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Comment by PeteMichaud (petemichaud-1) on My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage) · 2021-10-22T12:35:54.890Z · LW · GW

The way I can make sense of seeking high-psychoticism people being morally equivalent to seeking high IQ systematizers, is if I drain any normative valance from "psychotic," and imagine there is a spectrum from autistic to psychotic. In this spectrum the extreme autistic is exclusively focused on exactly one thing at a time, and is incapable of cognition that has to take into account context, especially context they aren't already primed to have in mind, and the extreme psychotic can only see the globally interconnected context where everything means/is connected to everything else. Obviously neither extreme state is desirable, but leaning one way or another could be very helpful in different contexts.  

See also: indexicality.

On the other hand, back in my reflective beliefs, I think psychosis is a much scarier failure mode than "autism," on this scale, and I would not personally pursue any actions that pushed people toward it without, among other things, a supporting infrastructure of some kind for processing the psychotic state without losing the plot (social or cultural would work, but whatever).

Comment by PeteMichaud (petemichaud-1) on My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage) · 2021-10-18T07:14:42.324Z · LW · GW

It's always been a somewhat group-involved process, but yes, I was primarily responsible for hiring for roughly 2016 through the end of 2017, then it would have been Tim. But again, it's a small org and always involved some involvement of the whole group.