quiet_NaN
1d ago
Is anyone arguing for "give Eliezer and Scott full exclusive access to prompting the first ASI instead of Sam or Dario"?
Last time I was checking, they were mostly pushing for pausing the training of bigger models. Their take is not "we have solved alignment, here is the perfect list of preferences to give AI", but "alignment seems really hard, we should not build ASI until we have solved it".
Perhaps Eliezer believes in his heart of hearts that the best outcome is a society which uses the tools of totalitarianism to crack down on any AI development, but he is not in the position to do that and will never be.
If we manage to coordinate and build aligned ASI, then we will not simply put Eliezer's value system into it, because quite frankly Eliezer is not a critical stakeholder with whom one needs to coordinate. Likely the USG would get 30%, Anthropic and OpenAI would get 10% each, the Chinese would get another 30%, the rest of the world would get another 10% and LW would end up with less sway than the Catholic Church.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
That said, if I were to compile a list of people EY banned from LessWrong for being "moral mutants" that list would include David Friedman, Peter Thiel, Trae Stephens. JD Vance, Sam Hughes, Jared Issacman
I was curious about this, so I asked Claude. Sadly, it did not find any evidence of EY using the "moral mutant" framing and banning these people. I also asked it if there is any public recording of qntm having publicly complained about being banned, and it could not find that either.
But LW 1.0 is well archived, and thus it should not be difficult to back up your claims with evidence instead of just linking to the WP articles.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
some of their most prominent public opinions are "give in to base sexual urges"
Are you sure this is in the sequences? Planecrash is unlikely to be the first place someone starts reading on rationality. If Scott is regularly organizing CNC orgy meetups worldwide, I must have missed that.
You can of course argue that the sequences being silent on sex is itself a moral stance. It seems fair to say that Eliezer probably thought that politics is a larger impediment to his style of rationality than having sex out of wedlock, which is why we have no sequence sex is the mind-killer.
But a liberal stance on sexuality (roughly "what consenting adults do in their bedrooms is their business") is not unique to the ratsphere, it is a widely accepted norm encompassing both the blue and the majority of the red tribe.
I am not part of the inner circle of the Bay Area ratsphere, but would be somewhat surprised if the top 1000 rationalists all had had sex with each other (gender attraction permitting). Instead, I would assume that some of them are asexual, monogamous or even celibate.
are the Shakers and such irrational in adopting complete celibacy?
I think as an individual moral decision, it is fine.
Personally, when I wanted to lose weight, I did not try dieting, I simply started injecting Chinese GLP-1 agonists. If I wanted to embrace celibacy, I would probably reach for T blockers rather than trying to spend my limited willpower on resisting the urge to jerk off.
However, I also do not feel that my sexuality is what is holding me back from being a better rationalist. If I spend half an hour on average per day watching porn, that is not a cause area where I can reach huge gains by turning myself into a straw vulcan.
I mean, there is probably some former sex-crazed maniac out there for whom embracing celibacy was exactly the right decision, but it hardly seems like something which would generally improve humanity.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think that the interaction between drug use (including alcohol) and sex is generally a moral minefield.
The corner cases are clear enough: if A puts a roofie into B's to have sex with them, that is rape with a side dish of poisoning. If B is passed out and has given no prior indication of consent, then any sexual action A initiates with B is likewise rape. If B is conscious but unable to verbally or motorically signal non-consent, that is pretty much the same. And if A and B regularly have sex, then it seems unlikely to assume that they are in fact raping each other when they have similar sexual relations while on drugs.
But for everything in between, consent is kind of a nightmare to sort out. Having sex with someone who had a glass of wine over dinner is generally fine, taking advantage of someone who is on the verge of passing out is rape, so at some point in between, there has to be a border between non-rape and rape territory. It probably depends on the degree of impairment, the activeness of the various participants and possibly what a neutral observer would assume that the supposed victim would consent to if sober. But the last point is already contentious: by my observation, men are much more open to having sex than women generally. So this would effectively mean that it would be hard for a woman to PIV-rape a man no matter how high he was.
Relevant question: Can two people mutually rape each other at the same time? Like neither of them would want to fuck the other if they were sober, but somehow they get drunk or high, and mutually initiate sex. Personally, I would consider convicting both of them silly. Instead, they simply made bad life choices while drunk, not all that different from other non-criminal bad life choices people make while drunk.
My impression is that non-app hookup culture often involves booze and partying. De facto, the women gets to decide after the fact if she was a-ok with what happened or not (which seems a bit unfair to the guys participating). Of course, once she decides that her consent was violated, she needs to decide if she is pushing charges, which are probably not all that likely to lead to a conviction, because proving what happened and if consent was given and what state of mind you were in is all hard (which seems unfair to women who were clearly raped).
The correct way to do this would be consent armbands (or a high-tech version, like a LLM agent on your mobile which you picked and told your preferences who gets to confirm your consent while you are high), but the downside of that would be that people would need to come clean about their sexual preferences, instead of hiding behind "I was drunk, so whatever sex acts I did do not really define me as a person".
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I don't understand the signed victim statement to the police. It seems to really undermine the case, assuming the prosecutor's statement accurately summarizes it. It was done voluntarily working with the campus police, then she was given a chance to review it and apply edits before signing under penalty of perjury.
This is a good point. So Jane Doe must have thought "that drug-fueled orgy last night was amazing, I better file a police report on how great it was". I can believe her attending a gangbang, but I do not think that a single person at Cornell has such a weird oversharing kink.
If she did not go to the cops, then who did involve them, and why did she give testimony instead of taking the fifth like a sane person?
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Of course none of that would ever happen after the civil rights era eliminated universities acting in loco parentis because that was impeding student freedoms to consume drugs, engage in fornication, attend leftist protests, etc.
Come on. It is college, not kindergarden. 90% of the undergrad students are 18+, i.e. the kind of people the right is willing to execute if they kill someone. To tell someone "you are responsible for your actions and will answer with your life, except that we still treat you like a child where drugs and sex are concerned" sounds extremely weird to my European ears.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
My understanding of Yudkowski's legacy to date is that he has inspired at least one no-shit murder cult, a number of normal cults with a serious record of abuse toward their participants, one of the largest financial frauds ever committed, and the initiation of the exact sort of AI race he set out to avoid, together with some fairly-good short-term misery amelioration of questionable sustainability and a lot of intelligent, sensitive humans driven mad by overwhelming concern over shrimp welfare.
This seems to be an extremely hostile summary of EY's impact.
First off, LW+offshoots is the most interesting collection of thinkers I have encountered on the internet. A lot of people thought likewise, which is why the ratsphere enjoys some popularity. It attracted a lot of weird smart people, and obviously some of them turned murderous or financially irresponsible later on. But if Eliezer wrote a sequence called be trans and murder people, I must have missed it, likewise with the one about Forget Kelly: always bet the future of mankind at even odds.
That his attempt to argue for the danger of AI x-risk was mostly successful at arguing that higher AI capabilities are possible is true enough. Still, I would not give him credit/blame for the LLMs too much, he might have pushed capabilities ahead a few months by trying to get Musk interested in the topic, but he hardly invented the transformer architecture single-handedly.
Blaming him for "humans driven mad by overwhelming concern over shrimp welfare" is even more indirect. AI x-risk aside, EY does not seem to be very involved in EA, though obviously there is some overlap between these wider movements. At this point, you are not even blaming Jesus for medieval witch burnings, but blaming Plato for them. Also, do you have a list of these people driven "mad"? Are we talking psychosis or bipolar or some other form of "madness"? Is there even the flimsiest psychiatric study supporting your claims?
Nor do I think that the lifestyle choices of the center of LW matter much. For the longest time, Scott Alexander was to me just an entity which generated text over at LW and SSC. My respect for him is entirely based on his writing. If I had learned (before he was outed) that actually, he was in a polycule, a trans-man, a devout Hindu, into fucking donkeys, an LLM, super into NASCAR, had spent a decade in juvenile for manslaughter, that would not have mattered to me. (By contrast, if I had learned he did not have a medicine degree or actually spent most of his surplus income on torturing small mammals, that would have been disappointing.)
The reason why a priest having a mistress is generally considered a scandal is because the priest spent a lot of time denouncing that lifestyle. By contrast, the grey tribe is generally liberal in their position on sex. Aella and the polycule culture seem like a minor side note to the ratsphere than the centerpiece.
I suppose that you strongly disapprove of grey tribe sexual norms, but from where I stand, they are not affecting the credibility of LW much. If every poster on LW was married with 2.5 kids and went to church on Sunday, this would not affect Trump's stance on AI alignment at all. The Christian right would still find plenty of other reasons to hate us, just as the woke left finds plenty of reasons despite agreeing with us on most matters of sex.
Now, if the ratsphere was pushing for poly relationships as a method of alignment, you would have some reason to be concerned regarding the culture war. In fact, they do no such thing. I see Eliezer mentioned more frequently in the mainstream press these days, but his sexuality is neither pushed in the foreground by himself nor by journalists.
Aella using her area of exertise to try to help on AI alignment is not more surprising than if Scott was offering free psychotherapy to important AI researchers. Neither seems especially newsworthy.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
MAGA's contentious relation with objective reality is a bit of a double-edged sword for them. On the one hand, it is pretty great -- it is much easier to find fodder with the right vibes when you don't have to actually filter for stuff which happens to be true. Trump entered politics by promoting the birther conspiracy, after all.
On the other hand, in some domains you will want to favor objective reality simply because convincing your base of your delusions is not enough. If something is perjury is in decided by the courts, so as long as you can not gaslight the courts, being overconfident in the Senate gets you nothing.
Lest I be accused of partisanship, I will concede that the woke crowd also has their persistent delusions. But unlike MAGA, I see their delusions more accurately modeled as ideological blind spots (i.e., anything related to gender and race), whereas for MAGA it seems to cover anything from the nationality of Obama at birth to AI x-risk, the whereabouts of some DA, the relative IQ of US presidents, the cost of living and most other things.
For this particular case, my reality model says that any democratic Senator asking questions in a committee in a similar setting would have competent PMC staffers which had made sure that she knew the factual answer to any question she was asking.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I don't think that many astute geopolitical commenters who weren't blinded by some form of domestic politics bias ever thought that Iran could defeat the US in a war.
"Defeat" can mean many different things. Sure, it can mean "conquer and annex". But that is not how it gets generally used. For example, I think it is absolutely fair to say that the US defeated the British in the US war of independence, even though they did not conquer London.
In slightly more asymmetrical conflicts, I would also say that the Taliban effectively defeated coalition forces.
Paradox games like EU4 actually model conflicts like this: the attacking party has a war goal, which is generally a change to the status quo. It could be the annexation of a province, or (in the real world) the legalization of opium in China, or Iran rejoining the non-proliferation treaty. Typically, the defending party wants to keep the status quo, but sometimes you can improve on that if you defeat your attacker.
The US/Israeli goals in attacking Iran were arguably
(1) Destroying the Iranian navy and missiles (which has largely been accomplished, but does not feel like a worthwhile war goal to me, personally)
(2) Preventing Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon
(3) Regime change (sure, it was never stated as a goal officially, but killing the Ayatollah served very little purpose other than that)
(4) Bonus goal: re-securing the freedom of navigation (which was respected by Iran before they were bombed)
The Iranian regime resisted regime change so far. They did lose their navy and some missiles, but that is not changing the strategic landscape. They learned that if they ever want to live in a world where Israel does not bomb them at will, they need some deterrence, whether nuclear or economic. They proved that they can make transit through the strait very costly.
Militarily speaking, the US is laughably more powerful than Iran. The limiting factor for the US is will, as it is often the case with the stronger party. If accepting US independence would have meant the death of every English aristocrat, Britain would probably have fought a lot longer and harder (and might actually have retained the American colonies, I am not a historian). If the world economy was tied to the state of women's right in Kabul, the West would probably occupy Kabul for the foreseeable future without too much trouble.
If every day the Iranian regime it stayed it power, it somehow executed a few thousand Americans on TV, then the US would have the political will to send troops and occupy Tehran. Failing that, the median voter does not care much either way, she is likely unwilling to take on any hardships either to improve the lives of Iranians or to bomb them.
Unlike Maduro et al, the leaders of the Iranian regime seem to be prepared to die for their cause, and they are certainly prepared to also subject their people to hardships. I do not think they will capitulate before Trump turns Iran into Gaza, and possibly not even then. Nor will the people rise up against them, experience shows that foreigners dropping bombs on you generally strengthens the regime.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I think as far as spending taxes on genocide-related topics to keep some some Jews happy, I think that Mamdani investing a few millions in holocaust museums is not even worth noticing compared to the tens of billions US Congress pays in military aid to Israel in either magnitude or impact.
And this gets to the heart of the problem of left-wing antisemitism, especially with notorious left-wing commentators like Hasan Piker. They always denounce antisemitism in their diatribe against Israel. When in fact the right-Wing antisemites are correct that this is not only a problem with Israel, it is actually a problem with the way Jews politically and culturally organize in the United States.
I think that this is kinda the gist of the disagreement, and I think the distinction is important. I have just browsed through Piker's WP page, and while I strongly disagree with his assertion that Hamas would be "a thousand times better than a fascist settler colonial apartheid state", I also do not consider this to be clear-cut antisemitism.
Generally, the left (for the most part) has nothing in particular against Jews. In fact, Ashkenazim are probably well over-represented among leftist thinkers (just as they are over-represented among thinkers more generally). I mean, there are likely points of contention, Judaism is a patriarchal religion, and circumcision for religious reasons is also unlikely to play well with the secular left. On the other hand, Jews are not proselytizing, and a tiny minority almost everywhere. Deep-held Christian beliefs like their stance on abortion play an important role in US politics, but there simply is no large Judaism voting block who could push for mandatory labeling of non-kosher food or whatever. (Importantly, I claim that Zionism is not a deep-held intrinsic part of Judaism.)
Zionism aside, I would expect that most ethnic and religious Jews would support multi-culturalism for the simple reason that they generally did not consistently fare very well in culturally homogeneous societies. I actually expect that quite a few liberal Jews actually voted for Mamdani.
Netanyahu et al like to call any criticism of Israel antisemitic. This serves two purposes: it discourages (and discredits) critics and it tells the Jews in the diaspora "the world really hates you, Israel is your only safe haven".
In this context, I think paying Mamdani paying a token amount for some Jewish culture center is politically savvy. It sends a clear message to the million (or so) Jews in NYC: "Our problem is with Israel, not Jews. You are still (somewhat) welcome in the woke coalition."
I would argue that EA has been trying to pick up some of the slack. Likely they favored the most effective measures, but it seems to me that they stopped because they ran out of funds rather than because they thought that most of the things USAID funded were net negative
The truth is that before Trump, USAID was spending 12-15G$/a on global healthcare and EA (with a total budget of 1.5-2G$/a over all cause areas) is simply not in the position to simply replace the gap with some spare change.
Was there some USAID funded NGO delivering books with inspiring stories about racial justice to some structurally disadvantaged girls? Probably. Was this where the median dollar was spent? Unlikely, it seems more likely that it got into vaccination campaigns and the like.
In the past, USAID was part of a broader strategy of the US painting itself as the good guy. Sure, sometimes they would bomb the shit out of you and steal your oil, but overall they were not a terrible hegemon as these things go. Trump does not care about USAID as a tool of soft power because he does not understand soft power. His levers of foreign policy are tariffs and the US military.
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