Yes. I’m going to attempt a post-mortem with more detail, but I would not be surprised if it contains more social climbing.
My first guess was that the way I’d used “collateral” was incorrect. So I searched it to see what would come up.
After finding my definition of “collateral”, I considered the possibility that maybe there was something else grammatical I’d done wrong in the phrase “written some business collateral” unrelated to the word “collateral”. I came up empty. Despite that, I figured there was a decent chance I had done something wrong unrelated to “collateral” that would sooner or later come to light.
I did notice mine was definition 4 out of 4 for collateral, and I considered mentioning that as a possible reason ET didn’t know what I meant. But I was wary of looking bad for trying to lecture/correct ET again with a suggestion that he wasn’t aware of a valid definition for “collateral”. So I suppressed that.
Meaning:
was actually a lie. I did have another guess, that ET was unfamiliar with the way I had used “collateral”. But I was unwilling to take that guess seriously or think about reasons that might be, like my use being uncommon. I feared looking bad when, as I judged decently likely, it turned out that ET knew the use of “collateral” I was using but I’d made some other error.
And then:
was a misleading rationalization. I legit wasn’t thinking about other definitions for “business collateral”, but I was aware of the other definitions for “collateral” that I’d just read.
So you doubted my negative judgment re SENS, undertook a major project by betting on me being wrong, didn’t debate any of it or even say you were doing this, did nothing to find out what other criticisms of SENS I had that I hadn’t already posted (since no one was arguing with the ones I already posted, they seemed adequate, there was no reason for me to attempt completeness) … and that failed spectacularly. And you did all this with no contingency plan, so now when it turns out that I’m right you just “don’t know what to do”.
Having no contingency plan really shows a lack of respect for my judgment, and for the philosophical accomplishments underlying it.
And you haven’t given any acknowledgment that I was right years in advance, you were wrong, this is a major demonstration of my good judgment, your actions fit into very standard patterns of irrational behavior that I’ve repeatedly publicly explained (you ignored that too with no debate, bet your project on that being ok, and failed), etc. No “My bad, I should have listened; I’ll listen next time”. No “you told me so”.
You’ve said some stuff about critical arguments discouraging you from doing projects. That is shooting the messenger. You thought you could ignore criticism about SENS but reality said “no”. You can ignore messengers but the problems come from reality not from critics. You can’t fix plans that don’t make sense and address reality, and have no good way to succeed, by evading criticism. Understanding what won’t work and why is a huge competitive advantage that you have not embraced.
You’re lucky SENS blew up so visibly when it did. You could have wasted the next 10+ years (while feeling good about yourself and believing you were doing important work) if you ignored my criticism and no scandal came out.
Yes. One way I disagree with this summary is I thought that we approximately agreed about SENS itself and our disagreement was about whether it was better to help SENS first or learn/promote better thinking methods first.
I don’t understand. Did you read my posts? I had a long discussion with AdG where I discovered e.g. that he is clueless about cryonics (but he thinks he’s an expert, funds it, promotes it, etc.). There were other serious problems. I then wrote a critical letter to SENS and then another post about their huge problems that ended:
By the way, I’m not even going to send AdG a link to this, even though we had a long discussion before. I wrote to him to tell him I’d given up on SENS – and why. He did not reply. He is too unreasonable to talk to, or tell things like this. He won’t listen. I think it’s hopeless. It’s a ridiculous situation. I may well literally die because AdG won’t listen, and yet he convinced me to give up…
I could fucking cry.
Steve Jobs apologized to Seva for trying to help. At least I won’t be apologizing to SENS.
No source link because you know what I mean, right? … right? If you can’t find it I can link it.
I said it was hopeless, that AdG won’t listen, and that I gave up on SENS. (I believed that other people at SENS would not listen more/better than AdG. E.g. Michael Rae was worse. And AdG was in charge anyway.)
I went on the record publicly, under my real name, about this. It’s on my website live right now.
CAVEAT 1:
I readily accept that I could have been wrong in thinking we approximately agreed about SENS itself. My point was that I disagree with your summary’s statement:
…at least in so far as I did not think I was doubting your judgment re SENS nor undertaking a major project by betting on you being wrong about SENS.
CAVEAT 2:
My explicit goal with what follows is to look at whether I had a reasonable basis for thinking I agreed with your public judgments about SENS. I could instead be paying selective attention or taking things out of context for social reasons. That’s not my conscious intent, and I’ve tried to maximize my use of direct quotes with lots of context to help prevent that. But it could still be what’s going on.
CAVEAT 3: This post violates my recent effort to keep replies short, because I don’t know a way to get my analysis across in short chunks.
THE IDEA (what I meant by “SENS itself”):
Prior to starting my project I thought I agreed with you about (approximately):
SENS has multiple, serious flaws. If not corrected these flaws will slow its progress substantially, costing millions or billions of lives. Both AdG and the SENS organization are, unreasonably, not listening to you and correcting the flaws or answering your criticisms.
However, the SENS technical approach to solving aging developed by AdG is the best we know of, and the SENS organization is a good thing and SENS is better than its rivals at working against aging.
ANALYSIS:
When I saw your summary in this thread I went back over some of your SENS material to see where I might have gotten the idea that I agreed with you about SENS itself. I found several references, including the one you quoted above. All bold emphasis was added by me.
From March 5, 2015 (after your discussion with AdG but before the post you quoted):
I sent the below letter to SENS, which is a medical research non-profit seeking to solve human aging. I like them because they have a good plan for how to do this which makes sense.
The rest of that post goes on to point out multiple very serious flaws in SENS. But just before the bottom there’s:
But Aubrey asked me to write (some of) this, and anyway I think it’s interesting. And SENS is important – as far as medical science, it impresses me more than anything else I’ve seen – so I hope this helps.
Which kinda matches the part of my idea about SENS having multiple serious flaws but still being good.
Then there’s two links, one of which is broken.
The other (unbroken) link is from March 27, 2015 and contains the section you quoted above about giving up on SENS.
Giving up on SENS sure sounds at face value like a strong disagreement with my idea. I suppose (I don’t actually remember) I took it to mean you’d given up trying to talk to SENS or otherwise get SENS to improve.
Nor did I take the post you quoted as your last opinion on SENS before I started my project. I didn’t even remember that post until I found it in my search. In early 2020 you created a blog post for discussing anti-aging:
Discuss SENS, Ending Aging, longevity, immortality, croyonics, gerontology, etc.
Here’s a YouTube playlist with 200 AdG videos. Other anti-aging ideas besides AdG’s are also welcome.
All quotes that follow are from that post’s comment thread.
On February 19, 2020 you wrote a comment (quoted in entirety, but bold emphasis added by me):
If Paths Forward, Discussion Trees, Yes or No Philosophy, etc. caught on, people would be a lot better at discussing to actually reach a conclusion and not ignoring arguments and criticism.
Then SENS would very rapidly get a lot more funding or there would be some outstanding arguments about why it doesn’t merit that funding. It wouldn’t stay in its current limbo of appearing to have arguments meriting more funding but then those arguments seem to be largely ignored by almost everyone who controls a lot of money.
Better thinking/discussing methods give a large edge to good ideas. So SENS either is a good idea and would be massively benefitted, or we’d discover it’s not and try something else instead, which AdG and all the rest would be glad to discover because this would involve arguments that actually convince them and answer all their questions and objections, so everyone would prefer to move on to some other research approaches. I don’t expect SENS to be not worth funding and trying, but the point is in either scenario resolving arguments more is better, while leaving them so unresolved and disorganized is bad. Better philosophy would be good for SENS. (It’d also help with the research and scientific debates).
In another comment on February 19, 2020 you wrote:
I do think there’s a case that SENS is underfunded, needs more smart people desperately, etc. and that maybe you could make a difference. The case should be written down and analyzed though. It should be recognized as something kinda unusual, a significant claim that goes against some standard ways things work.
On February 20, 2020 you wrote the following comment about one of SENS’ rivals:
the Google founders made Calico to help defeat aging, but they did it wrong and it’s basically not productive, and tons of money is being wasted. Their bad and lazy thinking – more about virtue signaling than results – is a huge problem. But I don’t want to overstate the problem because many other billionaires aren’t trying to help rather than helping badly, so Calico isn’t worse than that and may do some useful non-SENS type medical research. AdG says the reason Calico doesn’t fix its problems is ego and social status stuff: Larry and Sergey don’t want to admit they made any mistakes.
I took this to mean you thought SENS is better than Calico, but Calico is not worse than zero and maybe slightly positive.
On Feb 28, 2020 you posted links to a couple of streams criticizing a SENS related paper. I asked the following questions in response:
For example, do you think the paper being trash and no other recent non-trash papers being easily found rules out the idea that SENS is much better than other other organizations working on the aging problem?
Does the paper being trash shed any light on whether the best anti-aging strategy would be to reform an existing organization or start an entirely new one?
Or does one paper being trash really not mean much and we’d need to look at a bunch more to have reasonable insights to the kind of questions above?
And in response you wrote on March 8, 2020:
I gave my conclusions more in the second stream about the paper. Nothing really changed in the third. I think the paper is one red flag, but normal, at the same time.
Your hypothetical about no non-trash papers doesn’t work b/c the book Ending Aging is good (at least according to my evaluation when I first read it). It’s not a paper but the format isn’t the point here. If they actually had no good materials then yeah it’d be implausible they were good, but the reason i thought they were good is that they DO have good material.
I re-listened to the second stream and didn’t hear comments about giving up on SENS, or SENS being zero or worse than zero value, etc.
CONCLUSION:
I think the one post you quoted, taken alone, would have made it unreasonable for me to think I was in agreement with you about SENS itself. However, I don’t think it was unreasonable for me to think I was in agreement with you about SENS itself given the other posts I quoted, especially the blog discussion from early 2020.
To be clear, I did knowingly disagree with you about some other relevant things like whether I should get better at philosophy before trying to help SENS and whether any plan to help SENS should be shared publicly and exposed to criticism on curi/FI/CF before implementation.
And your approach was to ignore those flaws and do some marketing (which you aren’t even good at) instead of trying to come up with a plan to address them?
So you weren’t betting against me on the basis that, actually, you chose not to even know what I wrote or thought…?
Everything I said later was intended in the context of what I already said, which I reasonably expected you to have familiarized yourself with.
I think that’s close to right, but “ignorable” is somewhat overstating my position. I didn’t intend to ignore the flaws. For example, I figured that if I could generate a significant amount of new donations and/or new donors for SENS they might listen to suggestions from me about improving the flaws.
I wonder how clear the issue of a risk of failure was to Andy. More specifically, I wonder what the goals he had in mind - both for himself in helping SENS, and in how he’d evaluate the SENS project. The goals in mind would be relevant for judging the risk of failure.
Like, did he hope to get personal benefit from helping SENS (so, success within his lifetime?). If so, that sounds like an issue where you need to be very mindful of major things slowing down progress.
Or did he just want to support an effort that was making some kind of progress towards life extension, and decided SENS was the least bad one? That seems like not a great/ambitious goal - basically just wanting to be some non-zero amount of helpful and trying to pick the best option from existing options. But maybe if that was the goal, then you could worry less about major threats to rapid progress.
So basically, the more ambitious/important/time sensitive Andy’s goals were, the more he should have been alert to the issues of major problems/criticisms with SENS.
Here’s the the previous time Andy said he was trying to ignore the flaws instead of address them. This is from 5 days ago, whereas the contradiction I quoted above is under an hour apart. This previous exchange informed what I said in my question, which was an attempt to re-confirm prior information. And then he did confirm it … only to deny it a few messages later.
Note the misleading dishonesty of talking about “known flaws” regarding my pre-existing writing that he did not remember. The flaws were not known to him because he didn’t reread my criticisms.
And the “main reason” was misleading too: he hadn’t actually looked for better orgs.