Post #2769125

From the post linked ther0ein: There’s this thing Nate and Eliezer do where they proclaim some extremely nonobvious take about alignment, say it in the same tone they would use to declare that grass is green, and don’t really explain it. Gambling? In this establishment?! Nate thinks in a different ontology from everyone, and often communicates using weird analogies This feels like a misuse of the word ontology, but what do I know? when Nate thinks you don’t understand something or have a mistaken approach, he gets visibly distressed and sad. I think this conditioned us to express less disagreement with him. I have a bunch of disagreements from his world model, and could probably be convinced to his position on like 1/3 of them, but I’m too afraid to bring them all up and if I did he’d probably stop talking to me out of despair anyway. Wow, that’s a bad research supervisor. The structure where we would talk to Nate 4h/day for one out of every ~6 weeks was pretty bad for feedback loops. A short meeting every week would have been better, but Nate said this would be more costly for him. Wow, that’s a bad research supervisor. (Every functional research group I’ve been part of has had weekly staff meetings. Even the undergrads were encouraged to participate and got at least that much talking time with the professor.) In my frustration at the lack of concrete problems I asked Nate what research he would approve of outside of the main direction. We thought of two ideas […] I worked on these on and off for a few months without much progress, then went back to Nate to ask for advice. Nate clarified that he was not actually very excited about these directions himself, and it was more like “I don’t see the relevance here, but if you feel excited by these, I could see this not being totally useless”. Wow, that’s a bad research supervisor.