I think emotions are not blame assignment tools, and have other (evolutionary) purposes. A classic example is a relationship break-up, where two people can have strong emotions even though nobody did anything wrong. So I do not interpret emotions as accusations in general. It sounds like you have a different approach, and I don’t object to that.

You misunderstand. I’m not “interpret[ing] emotions as accusations”; I’m simply saying that emotions don’t generally arise for no reason at all (if they do, we consider that to be a pathology!).

So, in your break-up example, the two people involved of course have strong emotions—because of the break-up! On the other hand, it would be very strange indeed to wake up one day and have those same emotions, but without having broken up with anyone, or anything going wrong in your relationships at all.

And likewise, in this case:

Grief over what, anger about what?

For example, grief over the loss of the $100k+ donation. Donated with the hope that it would reduce extinction risk, but with the benefit of hindsight the donor now thinks that the marginal donation had no counterfactual impact. It’s not blameworthy because no researcher can possibly promise that a marginal donation will have a large counterfactual impact, and MIRI did not so promise. But a donor can still grieve the loss without someone being to blame.

Well, it’s bit dramatic to talk of “grief” over the loss of money, but let’s let that pass. More to the point: why is it a “loss”, suddenly? What’s happened just now that would cause iceman to view it as a “loss”? It’s got to be something in Zack’s post, or else the comment is weirdly non-apropos, right? In other words, the implication here is that something in the OP has caused iceman to re-examine the facts, and gain a new “benefit of hindsight”. But that’s just what I’m questioning.

For example, anger that Yudkowsky realized he had no workable alignment plan, in his estimation, in 2015 (Bankless), and didn’t share that until 2022 (Death with Dignity). This is not blameworthy because people are not morally obliged to share their extinction risk predictions, and MIRI has a clear policy against sharing information by default. But a donor can still be angry that they were disadvantaged by known unknowns.

I do not read Eliezer’s statements in the Bankless interview as saying that he “realized he had no workable alignment plan” in 2015. As far as I know, at no time since starting to write the Sequences has Eliezer ever claimed to have, or thought that he had, a workable alignment plan. This has never been a secret, nor is it news, either to Eliezer in 2015 or to the rest of us in 2022.

I hope these examples illustrate that a non-accusatory interpretation is sensical, even if you don’t think it plausible.

They do not.

There’s a later comment from iceman, which is probably the place to discuss what iceman is alleging:

Well, you can see my response to that comment.

So, just to clarify, “serious accusation” is not a phrase that I have written in this discussion prior to this comment, which is what the use of quotes in your comment suggests. I did write something which has more or less the same meaning! So you’re not mis-ascribing beliefs to me. But quotes mean that you’re… quoting… and that’s not the case here.

Anyway, on to the substance:

What “serious accusation” do you see in the connotations of that quote?

And the quote in question, again, is:

So Yudkowsky doesn’t have a workable alignment plan, so he decided to just live off our donations, running out the clock.

The connotations are that Eliezer has consciously chosen to stop working on alignment, while pretending to work on alignment, and receiving money to allegedly work on alignment but instead just not doing so, knowing that there won’t be any consequences for perpetrating this clear and obvious scam in the classic sense of the word, because the world’s going to end and he’ll never be held to account.

Needless to say, it just does not seem to me like Eliezer or MIRI are doing anything remotely like that. Indeed I don’t think anyone (serious) has even suggested that they’re doing anything like that. (The usual horde of haters on Twitter / Reddit / etc. notwithstanding.)

Mostly the subtext I see from iceman is disappointment and grief and anger and regret. Which are all valid emotions for them to feel.

But of course this is largely nonsensical in the absence of any “serious accusations”. Grief over what, anger about what? Why should these things be “valid emotions … to feel”? (And it can’t just be “we’re all going to die”, because that’s not new; we didn’t just find that out from the OP—while iceman’s comment clearly implies that whatever is the cause of his reaction, it’s something that he just learned from Zack’s post.)

I think a lot of what might have been “serious accusations” in 2019 are now common knowledge, eg after Bankless, Death with Dignity, etc.

Which is precisely why iceman’s comment does not make sense as a reply to this post, now; nor is the characterization which I quoted an accurate one.

(It’s not my understanding that MIRI is funding constrained at this time. Can anyone confirm or disconfirm this?)

From the Bankless interview:

Yep, I would describe that state of affairs as “not funding constrained”.

That’s no less true of a king.

Applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry...

This is incredibly dumb. Like, succinctly sums up why I don’t take Curtis here seriously.

I think you’ve quite thoroughly misunderstood the significance of that line.

It’s indicative, not explanatory.

Like, the “citizens” of the company are the shareholders; the workers are just cogs or components of the metamachine the shareholders own together.

This is a really bizarre model, which seems to me to dramatically reduce one’s ability to understand how corporations work and what goes on within them. It’s much, much weirder than thinking of a corporation as a monarchy.

A CEO is a lot more like the leader of a band of hunter gatherers (and the POTUS is similar to both) than they are like a king.

The relationship of a CEO to his subordinates, and the nature and form of his authority over them, are defined in rules and formal structures—which is true of a king but false of a hunter-gatherer band leader. The President, likewise.

In every specific instance this looks different. Sometimes this means you reach out to people they know and let them know about the blackmailing in a way that would damage their reputation. Sometimes it means you threaten to escalate to a legal battle where you are willing to burn resources to make the counterparty come out in the red.

Why would you condition any of this on how much they’re spending?

And how exactly would you calibrate it to impose a specific amount of cost on the blackmailer? (How do you even map some of these things to monetary cost…?)

To estimate the cost you have to compare the outcome of the legal case to the counterfactual baseline in which there was no blackmail happening on the side (that baseline is not zero)

Seems wrong to me. Opportunity cost is not the same as expenditures.

and you have to include other costs besides lawyers.

Alright, and what costs were there?

I have to admit that I still haven’t the faintest clue what concrete behavior you’re actually suggesting. I repeat my questions: “What would this look like…?” and “Actions like what?” (Indeed, since—as I understand it—you say you’ve done this sort of thing, can you give concrete examples from those experiences?)

I’ve asked some MIRI people this exact question and they gave me this answer, with pretty strong confidence and relatively large error margins.

Alright, and what has this looked like in practice for MIRI…?

Financial incentives are ineffecitve if offered privately? That’s perhaps true for me personally at the level Zack is offering, but seems obviously false in general.

The financial incentive was clearly ineffective in this case, when offered publicly, so this is a red herring. (Really, who would’ve expected otherwise? $40, for the average Less Wrong reader? That’s a nominal amount, no more.)

No, what was effective was the social pressure—as you say!

I request that future such incentives be applied in a more disentangled way, but I’m not asking Zack to refrain from applying social pressure OR from offering financial incentives, just asking that those methods be explicitly disentangled. Zack is of course not obliged to comply with this request, but if he does not do so, I will continue flagging my actual motivations explicitly.

Disentangling these things as you describe would reduce the force of the social pressure, however.

Accepted, but I want to register that I am responding because you have successfully exerted social pressure, not because of any monetary incentive. I don’t mind the offer / ask (or the emotional appeals / explanations), but in the future I would prefer that you (or anyone) make such offers via PM.

It would hardly have been effective for Zack to make the offer via PM! In essence, you’re asking for Zack (or anyone) to act ineffectively, in order that you may avoid the inconvenience of having to publicly defend your claims against public disapprobation!