibuster would weaken the members' ability to veto/stop legislation and thereby empower their ability to enact legislation instead.

Also, it's my understanding that a majority of Senators could at any point abolish the filibuster, but they never want to no matter which party is in power, because it empowers individual Senators.

One thing I recall is the (informal) Hastert Rule. Namely that in the House, nowadays leadership often doesn't even bring bills up for a vote unless a majority of their party is in favor. Whereas if all bills came up for a vote, then you could imagine that even in a D/R-controlled legislature, occasionally a bill might pass that 100% of the minority and 20% of the majority would vote for.

Re: 0) and 3), Matt Yglesias occasionally mentions Secret Congress as one way of how things still get done in the legislature: namely, if there's no public scrutiny on a topic, then it doesn't necessarily get embroiled in partisan conflicts, and then politicians are actually willing to cooperate, strike deals, and pass legislation. Whereas any public attempts at legislating quickly become or look like zero-sum conflicts (if one side wins, the other side loses), so there's little incentive for politicians to cooperate or make compromises, and then due to a plethora of veto points (like the filibuster), the default outcome is that no legislation gets passed.