Dear Sam Altman: All Coherent and Fruitful Thought Is Restricted(dispatches.artifexdeus.com) |
Dear Sam Altman: All Coherent and Fruitful Thought Is Restricted(dispatches.artifexdeus.com) |
> "That your post elicited outrage from a large body of people who study sociology, politics, and culture should provide you with some evidence that, perhaps, you are wrong."
Argumentum ad populum. Appeal to Authority. Slightly softballed with the perhaps, but it doesn't make it better.
If all we ever did was listen to the experts, the earth would be flat still.
> "So, maybe it’s a real problem when you share your thoughts on something you don’t understand."
Where's the line where you're "understanding" enough to talk about things?
I can't get through the fallacious logic enough to see the real argument here.
That's mostly a myth. In almost all cases, at least in objective fields, the people who establish a new understanding that replaces the old expert consensus are themselves experts in the old understanding.
The people who established a round earth in any given culture were experts in that culture's flat earth view.
Copernicus was an expert in geocentric cosmology.
Galileo was an expert in Aristotelian physics.
Einstein was an expert in Newtonian physics.
However, I am purely going off the tone of Sam's article. I know very little about Sam Altman. He could have been coming from a place of goodwill and sincerity. If he was, "E Pur Si Muove" also needs a little work, 'cause at face value... dog whistle.
What does this even mean..
The entire argument made here basically reduces to the concept "if everyone around you is telling you you're an asshole, the most probable conclusion is that you're an asshole" but in a more diplomatic way.
Which, having read the original post in question, seems a reasonable response.
You know... The entire point of Sam’s piece.
Unfortunately, I don't think that sociologists are going to find the answer alone. It will take others who can engage the theory, but not become swept away in it. What's most troubling is that Sam Altman is just the sort of person who might be able to add value to the situation by taking a complex issue and thinking really hard about how to deal with it. We need to develop nuanced mechanisms of combatting misinformation and filtering out truly impoverished arguments while letting in unusual, perhaps even incorrect, but potentially valuable ones. Instead he merely repeated dogma of a "marketplace of ideas" model of the world that is clearly inconsistent with the evidence all around us.
This is, at least in part, a technical problem. Zuckerberg seems to be waking up to the role of the failed marketplace of ideas in creating the political monstrosity that we are dealing with now. He seems to be at least thinking through how to deal with it. But it's going to require a lot more than one organization to figure out how to communication must change in an era where the value of talk is so much lower and the value of the attentional resources required to truly listen are so much higher.
Of course the people who are harder to work with are the ones on the bleeding edge! SSC had a great post on this[0]. What are the qualities that make a good scientist? Curiosity, open-mindedness, looking for errors in the dominant paradigm. Not coincidentally, these are also exactly the qualities that lead people to question the popular orthodoxies of the moment.
A good scientist would never be so absurdly naive to assume that society "drawing a line" necessarily "limits harm". Society is often wrong. Society has drawn many, many stupid lines in the past and there is no reason to believe that we have moved beyond that.
Also, someone should alert the author about the replication crisis. There are extremely good reasons not to trust sociologists.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-a...
'More recently, I’ve seen credible people working on ideas like pharmaceuticals for intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension leave San Francisco because they found the reaction to their work to be so toxic. “If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical” was a memorable quote I heard this year.'
Unless the plan is to give a dose (or a prolonged treatment, if that's what it ends up being) to all ~7.6B people for free, that basically puts more wind in the sails of the team that is already ahead--as opposed to grandpa's old-school eugenics that sought to end the race then-and-there for the team that was already behind. Eugenics-lite.