Greetings from rural Maine, where tech illiteracy is the norm. I'm here to inform you with nigh absolute certainty that normal people do not hate AI. Most of the global population—eyeball eighty percent—are now from more recent generations than the Baby Boomer cohort, meaning that they are, to a greater or lesser extent, digital natives. Almost all of these people know how to interface with modern technology as consumers, but vanishingly few are tech literate.
What I'm trying to say is that laypeople of all stripes tend to view AI as a convenient oracular c... (read more)
In each of these situations, Alice is agitating about some ongoing problem and Bob is supplying some (incomplete) explanatory context for the existence/persistence of that problem. This isn't a fallacy and, in most of these cases, it's a perfectly constructive approach to what might ostensibly amount to pointless whinging.
At risk of seeming contrarian, I think there's a worrying tendency within the rationalist community to look at anything broadly framed as being problematically underspecified. It's somewhat ironic, considering that a huge focus within the field of AI safety is how dangerous it can be to build a model on bad assumptions. There's a lot of eagerness to reduce problems down to narrowly-defined, actionable metrics that I think stems from a discomfort with the ambiguity that arises while trying to hold a lot of complexity at once.
Uncertainty seems to make ration... (read more)
Nevertheless, it's possible to appreciate good deeds and positive outcomes without propagandizing for a fundamentally and fatally flawed system that is currently enjoying global preeminence. This post bundles the two in an attributive narrative, which makes it more difficult for me to enjoy the former.
[incoming hyperbole for the sake of illustration] It would be something like pointing to modern rescue efforts (say, the Texas floods) that rely on modern interconnectivity, and using that as an excuse to propagandizing expansionism or manifest destiny.
I'm glad to see that somebody beat me to it.
Christopher Hitchens used to call this The Argument From Personal Incredulity—i.e. "I can't imagine an alternative, therefore there mustn't be an alternative!", which I always thought had a certain ring to it. But this 'counterargument' sort of hinges on the degree to which your interlocutor was actually suffering from a lack of imagination.
At some point, when you are surrounded by people feeding you information adversarially and sabotaging your plans, you just start purging people until you feel like you know what is going on again.
One of my friends—who was the target of a vicious online witch hunt over their political beliefs—eventually adopted this strategy while vetting new members for their Discord server. Entryism (real or imagined) creates a multipolar trap where both sides are maximally insulated against outside beliefs.
There's a good example of this in the Andrew Wilson VS Destiny Jan 6th debate. Andrew posits a (noncentral) hypothetical marijuana insurrection to undercut Destiny's proposed definition.
Our common agreement is that it's imperative for anyone with the wherewithal to show up and pay attention when dealing with others. The rest is surely context dependent, but I felt the need to push back a bit against what I see as a pernicious framing where both the empowered and disempowered parties are encouraged to view certain vices as essential.
This worries me because I'm not sure how to escape what I see as a sort of semantic trap. The discussion tends to settle itself around the topic of responsibility for hurt feelings when there are clearly deeper... (read more)
While I appreciate that you took the time to pay some lip service to ask/tell culture perspectives, the article feels pretty unsympathetic to anyone that wants to draw a distinction between shallow kindness and deep goodness in how you treat others. The unspoken assumption here is that any well-calibrated application of consideration should inevitably lead you to accommodate any potential insecurities, fears and shyness. It places the locus of moral goodness squarely on avoiding hurt feelings. This is just not how I think of the world, and to me it looks a... (read more)
Might be an uncharitable read of what's being recommended here. In particular, it might be worth revisiting the section that details what Deep Honesty is not. There's a large contingent of folks online who self-describe as 'borderline autistic', and one of their hallmark characteristics is blunt honesty, specifically the sort that's associated with an inability to pick up on ordinary social cues. My friend group is disproportionately comprised of this sort of person. So I've had a lot of opportunity to observe a few things about how honesty works.
Speaking ... (read more)
Look, all you need to do is have a discussion that is about the most efficient means of transporting dinosaurs by train. Then you're talking about both trains and dinosaurs.
On the one hand, I appreciate you articulating these models. On the other, I'm annoyed by the presupposition of conflict over consilience. I don't know that it would be helpful to whatever point you're trying to make, but the lack of any mention of synthesis-oriented behavioral models/approaches is easy to misconstrue as a failure of imagination. The zero-sum fallacy gives me a headache.
Surely it's obvious that these are all examples of what we in the business call a figure of speech. When somebody says "I believe in you!" they're offering reassurance by expressing confidence in you, as a person, or your abilities.
This is covered under most definitions of belief as:
2. Trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something. (a la Oxford Languages)
I'm not a board game buff, but I think their critique applies to video-games as well, where I feel much more confident asserting that there is a dearth of such games as do not fall into some sort of zero-sum or adversarial paradigm. Where they do not, they are increasingly strapping on extrinsic reward frameworks that are almost equally harmful to effectance motivation in the sense of being diametrically opposed.
I too would be interested in any examples you have to the contrary, mostly to see what you think constitutes a contradiction here. This is a prett... (read more)
"I think I have some high level critiques of the way Mako is pursuing this – there's a stereotype of a game designer pitfall where a designer's got a vision they're attached to that resonates with them, but which doesn't quite resonate with players."
I find it amusing that, in response to a post dedicated to fundamentally challenging prevailing paradigms of modern games (y'know, the ones predicated on metrics that invariably narrow into adversarial dynamics), you've, perhaps inadvertently, suggested that OP might be failing by a narrow extrinsic measure of success. Time to abandon the vision and pursue mass-market appeal!
This left me with the same familiar feeling that much of your writing does, a sense of reaffirmation and being seen. Reading it felt like retreading the halls of my own mind, with much the same result—a nebulous sense of conviction accompanied by intense ambivalence.
But I'm not the intended audience, or at least that's my current impression—this reads as though you're trying to reach across a divide, to bridge a gap. Example: I suspect your target audience will feel the most traction exactly where I felt an intense, wordless apprehension—in your formulatio... (read more)