Thanks for this post. I especially found your point on treating the post-FTX challenge as a trust problem valuable. I always had a slightly bad feeling about this trend of trying to minimize reputational risks and distancing oneself from stuff that others might find controversial. After reading your post I have now more clarity regarding that.

Focussing on outward appearance comes with the risk of losing intellectual honesty and might not even be very effective at improving outward appearance as it is only treating the symptoms and might even seem deceptive or as if we had something to hide. I am not saying that one shouldn't care about outward appearance at all, but maybe it shouldn't be the main focus of dealing with the post-FTX challenge but rather thinking about it as a trust problem should be. The main priority should be to ensure that our community is worthy of our trust and that it creates value. I am aware that this is already happening to some degree, and I am not sure if it is possible to judge how much of it is by looking how much is publicly talked about it is, but if it is then outward appearance of EA is currently too much of a focus and making sure that EA is trustworthy, honest and true to its principles maybe deserves a little more attention.

Having a community worthy of our trust and one that is true to its original principles gets harder the larger the community gets, and it also gets harder when the community grows faster. I get the point that growing slower comes at a cost and more good can be done with a larger community but when slower growth means a healthier community that exists in a meaningful way for longer, then maybe that is a price we should be willing to pay.

Duncan Sabien's "Make more Grayspaces" is also interesting in this context. It describes a possible solution for how a growing community can stay true to its values. I am not sure if this solution would work for EA, but I found the description of the problem quite compelling.

I did, but I must confess that it wasn't for me. For some reason I found it really annoying to hear the two AI voices so often talk about their reactions or how they "felt" about a particular part of the book. I already find it annoying when humans do that instead of talking about the actual topic but when AIs fake that to appear more human like I find it quite irritating.

Sorry, I meant to write "ideas are more uncomfortable when they are new". Not because. 

Since you wrote "force", I assumed you'd be uncomfortable.

Yes, that is what I meant.

Ok, so your point is that ideas are more uncomfortable when they are new and when I already heard them, I'll find them less uncomfortable?

Not yet. To give the podcast the best chance, I'll start with a book summary that I think I'll enjoy. Once I've finished it, I'll decide how to proceed.

I am not sure what your point is regarding encountering those opinions in the wild. After listening to the book summary, it doesn't get easier to control how long I immerse myself in this in a conversation. But I don't think that is what you mean.

On your website you say that your goal with this project is to enable people to have their own informed opinion about a book so that they don't just repeat headlines. This is obviously a good thing, but I was skimming through the list of books and I must admit that for some my first reaction was "ok, you'll need to duraniumman that author's position to make me update my uninformed opinion on that book!" Of course, it is important to have a strong foundation on which to base a strong disagreement with a view. I am just not sure if I can force myself through it.

What is your view on this: If I rate the chance that my more informed view will be different to my less informed view very low and the chance that the experience will make me angry and sad very high, is it then worth doing? 

I want to be able to engage with opinions that I disagree with but for some opinions I find this very challenging. I am often wondering about how hard I should push myself here. Any thoughts on that?

I don't have a ChatGPT subscription. If I stop using their free tier, I think this has two effects: It benefits them because they can spend less resources on inference and it hurts them because investors lose trust in them. Do you think the expected net effect is positive or negative? Should I stop using their free tier if I want to protest against OpenAI? 

Also, I noticed that I can check multiple boxes on https://quitgpt.org/ and only one of them is "I cancelled my subscription". If I understand the footnote below the number displayed at the top (currently 1,200,000) correctly, it counts everyone who checked any of the boxes. I would be more curious about how high the number of only the people is, who canceled their subscription or commit to not paying for ChatGPT in the future.

Update: The Venue has changed. We will meet at Gunnar's place (address above).

The first four slides work now but unfortunately when I continue to the fifth slide, I get an error again.

Edit: It looks like that issue was now also fixed. Thanks :)

Is the problem on my side or is it also broken for others?