
Sam Altman: E Pur Si Muove - leandrod
http://blog.samaltman.com/
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elliotec
This is unbelievably ignorant. If everything wasn't already so bad I literally
would not believe he wrote this.

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observation
Thanks for writing this Sam.

I'd add that contrary to intuition, sometimes bad ideas might be required to
get to good ones. Sometimes if you're wrong in an interesting way it opens up
somewhere that has been overlooked by the others who sped off in another
direction.

Consider that probably a majority of the most influential early scientists
thought the world was 6000 years old, that most interesting people in the
Middle Ages were deep down the Alchemy rabbit hole.

I distinctly remember a BBC article on a Chinese scientist saying
(paraphrased) "Hey, if you eat these animals, if you like them, you should
sequence them right away, they should be priority". The pathos of the article
implied this was mildly barbaric instead of making complete sense. I remember
thinking "Man, you can't even explain why this dude is wrong". Abrupt, yes,
wrong, no.

Scott Alexander made an observation on why this happens.

"But I can’t help noticing that eight years ago, New Atheism was really
popular, and now it’s really unpopular. Or that eight years ago I was in a
place where having Richard Dawkins style hyperrationalism was a useful brand,
and now I’m (for some reason) in a place where having James C. Scott style
intellectual conservativism is a useful brand. A lot of the “wisdom” I’ve
“gained” with age is the kind of wisdom that helps me channel James C. Scott
instead of Richard Dawkins; how sure am I that this is the right path?

Sometimes I can almost feel this happening. First I believe something is true,
and say so. Then I realize it’s considered low-status and cringeworthy. Then I
make a principled decision to avoid saying it – or say it only in a very
careful way – in order to protect my reputation and ability to participate in
society. Then when other people say it, I start looking down on them for being
bad at public relations. Then I start looking down on them just for being low-
status or cringeworthy. Finally the idea of “low-status” and “bad and wrong”
have merged so fully in my mind that the idea seems terrible and ridiculous to
me, and I only remember it’s true if I force myself to explicitly consider the
question. And even then, it’s in a condescending way, where I feel like the
people who say it’s true deserve low status for not being smart enough to
remember not to say it. This is endemic, and I try to quash it when I notice
it, but I don’t know how many times it’s slipped my notice all the way to the
point where I can no longer remember the truth of the original statement."

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observation
I realize this contradicts a core CompSci idea of bad data in, bad data out,
but if I recall right then at the higher levels of rationality like neural
networks we have similar counterintuitive results.

