they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful
how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?
Adderall
I think it misses the word for the trees to put the emphasis on a libertarian bent. The British and American class systems are perfectly capable of enforcing the same rules for prestige and polite discussion in order to favour some preferred hegemonic power without endorsing libertarian values. Indeed libertarianism as a movement most certainly adopts those rules because - for all that it may derive political support from (primarily white) guys of all sorts of backgrounds - it’s a fundamentally aristocratic proposition, right down to almost absurdist details such as its propensity to distribute land amongst an elite who employ lesser beings to work it.
In the case of rationalism, the emphasis should instead be on control: Yudkowsky built his system to control what was and wasn’t acceptable thinking, ostensibly for the benefit of the thinker. Its departures from actually very good patterns of thinking are what take it into cult territory, as the rigidity of the rules meets the hard wall of reality, and forces adherents to choose between reality and fantasy.
And as I say below to David, sure, there were other trends in play (most especially - as I note above as well - the tendency for America’s moral arc to bend towards racism). But I’d push back on suggesting that IQ-fetishism is distinct from naive biologism. Rather, IQ-fetishism itself is an expression of naive biologism (as we can see tracing its antecedents through back to Herbert Spencer), because you don’t get IQ-fetishism without the spectres of relativism and nurturism which, politically, it purports to counter-act - “IQ” is a supposedly sound, stable, measurable, cognitive category, where the alternative is understood to be a tangled mess of occult entities which cannot be reduced to any structure in the brain (and IQ holds out the promise of being reducible to g, which is in its whole conception reducible to a structure in the brain).
In this way the speculative futurism is simply of a piece with the biologism: once you reduce everything to (this very peculiar and highly naive, already science-fictional, concept of) the physical, you can manipulate it to generate whatever future you want. By the same token, the eugenic and fascistic trend in science-fiction pursues the same conceptual route. But it is only with the right historical ingredients, and the right players to activate those ingredients - which is to say an unequal society and the tendency to have people who want to naturalise that inequality - that the mixture becomes potently racist, and Yudkowsky, so to speak, is the one building the pot to specification.
you just made me extremely aware of where i was, what i was doing, and how i was feeling, when i found out that the yud had an article in Time, and I am going to sue for the whiplash of realising how short a time ago that was
I’d say “what the fuck was a 30 year old man doing on a sugar daddy site” but you answered it pretty aptly
Fun to see gwern in there presumably telling a fib. I wonder what really happened when Metz “ghosted” him? I particularly enjoyed, this time, watching whatever uppers he’s on these days kick in (or wear off?) about halfway through writing the footnote he added to that comment.
THEY HAVE A THREAD ON HIP HOP!?> LINDA HOLD MY GODDAMN CLALS
Now hold on, I don’t want to say he’s WHOLLY wrong about my people
The specific guilty element here is sacrificial war with China, which they know to be a phantasm. Just America First foreign policy in general.
To be clear: it is all movie plot threats. At the very forefront of the entire “existential threat” space is nothing but a mid-1990s VHS library. Frankly if you want to understand like 50% of what goes on in AI at this point my recommendation is just that you read John Ganz and listen to his podcast, because 90s pop and politics culture is the connective tissue of the whole fucking enterprise.
The great philosophical dialogues in English - those by Berkeley, Hume, Lakatos - are few and far between. Perhaps there is a general awareness that only these exceptional stylists could pull off the rare trick of not obviously putting words into their antagonist’s mouths, even insofar as the author clearly took the view of his protagonist. Indeed there is still, two and a half centuries later, debate about whose view in his own dialogue Hume actually took - when the rather obvious and straightforward alternative was just writing down “this is what I fucking think, alright?” that aporetic flourish was precisely what justified writing it down in dialogue form in the first place.
If you want to prematurely end your stimulant rush, booze, GHB, or ketamine will do that.
Ketamine and booze will absolutely not do that, and for the love of God do not take GHB to cool off a rush, what in God’s name are you thinking, you ludicrous phoney
For anybody hard of hearing at the back, the combination of a “characteristically (neo/)lib failure of imagination” and a “Promethean ideology” is subtext for “striding confidently towards fascism”