Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Other people are wrong vs I am right, published by Buck the LessWrong. I’ve recently been spending some time thinking about the rationality mistakes I’ve made in the past. Here’s an interesting one: I think I have historically been too hasty to go from “other people seem very wrong on this topic” to “I am right on this topic”. Throughout my life, I’ve often thought that other people had beliefs that were really repugnant and stupid. Now that I am older and wiser, I still think I was correct to think that these ideas were repugnant and stupid. Overall I was probably slightly insufficiently dismissive of things like the opinions of apparent domain experts and the opinions of people who seemed smart whose arguments I couldn’t really follow. I also overrated conventional wisdom about factual claims about how the world worked, though I underrated conventional wisdom about how to behave. Examples of ideas where I thought the conventional wisdom was really dumb: I thought that animal farming was a massive moral catastrophe, and I thought it was a sign of terrible moral failure that almost everyone around me didn’t care about this and wasn’t interested when I brought it up. I thought that AI safety was a big deal, and I thought the arguments against it were all pretty stupid. (Nowadays the conventional wisdom has a much higher opinion of AI safety; I’m talking about 2010-2014.) I thought that people have terrible taste in economic policy, and that they mostly vote for good-sounding stuff that stops sounding good if you think about it properly for even a minute I was horrified by people proudly buying products that said “Made in Australia” on them; I didn’t understand how that wasn’t obviously racist, and I thought that we should make it much easier to allow anyone who wants to to come live in Australia. (This one has become much less controversial since Trump inadvertently convinced liberals that they should be in favor of immigration liberalization.) I thought and still think that a lot of people’s arguments about why it’s good to call the police on bike thieves were dumb. See eg many of the arguments people made in response to a post of mine about this (that in fairness was a really dumb post, IMO) I think I was right about other people being wrong. However, I think that my actual opinions on these topics were pretty confused and wrong, much more than I thought at the time. Here’s how I updated my opinion for all the things above: I have updated against the simple view of hedonic utilitarianism under which it’s plausible that simple control systems can suffer. A few years ago, I was seriously worried that the future would contain much more factory farming and therefore end up net negative; I now think that I overrated this fear, because (among other arguments) almost no-one actually endorses torturing animals, we just do it out of expediency, and in the limit of better technology our weak preferences will override our expediency. My understanding of AI safety was “eventually someone will build a recursively self improving singleton sovereign AGI, and we need to figure out how to build it such that it can have an off switch and it implements some good value function instead of something bad.” I think this picture was massively oversimplified. On the strategic side, I didn’t think about the possibilities of slower takeoffs or powerful technologies without recursive self improvement; on the technical safety side, I didn’t understand that it’s hard to even build a paperclip maximizer, and a lot of our effort might go into figuring out how to do that. Other people have terrible taste in economic policy, but I think that I was at the time overconfident in various libertarianish ideas that I’m now less enthusiastic about. Also, I no longer think it’s a slam dunk that society is b...