Practically A Book Review: Appendix to "Nonlinear's Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims" (ThingOfThings)

post by tailcalled · 2024-01-03T17:07:13.990Z · LW · GW · 25 comments

This is a link post for https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/practically-a-book-review-appendix

Subtitle: Taking nonprescription amphetamines across the U.S.-Mexico border is a felony

I haven't followed the controversy long enough to be able to tell how correct Ozy is, but what I like about this post is that I find it better structured than some posts, and with better focus on strategically relevant information.

For instance, in response to Nonlinear's claim that they weren't isolating Alice and Chloe, Ozy wrote:

Kat believes in the importance of digital nomads remaining socially connected to others. However, Kat and Emerson had a consistent pattern of encouraging Alice and Chloe to spend time with people they considered high value (i.e. effective altruists, especially those working in AI safety) instead of people they considered low-value. To be clear, Kat and Emerson didn't think Alice and Chloe should completely isolate themselves from people who weren’t effective altruists. Kat encouraged Alice and Chloe to call their families regularly. She explicitly supports spending some time with locals. Friends and family who didn't work in AI safety were invited to travel with Nonlinear, although they were lower priority to invite than AI safety people.

However, the vast majority of Kat’s evidence that she didn't isolate Alice and Chloe is evidence that she didn't isolate Alice and Chloe from effective altruists, particularly "top" effective altruists working in AI safety. Alice and Chloe were given lots of access to so-called top effective altruists: there was an average of 7 people living in the house. Nonlinear encouraged networking with FTX people. They traveled with Chloe's boyfriend, whom Kat Woods considered to "have high potential." Inviting people to travel with Nonlinear was framed as "one of the highest ROI things you can do”—that is, as an important means of bettering the world.

Kat and Emerson discouraged Alice from visiting her family because her trip overlapped with "some of the top figures in the field" coming to visit. (The chatlogs are suggestive that Alice timed her visit around a family emergency, but Kat doesn't explicitly mention this.) Kat also discouraged Alice from spending too much time socializing with locals, saying that she would have higher impact if she spent time with higher-value people.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to Nonlinear that Alice and Chloe might have been complaining about being isolated from people who aren't effective altruists.

I was thinking along similar lines when I was reading this part of Nonlinear's response, but I hadn't followed it well enough to make the argument in detail.

When I say "strategic", what I mean is that the above information focuses on the specifics of the relationships and the roles that people had. This is as opposed to "generic" meanings of "social isolation", which might simply be defined based on the presence or absence of other people.

(As a side-note, I think there might be a general rationality phenomenon to study here? The distinction between strategic phenomena and generic phenomena, and miscommunication/deception when one is substituted for the other. But this gets a bit off-topic for the overall post.)

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