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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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If it's so serious, stop writing puff pieces and start doing something more. You write a poorly written sco fi story that you want others to take seriously if anything there remotely ever comes true but don't want it to be criticised with the same level of rigor. This is assymetric. I recently saw a terrible mission impossible movie that made me scream internally due to its poor handling of basic computer tech and rogue AI. People should talk about doom but at the same time they happily go to meet ups with people in AI who develop these models they warn us about.

Of course, you can simply pick your AGI probability to be 1e-50, but then I might claim that you are overconfident, and ask what other past correct predictions you have made which might make me rely on your predictions instead of everyone else's

If I bring up yuds record, I would be far more correct than he was since I always claimed that language models will be hype puff pieces if you compare them with the attention they get, they're brilliant otherwise but they're not the same level of technology as nuclear weapons.

The meandering posts by all AI safety folks fail to offer concrete plans either, they are not the first ones to suggest having defensive options for rogue technologies. People on this forum commented plenty about this being true a two weeks ago.

By and large, the ratsphere does not share his high confidence on p(doom), I think, because they were trained by their prophet to update based on the strength of arguments, not to blindly follow their prophet.

This makes me a little melancholic as Scott's writing and opinions post doxxing make me less lose respect for him. Unpersoning people, voting to keep the same order in place that wanted his life wrecked, going on podcasts and making claims about OpenAI being able to buy out all car manufacturers in the US for making killer robots are childish even if these are hypothetical.

The entire subreddit over at /r/slatestarcodex has rosy takes about his Sci fi piece, he got called out upon this clip surfacing, many there seem to be have been traumatized by his fictional story.