Sam Altman Q&A Notes - Aftermath

There's also an ambiguity here about "how much can LWers discuss particular important questions or issues that are informed by stuff they learned from the meetup, or from p.b. and others' notes?".

I assume Sam's views are now generally 'in the water' on LW, and that it would be pretty costly for the whole community to permanently self-censor about them in all non-private discussion.

(Both because the info is pretty important and discussion-worthy, and because keeping long-term secrets tends to be very cognitively taxing. And people weren't warned in advance that they might have to permanently tag a bunch of complicated facts in their head as 'secret' and avoid mentioning them at all -- either at the meetup, AFAICT, or before reading p.b.'s post.)

I think it makes more sense for the norm to be something like 'don't make a big public list of Things Sam Said At The Meetup', 'don't go giving interviews to reporters about it', and 'don't title your posts "Sam Altman thinks X" if your only evidence is from the meetup', but for discussion of this stuff to otherwise be fair game going forward. (Maybe after a one-week moratorium or something, I dunno.)

Whether this term was being used also feels pretty cruxy to me, so other people chiming in would be useful (ironically it would be useful to have a recording of the talk so we could figure out what confidentiality request was made :P). 

I don't have a very good (or even halfway decent) memory for phrases, so I have no idea, and since no-one else heard it, I assume it wasn't said. Still, it seemed clear to me that the request was intended for the talk to be off the record, in the journalistic sense. 

The phrase "no recording and no transcript," which you seem to agree was said explicitly, seems to indicate that he didn't want there to be a record of what he said. At that point,  maybe you didn't technically do anything he requested you not to do, but it seems like the responsible  and decent thing would be to have asked Sam if he minded.

It may have been requested from the organizers and it may have been mentioned that there won't be a recording, but as far as I remember it was not requested from the participants.

I don't recall what phrase was used, but I thought that it was clear enough. If someone said that they agree to do a talk on the condition that there be no recording and no transcript, unlike every other talk in the series, it seems to take a really weird model of the situation to claim that you had no idea that they would not want people publicly posting notes. At the very least, it merits checking.

Sam has said he thought this was "off-the-record-ish" and it was clearly known that it not being recorded was a precondition for giving the talk. I don't recall what terms were used, but I thought it was pretty obvious - and Sam's later responses seem to agree - that he expected notes like this not to be made public.

Edit to add: I thought at the time that it was clear that this was off the record, despite that phrase likely not being used. If not, I would not have asked the question which I asked during the meetup.

But I have never seen an article pulled completely before.

It happened before, but it's quite rare. Normally when I've done it, I've left a note in an Open Thread, such as this case [LW(p) · GW(p)] where I moved to drafts a post that was talking about an ongoing legal case (now concluded). I think that's the last one I did, and it was four years ago? But there are other mods as well.

This was new to me too, and I didn't like how muddy it made the waters. Thank you for the information! It bounds the badness, which is comforting <3

Newspapers are mostly garbage, and I do not, by default, admire their epistemic or typical "moral" standards.

To the degree that the first amendment is wise, it is by making sure that if evil powers are temporarily in control of the government, even then they can't prevent the spread of the truth, because the tools for the spreading of truth are so clearly protected that even the spreaders of intellectual sewage are granted the right to operate.

Newspapers rake muck through exaggeration, and spread falsehoods, and bash people indirectly during political seasons, and build viewership via tabloid antics when no elections are at stake.

The whole thing is is essentially patrimonial with the Owner/CEOs and the CEO's delegated Editors as the monarch-like rulers-over-the-mere-writers, with the powerful folk existing in a murky world of favors and dirty deals, and the minions towing the line as they must, because they are working stiffs who need a job, and some things are "above their pay grade". This works for some things, like making ice cream and building houses. Capitalism, baby!

Lesswrong does not pay the writers that I've heard of? And Lesswrong doesn't direct our writing. And I think probably: thank goodness for that?

You say:

I don't consider it censorship if a newspaper and journalist agree to spike a story

Contrast this with my claim over in a cousin comment (which did not have the bold over there):

Certainly, if there is a call to be made, the call should be made by the author, not the mods.

I don't want to harp too much on this bit, which feels close to the crux for me... 

Reading above, Ruby claims to have the final say... and used her final say to say that it was the author's say... 

This is a beautiful waffle, and Ruby perhaps deserves a very prestigious and beautiful Reagan Clinton Trump Teflon Waffleiron Award for wiggling out of this mess without ceding power or offending very many people <3

But like: If Lesswrong was just definitely and clearly a patrimonial system, and the mods often spiked stories as a favor to rich guys, because maybe the mods want to make the rich guy comfortable, because the rich guys have power and could do favors in return...

...then I think maybe I would be done with Lesswrong?

I wrote a lot more words about the abstract principle here, but I think they can be boiled down to:

(1) Sending written things down the memory hole is a bad policy for a platform that isn't just for commerce and shilling.

(2) I'm an inclusionist. Good people, cooperating to build pro-social communications infrastructure, should treat the censorship of truth as damage, and route around this damage.

(3) Lesswrong should not use people who aren't actually that good (like most for-profit news organizations and those who work in them) as role models.