LessWrong dev & admin as of July 5th, 2022.
Clarifying a couple of points:
I don't think that the top-level comment is particularly responsive to the post, except insofar as it might have taken the title as a call to action (and then ignored the rest of the post). It's also quite vague. But I agree that a ban seems like an unusually harsh response, absent additional context which supports the "provocation" interpretation.
Yes, I agree that there's a non-trivial divide in attitude. I don't think the difference in discussion is surprising, at least based on a similar pattern observed with the response to FTX. From a quick search and look at the tag, there were on the order of 10 top-level posts on the subject on LW. There are 151 posts under the FTX collapse tag on the EA forum, and possibly more untagged.
There's definitely no censorship of the topic on LessWrong. Obviously I don't know for sure why discussion is sparse, but my guess is that people mostly (and, in my opinion, correctly) don't think it's a particularly interesting or fruitful topic to discuss on LessWrong, or that the degree to which it's an interesting subject is significantly outweighed by mindkilling effects.
Edit: with respect to the rest of the comment, I disagree that rationalists are especially interested in object-level discussion of the subjects, but probably are much more likely to disapprove of the idea that discussion of the subject should be verboten.
I think the framing where Bostrom's apology is a subject which has to be deliberately ignored is mistaken. Your prior for whether something sees active discussion on LessWrong is that it doesn't, because most things don't, unless there's a specific reason you'd expect it to be of interest to the users there. I admit I haven't seen a compelling argument for there being a teachable moment here, except the obvious "don't do something like that in the first place", and perhaps "have a few people read over your apology with a critical eye before posting it" (assuming that didn't in fact happen). I'm sure you could find a way to tie those in to the practice of rationality, but it's a bit of a stretch.
It's possible I've flipped the sign on what you're saying, but if I haven't, I'm pretty sure most EAs are not moral realists, so I don't know where you got the impression that it's an underlying assumption of any serious EA efforts.
If I did flip the sign, then I don't think it's true that moral realism is "too unquestioned". At this point it might be more fair to say that too much time & ink has been spilled on what's frankly a pretty trivial question that only sees as much engagement as it does because people get caught up in arguing about definitions of words (and, of course, because some other people are deeply confused).
If your headline claim is that someone has a "fairly poor track record of correctness", then I think "using a representative set of examples" to make your case is the bare-minimum necessary for that to be taken seriously, not an isolated demand for rigor.
My guess is that he meant the sequences convey the kind of more foundational epistemology which helps people people derive better models on subjects like AI Alignment by themselves, though all of the sequences in The Machine in the Ghost and Mere Goodness have direct object-level relevance.
Excepting Ngo's AGI safety from first principles, I don't especially like most of those resources as introductions exactly because they offer readers very little opportunity to test or build on their beliefs. Also, I think most of them are substantially wrong. (Concrete Problems in AI Safety seems fine, but is also skipping a lot of steps. I haven't read Unsolved Problems in ML Safety.)
“I don’t currently have much sympathy for someone who’s highly confident that AI takeover would or would not happen (that is, for anyone who thinks the odds of AI takeover … are under 10% or over 90%).”
I find this difficult to square with the fact that:
I can imagine having an "all things considered" estimation (integrating model uncertainty, other people's predictions, etc) of under 90% for failure. But I don't understand writing off the epistemic position of someone who has an "inside view" estimation of >90% failure, especially given the enormous variation of probability distributions that people have over timelines (which I agree are an important, though not overwhelming, factor when it comes to estimating chances of failure). Indeed, an "extreme" inside view estimation conditional on short timelines seems much less strange to me than a "moderate" one. (The only way a "moderate" estimation makes sense to me is if it's downstream of predicting the odds of success for a specific research agenda, such as in John Wentworth's The Plan - 2022 Update, and I'm not even sure one could justifiably give a specific research agenda 50% odds of success nearly a decade out as the person who came up with it, let alone anyone looking in from the outside.)
There's obviously substantial disagreement here, but the most recent salient example (and arguably the entire surrounding context of OpenAI as an institution).
No, sorry, I meant that at the time the feature was released (a few months ago), it didn't have any karma requirement.