It says he actually converted to Judaism during college, open question how formally, but he certainly acted the part, kippah and all.
It feels like it would be genuinely hard to discern where the gaslighting stops and the self delusion begins with this guy.
(No spoiler tags because it's just background lore for Dune that's very tangential to the main plot)
Dune - after catastrophic wars between humans and AIs, computers are forbidden.
That's a retcon from the incredibly shit Dune-quel books from like 15 years after the original author had died. The first Dune was written well before computers as we know them would come in vogue, and the Butlerian Jihad was meant to be a sweeping cultural revolution against the stranglehold that automated decision-making had achieved over society, fought not against off-brand terminators but the entrenched elites that monopolized access to the setting's equivalent to AI.
The inciting incident semi-canonically (via the Dune Encyclopedia) I think was some sort of robo-nurse casually euthanizing Serena Butler's newborn baby, because of some algorithmic verdict that keeping it alive didn't square with optimal utilitarian calculus.
tl;dr: The Butlerian Jihad originally seemed to be way more about against-the-walling the altmans and the nadellas and undoing the societal damage done by the proliferation of sfba rationalism, than it was about fighting epic battles against AI controlled mechs.
It's been ages since I read Hyperion but I think it's one of those settings that start out somewhat utopian but as the story progresses you are meant to realize they are deeply fucked.
Also I had to look up Camp of the Saints, and I think complaining about living there may be a racist dog whistle.
edit: So apparently it really is a huge racist shibboleth, which makes me wonder if it's common for grok to recommend it and nobody noticed because it's kind of obscure.
He claims he was explaining what others believe not what he believes
Others as in specifically his co-writer for AI2027 Daniel Kokotlajo, the actual ex-OpenAI researcher.
I'm pretty annoyed at having this clip spammed to several different subreddits, with the most inflammatory possible title, out of context, where the context is me saying "I disagree that this is a likely timescale but I'm going to try to explain Daniel's position" immediately before. The reason I feel able to explain Daniel's position is that I argued with him about it for ~2 hours until I finally had to admit it wasn't completely insane and I couldn't find further holes in it.
Pay no attention to this thing we just spent two hours exhaustively discussing that I totally wasn't into, it's not really relevant context.
Also the title is inflammatory only in the context of already knowing him for a ridiculous AI doomer, otherwise it's fine. Inflammatory would be calling the video economically illiterate bald person thinks evaluations force-buy car factories, China having biomedicine research is like Elon running SpaceX .
His commenters really didn't like the 'white' part.
In a completely unexpected turn of events this new experiment in mainstreaming eugenics is being currently boosted by siskind.
There's also the Julian Assange connection, so we can probably blame him for Trump being president as well.
Absolutely, you can't keep pandering to the so called anti-woke and not end up with a lot of incel-adjacent people in your spaces, and the eugenics undercurrent feeds directly into manosphere perceptions about optimizing dating and tying your self worth to your splachnocranium/neurocranium ratio.
More specifically Scott Alexander has pandered pretty aggressively to the Dogged Good Guy demographic, and is also on the hook for being all about the 'merits' of neoreaction, and people like Moldbug and Emil Kirkegaard are semi-regulars in his comment sections.
Also worth noting that before the infamous EY editorial in TIME that called for airstrikes against foreign datacenters to prevent clippy from going rogue, the previous time they covered ea/rat was to report that they appear to have a serious sexual exploitation problem.
On a more speculative note, some staples of the movement like effective polyamory may have come about directly from early rationalist inability to get any on the regular. Apparently if you go reddit spelunking it appears they also went through a phase of trying to ~~brainwash each other~~ optimize into bisexuality to stave off sexual frustration.
To the extent EA/rats perpetuate cult behavior, it's probably safe to say that neither EY nor any other high status individuals within the space are wanting for sex.
I didn’t know the “eu” in “eugenics” came from greek.
Further fun facts: Eugene (the name) is greek for noble born, but since like most people we did away with nobles a long time ago now eugenic just means to have good manners, so when the modern term 'eugenics' came to Greece it was regreekified into eugonics (ευγονική).
Yeah, once you get past the compsci word salad things like this start to turn up:
Student: But I can't be racist, I'm black! Can't I just show the compiler a selfie to prove I've got the wrong skin color to be racist?
Truly incisive social commentary, and probably one of those things you claim it's satire as soon as you get called on it.
Timnit briefly weighs in about being included in the doc, apparently she regrets it and says the filmmakers "sprinkle some [AI skeptics] in like chocolate chips to perform ethics".
She also calls Yud a eugenicist cult leader with nothing to show for.