I mostly feel bad about LessWrong these days. I slightly dread logging on, I don't expect to find much insightful on the website, and think the community has a lot of groupthink / other "ew" factors that are harder for me to pin down (although I think that's improved over the last year or two). I also feel some dread at posting this because it might burn social capital I have with the mods, but whatever.

(Also, most of this stuff is about the community and not directly in the purview of the mods anyways.)

Here are some rambling thoughts, though:

I think there are pretty good reasons that the broader AI community hasn't taken LW seriously.
I feel a lot of cynicism. I worry that colors my lens here. But I'll just share what I see looking through that lens.
- Also some of my cynicism comes from annoying-feeling object-level disagreements driving me away from the website. Probably other people are having more fun.
(High confidence) I feel like the project of thinking more clearly has largely fallen by the wayside, and that we never did that great of a job at it anyways.
Over time, I've felt myself grow more distant from this community and website. At times, it feels sad. At times, it feels correct. Sometimes it feels both.
(Medium confidence, unsure if relevant to LW itself) In the bay area community, there are lots of professionally relevant events which are de facto gated by how much random people like you on a personal level (namely, the organizers). There’s also a lot of weird social stuff but IDK how relevant that is to LW.
(Medium confidence) It seems to me that often people rehearse fancy and cool-sounding reasons for believing roughly the same things they always believed, and comment threads don't often change important beliefs. Feels more like people defensively explaining why they aren't idiots, or why they don't have to change their mind. I mean, if so—I get it, sometimes I feel that way too. But it sucks and I think it happens a lot.
- I feel worried that there are a bunch of people with entrenched worldviews who basically never change their minds about anything important. Seems unhealthy on a community level.
- Like, there is a way that it feels to be defending yourself or sailing against the winds of counterevidence to your beliefs, and it’s really really important to not do that. Come on guys :(
- (When Wei_Dai introduced Updateless Decision Theory, it wasn't about this kind of "updatelessness"! :( )
(High confidence) I think this community has engaged in a lot of hero worship. I think to some extent I have benefited from this, though I don't think I'm the prototype. But, seriously guys, looking back, I think this place has been pretty creepy in some ways.
- The way people praise/exalt Eliezer and Paul is just... weird. The times I'd be at an in-person workshop, and people would spend time "ranking" alignment researchers. Feels like a social status horse race, and probably LessWrong has some direct culpability here.
  - But people don't seem to take Eliezer as seriously these days, which I think is great, so maybe it's less of a problem now.
- I think this is Eliezer's fault in his case and mostly not Paul's fault for his own rep, but IDK.
I think we've kinda patted ourselves on the back for being awesome and ahead of the curve, even though, in terms of alignment, I think we really didn't get anything done until 2022 or so, and a lot of the meaningful progress happened elsewhere.
(Medium confidence) It seems possible to me that "taking ideas seriously" has generally meant something like "being willing to change your life to further the goals and vision of powerful people in the community, or to better accord with socially popular trends", and less "taking unconventional but meaningful bets on your idiosyncratic beliefs."
- Somewhat relatedly, there have been a good number of times where it seems like I've persuaded someone of A and of , and they still don't believe $B$ , and coincidentally $B$ is unpopular.
I feel pretty frustrated at how rarely people actually bet or make quantitative predictions about existential risk from AI. EG my recent attempt to operationalize a bet with Nate went nowhere. Paul trying to get Eliezer to bet during the MIRI dialogues also went nowhere, or barely anywhere—I think they ended up making some random bet about how long an IMO challenge would take to be solved by AI. (feels pretty weak and unrelated to me. lame. but huge props to Paul for being so ready to bet, that made me take him a lot more seriously.)
(Medium-high confidence) I think that alignment "theorizing" is often a bunch of philosophizing and vibing in a way that protects itself from falsification (or even proof-of-work) via words like "pre-paradigmatic" and "deconfusion." I think it's not a coincidence that many of the "canonical alignment ideas" somehow don't make any testable predictions until AI takeoff has begun. 🤔

I expect there to be a bunch of responses which strike me as defensive, revisionist gaslighting, and I don't know if/when I'll reply.

Intellectual Progress via LessWrong

Intellectual Progress via LessWrong