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I just got done listening to Eliezer Yudkowski on EconTalk (https://www.econtalk.org/eliezer-yudkowsky-on-the-dangers-of-ai/).
I say this as someone who's mostly convinced of Big Yud's doomerism: Good lord, what a train wreck of a conversation. I'll save you the bother of listening to it -- Russ Roberts starts by asking a fairly softball question of (paraphrasing) "Why do you think the AIs will kill all of humanity?" And Yudkowski responds by asking Roberts "Explain why you think they won't, and I'll poke your argument until it falls apart." Russ didn't really give strong arguments, and the rest of the interview repeated this pattern a couple times. THIS IS NOT THE WAY HUMANS HAVE CONVERSATIONS! Your goal was not logically demolish Russ Roberts' faulty thinking, but to use Roberts as a sounding board to get your ideas to his huge audience, and you completely failed. Roberts wasn't convinced by the end, and I'm sure EY came off as a crank to anyone who was new to him.
I hope EY lurks here, or maybe someone close to him does. Here's my advice: if you want to convince people who are not already steeped in your philosophy you need to have a short explanation of your thesis that you can rattle off in about 5 minutes that doesn't use any jargon the median congresscritter doesn't already know. You should workshop it on people who don't know who you are, don't know any math or computer programming and who haven't read the Sequences, and when the next podcast host asks you why AIs will kill us all, you should be able to give a tight, logical-ish argument that gets the conversation going in a way that an audience can find interesting. 5 minutes can't cover everything so different people will poke and prod your argument in various ways, and that's when you fill in the gaps and poke holes in their thinking, something you did to great effect with Dwarkesh Patel (https://youtube.com/watch?v=41SUp-TRVlg&pp=ygUJeXVka293c2tp). That was a much better interview, mostly because Patel came in with much more knowledge and asked much better questions. I know you're probably tired of going over the same points ad nauseam, but every host will have audience members who've never heard of you or your jargon, and you have about 5 minutes to hold their interest or they'll press "next".
I don't know EY at all, but if you actually want to impute some knowledge to him, posting it on a forum he may or may not read, or possibly an associate may or may not read ....
Probably isn't an effective strategy.
While he has some notoriety, he doesn't seem like a particularly difficult person to reach.
That said, "hey, in this interview, you sucked", probably won't get you the desired effect you're hoping for.
Some sort of non-public communication - "hey, I watched this interview you did, its seemed like a succinct 'elevator pitch' of your position might have helped it go better, I've watched/listened/read alot of your (material/stuff/whatever), here is an elevator pitch that I think communicates your position, if it would be helpful, you're free to use it, riff off of it, and change it how you see fit. It meant to help, be well"
might get you closer to the desired effect you're hoping for.
Being good at media appearances is a tough deal, some people spend a lot of money on media training, and still aren't very good at it.
Is there any evidence he's spent money on it?
I recall EY being in the public eye for at least a decade now - I first saw him due to Methods of Rationality. There's no way he should be that bad at it. People here were complaining about him blowing weirdness points on fedoras and things like that. I don't think he can't learn not to do that over a decade.
I think, like a lot of nerds, he simply didn't care (helps that AI wasn't a big normie topic). Of course, he claims to be a "rationalist" so it's damning but it is what it is.
I suspect he hasn't, if the hat was passed around, are you putting money into it?
I don't think most people who haven't been exposed to public criticism have a good sense for how they would respond to it if they were.
I suspect most people would react in 1 of 2 ways.
Find it extremely unpleasant and basically avoid any exposure to it again, ie shut up and go away (to some degree, this is how SA has handled it)
Find it extremely unpleasant and dismiss as invalid out of hand, in a way that makes it difficult to make any improvement, (I suspect this is how EY has largely handled it).
The people who can expose themselves to it, keep coming back for more, but stay open to improvement.
That's actually a pretty rare psychological skill set.
No, but I wasn't of the tribe anyway . Plenty of people were onboard with EY intellectually and would have given him money at the time.
(Isn't he also an autodidact? There's always that...)
Absolutely. But then, so is rationality in general. I'd hope there'd be more of an overlap between claiming to be a rationalist and applying that logic to things that are relatively low cost but likely to have an impact on what you claim is an existential issue.
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