Two easy things that maybe Just Work to improve AI discourse

I strongly recommend against engaging with Twitter at all. The LessWrong community has been significantly underestimating the extent to which it damages the quality of its users' thinking. Twitter pulls its users into a pattern of seeking social approval in a fast-paced loop. Tweets shape their regular readers' thoughts into becoming more tweet-like: short, vague, lacking in context, status-driven, reactive, and conflict-theoretic. AI alignment researchers, more than perhaps anyone else right now, need to preserve their ability to engage in high-quality thinking. For them especially, spending time on Twitter isn't worth the risk of damaging their ability to think clearly.

AI Twitter is still a small space. There are often important posts that have only ~100 likes, ~10-100 comments, and maybe ~10-30 likes on top comments.

This also seems like a reason to think that intervening on AI Twitter is not very important. Not an overwhelming reason: there could still be founder effects in the discourse, or particularly influential people could be engaged in the twitter discourse.

tl;dr: the amount of people who could write sensible arguments is small, they would probably still be vastly outnumbered, and it makes more sense to focus on actually trying to talk to people who might have an impact

EDIT: my arguments mostly apply to "become a twitter micro-blogger" strat, but not to the "reply guy" strat that jacob seems to be arguing for

as someone who has historically wrote multiple tweets that were seen by the majority of "AI Twitter", I think I'm not that optimistic about the "let's just write sensible arguments on twitter" strategy

for context, here's my current mental model of the different "twitter spheres" surrounding AI twitter:
- ML Research twitter: academics, or OAI / GDM / Anthropic announcing a paper and everyone talks about it
- (SF) Tech Twitter: tweets about startup, VCs, YC, etc. 
- EA folks: a lot of ingroup EA chat, highly connected graph, veneration of QALY the lightbulb and mealreplacer
- tpot crew: This Part Of Twitter, used to be post-rats i reckon, now growing bigger with vibecamp events, and also they have this policy of always liking before replying which amplifies their reach
- Pause AI crew: folks with pause (or stop) emojis, who will often comment on bad behavior from labs building AGI, quoting (eg with clips) what some particular person say, or comment on eg sam altman's tweets
- AI Safety discourse: some people who do safety research, will mostly happen in response to a top AI lab announcing some safety research, or to comment on some otherwise big release. probably a subset of ML research twitter at this point, intersects with EA folks a lot
- AI policy / governance tweets: comment on current regulations being passed (like EU AI act, SB 1047), though often replying / quote-tweeting Tech Twitter
- the e/accs: somehow connected to tech twitter, but mostly anonymous accounts with more extreme views. dunk a lot on EAs & safety / governance people

I've been following these groups somehow evolve since 2017, and maybe the biggest recent changes have been how much tpot (started circa 2020 i reckon) and e/acc (who have grown a lot with twitter spaces / mainstream coverage) accounts have grown in the past 2 years. i'd say that in comparison the ea / policy / pause folks have also started to post more but there accounts are quite small compared to the rest and it just still stays contained in the same EA-adjacent bubble

I do agree to some extent with Nate Showell's comment saying that the reward mechanisms don't incentivize high-quality thinking. I think that if you naturally enjoy writing longform stuff in order to crystallize thinking, then posting with the intent of getting feedback on your thinking as some form of micro-blogging (which you would be doing anyway) could be good, and in that sense if everyone starts doing that this could shift the quality of discourse by a small bit.

To give some example on the reward mechanisms stuff, my last two tweets have been 1) some diagram I made trying to formalize what are the main cruxes that would make you want to have the US start a manhattan project 2) some green text format hyperbolic biography of leopold (who wrote the situational awareness series on ai and was recently on dwarkesh)

both took me the same amount of time to make (30 minutes to 1h), but the diagram got 20k impressions, whereas the green text format got 2M (so 100x more), and I think this is because of a) many more tech people are interested in current discourse stuff than infographics b) tech people don't agree with the regulation stuff c) in general, entertainement is more widely shared than informative stuff

so here are some consequences of what I expect to happen if lesswrong folks start to post more on x:
- 1. they're initially not going to reach a lot of people
- 2. it's going to be some ingroup chat with other EA folks / safety / pause / governance folks
- 3. they're still going to be outnumbered by a large amount of people who are explicitly anti-EA/rationalists
- 4. they're going to waste time tweeting / checking notifications
- 5. the reward structure is such that if you have never posted on X before, or don't have a lot of people who know you, then long-form tweets will perform worse than dunks / talking about current events / entertainement
- 6. they'll reach an asymptote given that the lesswrong crowd is still much smaller than the overal tech twitter crowd

to be clear, I agree that the current discourse quality is pretty low and I'd love to see more of it, my main claims are that:
- i. the time it would take to actually shift discourse meaningfully is much longer than how many years we actually have
- ii. current incentives & the current partition of twitter communities make it very adversarial
- iii. other communities are aligned with twitter incentives (eg. e/accs dunking, tpots liking everything) which implies that even if lesswrong people tried to shape discourse the twitter algorithm would not prioritize their (genuine, truth-seeking) tweets
- iv. twitter's reward system won't promote rational thinking and lead to spending more (unproductive) time on twitter overall.

all of the above points make it unlikely that (on average) the contribution of lw people to AI discourse will be worth all of the tradeoffs that comes with posting more on twitter

EDIT: in case we're talking about main posts, but I could see why posting replies debunking tweets or community notes could work

I love this. Strong upvoted. I wonder if there's a "silent majority" of folks who would tend to post (and upvote) reasonable things, but don't bother because "everyone knows there's no point in trying to have a civil discussion on Twitter".

Might there be a bit of a collective action problem here? Like, we need a critical mass of reasonable people participating in the discussion so that reasonable participation gets engagement and thus the reasonable people are motivated to continue? I wonder what might be done about that.

Keep in mind that long (>280 character) replies don't notify the people in the thread, so you have to manually tag them if you leave a high quality reply.

Strong agree. I think twitter and reposting stuff on other platforms is still neglected, and this is important to increase safety culture

im already on twitter but i saw this reposted on twitter and came to say i would be glad to see you there!

my one big recommendation is to focus on talking to people who seem reasonable and boosting ideas you like (vs trying to argue or dunk on ideas that are bad). twitter algo rewards any engagement so if you dont like what someone is saying, the best thing is to move on and talk to someone neutral or positive instead

Assuming that the goal is to 'raise the sanity waterline', I would recommend against engaging on most social media platforms, except for promoting content that resides outside the media circle (e.g. a book, blogpost, paper, etc...).
 

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