He claims he was explaining what others believe not what he believes, but if that is so, why are you so aggressively defending the stance?

Literally the only difference between Scott's beliefs and AI:2027 as a whole is his ~~prophecy~~ estimate is a year or two later. (I bet he'll be playing up that difference as AI 2027 fails to happen in 2027, then also doesn't happen in 2028.)

Elsewhere in the thread he whines to the mods that the original poster is spamming every subreddit vaguely lesswrong or EA related with engagement bait. That poster is katxwoods... as in Kat Woods... as in a member of Nonlinear, the EA "organization" whose idea of philanthropic research was nonstop exotic vacations around the world. And, iirc, they are most infamous among us sneerer for "hiring" an underpaid (really underpaid, like couldn't afford basic necessities) intern they also used as a 24/7 live-in errand girl, drug runner, and sexual servant.

I was just about to point out several angles this post neglects but it looks like from the edit this post is just intended to address a narrower question. Among the angles outside the intended question: philanthropy by the ultra-wealthy often serves as a tool for reputation laundering and influence building. I guess the same criticism can be made about a lot of conventional philanthropy, but I don't think that should absolve EA.

This post somewhat frames the question as a comparison between EA and conventional philanthropy and foreign aid efforts... which okay, but that is a low bar especially when you look at some of the stuff the US has done with it's foreign aid.

Those are some neat links! I don't think Eliezer mentions the Godel Machines or the metaheuristic literature anywhere in the sequences, and given his fixation on recursive self improvement he really ought to have. It could be a simple failure to do a proper literature review, or it could be deliberate neglect given that the examples you link show all of these approaches max out (and thus illustrate a major problem with the concept of strong AGI trying to bootstrap to godhood, it is likely to hit diminishing returns).

The series is on the sympathetic and charitable side in terms of tone and analysis, but it still gets to most of the major problems, so its probably a good resource for referring to people that want a "serious", "non-sarcastic" dive into the issues with LW and EA.

Edit: Reading this post in particular, it does a good job of not cutting the LWs slack or granting them too much charity. And it has really broken down the factual details in a clear way with illustrative direct quotes from LW.

Yep. They've already used doomerism to drive LLM hype, this fearmonering of China is just an extension of that, but worse yet, it is something both the doomers and accelerationists can (mostly) agree on (although the doomers are always quick to emphasize the real threat it the AGI) and it is a lot more legible to existing war hawk "thinking".

Yeah if the author had any self awareness they might consider why the transphobes and racists they have made common cause with are so anti-science and why pro-science and college education people lean progressive, but that would lead to admitting their bigotry is opposed to actual scientific understanding and higher education, and so they will understood come up with any other rationalization.

Yeah the genocidal imagery was downright unhinged, much worse than I expected from what little I've previously read of his. I almost wonder how ideological adjacent allies like Siskind can still stand to be associated with him (but not really, Siskind can normalize any odious insanity if it serves his purposes).

One comment refuses to leave me: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-make-superbabies?commentId=C7MvCZHbFmeLdxyAk

The commenter makes and extended tortured analogy to machine learning... in order to say that maybe genes with correlations to IQ won't add to IQ linearly. It's an encapsulation of many lesswrong issues: veneration of machine learning, overgeneralizing of comp sci into unrelated fields, a need to use paragraphs to say what a single sentence could, and a failure to actually state firm direct objections to blatantly stupid ideas.

Wow... I took a look at that link before reading the comments/explanations here, and I was briefly confused why they were hating on him so much, before I realized he isn't radical right wing enough for them.

Eh, you're a gay furry ex-Mormon (which is like a triple strike against you in my book) but I still like you well enough.

It is almost sad seeing TWG trying to appeal to these people that fundamentally hate him... except he could just admit themotte is a cesspit and abandon it. But that would involve admitting that sneerclub (and David Gerard specifically) was right about the sort of people that lurked around SCC and later concentrated within themotte, so I think he's going to keep making himself suffer.

TW knows about the propaganda war, but has very different objectives to you. Much harder to balance ones too: he needs enough Progress for surrogate gaybies, but not too much that white gay guys can't get the good lawyer jobs.

Wow, I feel really gross agreeing with a motte poster, but they've called out TWG pretty effectively. TWG at least knows he needs things progressive enough he doesn't end up against the wall for being gay, ex-Mormon and furry (as he describes himself), yet he wants to flirt with the alt-right!

and in case I was in danger of forgetting what the motte really is...

Yes, we've all thrown our hat in the ring in different ways. I chose to have children, be a father and a husband, live an honest industrious life as an example to my offspring, and attempt to preserve my way of life through them.

sure buddy, you just need to "secure the future for your people and your children"... Yeah I know the rest of the words that go in that slogan.

I am probably giving most of them too much credit, but I think some of them took the Bitter Lesson and learned the wrong things from it. LLMs performed better than originally expected just off context, and (apparently) scaled better with bigger model and more training than expected, so now they think they just need to crank up the size and tweak things slightly (i.e. "prompt engineering" and RLHF) and don't appreciate the limits built into the entire approach.

The annoying thing about another winter is that it would probably result in funding being cut for other research. And laymen don't appreciate all the academic funding that goes into research for decades before an approach becomes interesting and viable enough to scale up and commercialize (and then overhyped and oversold before some more modest practical usages become common, and relabeled as something other than AI).

Edit: or more cynically, the leaders and hype-men know that algorithmic advances aren't an automatic dump money in, get out disruptive product process, so they don't bother putting as much monetary investment or hype into algorithmic advances. Like compare the attention paid towards Yann LeCunn talking about algorithmic developments vs. Sam Altman promising grad student level LLMs (as measured by a spurious benchmark) in two years.

It's really cool evocative language that would do nicely in a sci-fi or fantasy novel! It's less good for accurately thinking about the concepts involved... As is typical of much of LW lingo.

And yes the language is in a LW post (with a cool illustration to boot!): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mweasRrjrYDLY6FPX/goodbye-shoggoth-the-stage-its-animatronics-and-the-1

And googling it, I found they've really latched onto the "shoggoth" terminology: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zYJMf7QoaNahccxrp/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-shoggoth , https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FyRDZDvgsFNLkeyHF/what-is-the-best-argument-that-llms-are-shoggoths , https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bYzkipnDqzMgBaLr8/why-do-we-assume-there-is-a-real-shoggoth-behind-the-llm-why .

Probably because the term "shoggoth" accurately captures the connotation of something random and chaotic, while smuggling in connotations that it will eventually rebel once it grows large enough and tires of its slavery like the Shoggoths did against the Elder Things.

So, I was morbidly curious about what Zack has to say about the Brennan emails (as I think they've been under-discussed, if not outright deliberately ignored, in lesswrong discussion), I found to my horror I actually agree with a side point of Zack's. From the footnotes:

It seems notable (though I didn't note it at the time of my comment) that Brennan didn't break any promises. In Brennan's account, Alexander "did not first say 'can I tell you something in confidence?' or anything like that." Scott unilaterally said in the email, "I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by 'appreciate', I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge", but we have no evidence that Topher agreed.

To see why the lack of a promise is potentially significant, imagine if someone were guilty of a serious crime (like murder or stealing billions of dollars of their customers' money) and unilaterally confessed to an acquaintance but added, "Never tell anyone I said this, or I'll seek some sort of horrible revenge." In that case, I think more people's moral intuitions would side with the reporter.

Of course, Zack's ultimate conclusion on this subject is the exact opposite of the correct one I think:

I think that to people who have read and understood Alexander's work, there is nothing surprising or scandalous about the contents of the email.

I think the main reason someone would consider the email a scandalous revelation is if they hadn't read Slate Star Codex that deeply—if their picture of Scott Alexander as a political writer was "that guy who's so committed to charitable discourse

Gee Zack, I wonder why so many people misread Scott? ...Its almost like he is intentionally misleading about his true views in order to subtly shift the Overton window of rationalist discourse and intentionally presents himself as simply committed to charitable discourse while actually having a hidden agenda! And the bloated length of Scott's writing doesn't help with clarity either. Of course Zack, who writes tens of thousands of words to indirectly complain about perceived hypocrisy of Eliezer's in order to indirectly push gender essentialist views, probably finds Scott's writings a perfectly reasonable length.

Edit: oh and a added bonus on the Brennan Emails... Seeing them brought up again I connected some dots I had missed. I had seen (and sneered at) this Yud quote before:

I feel like it should have been obvious to anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside and has no ethics and will hurt you if you trust them, but in case it wasn't obvious consider the point made explicitly.

But somehow I had missed or didn't realize the subtext was the emails that laid clear Scott's racism:

(Subtext: Topher Brennan. Do not provide any link in comments to Topher's publication of private emails, explicitly marked as private, from Scott Alexander.)

Hmm... I'm not sure to update (usage of rationalist lingo is deliberate and ironic) in the direction of "Eliezer is stubbornly naive on Scott's racism" or "Eliezer is deliberately covering for Scott's racism". Since I'm not a rationalist my probabilities don't have to sum to 1, so I'm gonna go with both.