which is fine. the bigger topic is, could you leave a religion if the priest’s powers were real*, even if the organization itself was questionable?
*real as in generally held to be real by all the major institutions in the world you are in. Most world governments and stock market investors are investing in AI, they believe they will get an ROI somehow.
Nail on the head. Especially on the internet/‘tech bro’ culture. All my leads at work also have such a, “extreme OCD” kinda attitude. Sorry if you feel offended emotionally, I didn’t mean it.
The rest of your post is ironically very much something that Eliezer posits a superintelligence would be able to do. Or from the anime Death Note. I use a few words or phrases, you analyze the shit out of them and try to extract all the information you can and have concluded all this stuff like
opening gambit
“amongst friends”
hiding all sorts of opinions behind a borrowed language
guff about “discovering reality”
real demands as “getting with the right programme”,
allegedly, scoring points “off each other”
Off each other” was another weasel phrase
you know that at least at first blush you weren’t scoring points off anyone
See everything you wrote above is a possibly correct interpretation of what I wrote. It’s like the english lit analysis after the author’s dead. Eliezer posits a superintelligence could use this kind of analysis to convince operators with admin authority to break the rules, or L in death note uses this to almost catch the killer.
It’s also all false in this case. (it’s also why a superintelligence probably can’t actually do this) I’ve been on the internet long enough to know it is almost impossible to convince someone of anything, unless they already were willing and you just link some facts they didn’t know about. So my gambit actually something very different.
Do you know how you get people to answer a question on the internet? To post something that’s wrong*. And it clearly worked, there’s more discussion on this thread than this entire forum in several pages, maybe since it was created.
*ironically in this case I posted what I think is the correct answer but it disagrees with your ontology. If I wanted lesswrongers to comment on my post I would need a different OP.