Link post Glen Weyl reflects on his previous disparagement of the social scene surrounding this website, and expresses regret at having been too hostile: while he stands by many of his specific criticisms, he now thinks "rationalists" should be seen as more similar to other intellectual communities (which can be allied on some issues if not others), rather than a uniquely nefarious threat. (October 2021, 1300 words)
What on earth caused him to change his mind? I do not understand how he ended up writing so viciously and ungroundedly about us, nor what would lead someone out of that state. It’s certainly a positive sign for someone to change their mind so much about a thing like this. The text reads as an honest and thoughtful account of what he thinks he was wrong about. But I did not expect this, and I notice I am confused.
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I will try to explain what I know. I guess 90% accuracy on individual points so some of it will be wrong. Overview: I think Weyl was going on a process of changing his mind for a year or two. Remmelt and I have both and conversations with him. I imagine there are more conversations and maybe some some deep process we can’t see.I’ve talked to Weyl for an hour or so on twitter 3 or 4 times. I liked his book and like him personally, so spent some time teasing out his thoughts whenever I thought he was being unfair. eg here https://twitter.com/NathanpmYoung/status/1374308591709138948Iirc I’d lightly pushed for a while for him to A) talk to some actual rationalists and B) Send documents with criticisms to ratinalists directly rather than post them as open letter. I think a document posted by Weyl to here would get a sober response. I’ve always felt Weyl was a sincere person, even if we disagreed and cares about AI risk etc. Also I genuinely like him, which makes it easier.Four months ago, he wrote this https://twitter.com/glenweyl/status/1423686528190980097 "I have [thought about writing on LessWrong] but I am worried I would get the tone wrong enough that it would be a net harm. @RemmeltE has kindly been trying to mentor me on this.and later to me https://twitter.com/glenweyl/status/1424366991792513024″Thanks for being so persistent with me about this. I do genuinely think that you’re basically right that my behavior here has been fundamentally hateful and against my principles, driven by feelings of guilt/shame and counterproductive to my own goals. I hope to have time Before going out on paternity leave to post an apology on LessWrong"To me it felt as if he had a culturally different approach to AI risk than rationalists (he wants to get more people involved, and likes redistributing wealth and power) and also there was maybe hurt. This led him (in my opinon) to overextend in his criticisms, mingling what I thought were fair and unfair commentary. The article he shared here I thought was unfair and didn’t deserve Weyl’s support. I guess I hoped he might change his mind, but I was still surprised when it happened (which makes me wonder if there were other things going on). I was particularly surprised by the strength of the first and this subsequent apology.Some thoughts suggestions:- I found the apology article a bit hard to follow—I read it a couple of hours ago and I’m not sure I could explain it now- Weyl seems to have done exactly what the rationalist part of me would want from him. If anything, it might be too much. I hope people are gracious to him for this. It probably cost him time, emotional energy, pride and possible the respect of some others.- I still wonder what led to him being so averse to rationalism in the first place.- I’d suggest if you’re interested you thank him for the apology and talk to him on the subject.I’ve struggle to write this accurately and non-arrogant/humbly so apologies if I’ve overcooked. Thanks to Neel for suggesting I give my thoughts.
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Weyl may not be really apologizing here.
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Someone’s paraphrase of the article: "I actually think they’re worse than before, but being mean is bad so I retract that part" Weyl’s response: "I didn’t call it an apology for this reason." https://twitter.com/glenweyl/status/1446337463442575361
Why would we want an apology? Apologies are boring. Updates are interesting!
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I didn’t say we/I wanted an apology. I was just trying to clarify what he was actually saying.
Every memorable apology I’ve ever gotten has hailed an update, although sometimes it lags a little bit- (eg person updates –> person spends some time applying the update to all affected beliefs –> person apologizes). This mostly holds for apologies i’ve given as well, excluding a couple where transgression and apology were separated by enough years to make pinning it on a specific update difficult.
As I said above I struggled to follow the article and now can’t be bothered to reread it.But I agree that he disagrees with his previous conduct.Feels like "I disagree with you but went about it the wrong way" is something we’d welcome from those who disagree with us, right?
Maybe he was embarrassed by the mistakes he made, like making up 3 different wrong citations for a claim about Audrey Tang despising rationalists (which was also not true), and reflected a bit.
@Ben, I had some conversations with Glen after sharing that blindspots post with him. Happy to call one-on-one about my impressions here: calendly.com/remmelt/30min/
The header font is perfect for "Demonize", maybe "Rationalism" should be changed to Comic Sans for best effect.
I do think the charge of feeding on the same audience as various cranky communities and semi-cults is accurate, and at least a bit worrying.
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I have no idea who is that guy, and I don’t really care, but that sentence was quite a surprise for me. Hands up, who is afraid of losing an audience (whom specifically?) to neoreaction, and what exactly are we doing to prevent such horrible hypothetical outcome? (Also, why I didn’t I get the memo? Should I feel offended?) Too bad the author isn’t more specific about what exactly is the "niche sport" that both rationalists and neoreactionaries are supposed to practice, what kind of audience are they competing for, and what specifically are rationalists doing to win the hearts and minds of the potential neoreactionaries. It would be much easier to respond to specific accusations. Let’s start with the "niche". The first approximation is "smart contrarians", but that seems too wide. Both groups are an outgroup to woke progressives, although for different (and kinda opposite) reasons: neoreactionaries identify as right-wing, rationalists say that politics is the mindkiller. What else? What audience are we competing for? I suppose it is the smart contrarians. What specific things are we doing to attract them, and specifically to prevent them from becoming neoreactionaries instead? (What things, that we are doing now, would we not do in a parallel universe where neoreaction never existed?) The only difference I am aware of is that we enforce the taboo on politics more strongly than we would in a parallel universe where neoreactionaries never tried to promote their politics on Less Wrong. But this answer does not make sense—if the author hates neoreactionaries, why would he be angry at Less Wrong for not providing a platform for them? I am out of ideas. The remaining one—and now I feel like I am making a strawman—is that the author believes that in the parallel universe all rationalists would be super woke (or whatever is his preferred flavor of politics, I don’t know), but in this universe we are not, because we are competing for the non-woke audience against the neoreaction. But this is so wrong it is not even funny. So, what else is there? In the meanwhile, my assumption is that the author apparently had some very confused ideas about rationalists, then he updated somewhat, but he still remains confused a lot.