orthonormal

Sequences

Staying Sane While Taking Ideas Seriously

Comments

I agree that, given the dynamics, it's rare to get a great journalist on a technical subject (we're lucky to have Zeynep Tufekci on public health), but my opinion is that Metz has a negative Value Over Replacement Tech Journalist, that coverage of AI in the NYT would be significantly more accurate if he quit and was replaced by whomever the Times would poach.

Cade Metz already has multiple strikes against him when it comes to journalistic carelessness around the rationalist community and around AI risk. In addition to outing Scott, he blithely mischaracterized the situation between Geoff Hinton and Google

It's harmful that the NYT still has him on this beat (though I'm sure his editors don't know/care that he's treating the topic as an anthropological curiosity rather than something worth taking seriously).

Elizabeth has invested a lot of work already, and has explicitly requested that people put in some amount of work when trying to argue against her cruxes (including actually reading her cruxes, and supporting one's points with studies whose methodology one has critically checked).

The citation on that sentence is the same as the first paragraph in this post about the animal-ethics.org website; Elizabeth is aware of that study and did not find it convincing.

In this and your comments below, you recapitulate points Elizabeth made pretty exactly- so it looks like you didn't need to read it after all!

My answer is "work on applications of existing AI, not the frontier". Advancing the frontier is the dangerous part, not using the state-of-the-art to make products.

But also, don't do frontend or infra for a company that's advancing capabilities.

I also had a bunch of thoughts of ‘oh, well, that’s easy, obviously you would just [OH MY LORD IS THIS CENSORED]’

I applaud your Virtue of Silence, and I'm also uncomfortable with the simplicity of some of the ones I'm sitting on.

Thanks for the info about sockpuppeting, will edit my first comment accordingly.

Re: Glassdoor, the most devastating reviews were indeed after 2017, but it's still the case that nobody rated the CEO above average among the ~30 people who worked in the Spartz era.

This is a good idea; unfortunately, based on discussions on the EA Forum, Nonlinear is not an organization I would trust to handle it. (Note, as external evidence, that the Glassdoor reviews of Emerson's previous company frequently mention a toxic upper management culture of exactly the sort that the commenter alleges at Nonlinear, and have a 0% rating of him as CEO.)

[EDITED TO ADD: The second comment quotes reviews written after the Spartz era (although I'm sure many of them were present during it), which is misleading; moreover, the second commenter was banned for having a sockpuppet. My criticisms are thereby reduced but not eliminated.]

I bet I know your survey answer on one of Aella's questions.

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