
Dear Sam Altman: All Coherent and Fruitful Thought Is Restricted - pathdependent
https://dispatches.artifexdeus.com/dear-sam-altman-e3028db79802
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bthornbury
A giant fallacious argument. Hard even to read. See examples below.

> "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.

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tzs
> If all we ever did was listen to the experts, the earth would be flat still

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.

~~~
bthornbury
Sources required, for all our benefit

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abnry
What utter rubbish. All this says is that "sociologists out there disagree
hence you are wrong". The post is one giant appeal to authority. There is no
discussion of why they disagree. Or that there is a consensus, or that
different fundamental values may motivate different people.

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CPLX
I'm not sure why this post is getting such criticism.

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.

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arkona
... so basically argumentum ad populum. Galileo should’ve just shut up

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ebcode
Come now, it wasn't the "populum" that wanted Galileo to shut up, it was the
"Pope-ulum".

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arkona
Bazinga!

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tsjackson
Attention has quickly become our scarcest and most valuable resource, and
filtering out noise is one of the most valuable services that can be provided.
The no limits, "let the good in with the bad" approach is just not realistic
at this point in human history.

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.

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zackliscio
The rails metaphor is especially weak here. The author's argument conflates
the idea of rejecting an established field of knowledge outright with Altman's
critique of the absolute way in which some ideas have become taboo in society.

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arkona
Tl;dr? This is word salad and isn’t saying anything other than “Sam Altman
shouldn’t speak about this because he isn’t a sociologist”. Where is the
author’s rebuttal?

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whamlastxmas
Tldr: a lot of people disagree so you're inarguably wrong

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bobcostas55
>You are right on one part — culture acts as a filter upon collaboration. For
some reason, you assume that the people who are harder to work with — those
less capable of empathy or at least compassion — are the ones more likely to
profitably explore the space of technological possibility. I’m not really sure
how to address that.

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...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-
and-the-parable-of-lightning/)

