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I'd like to take a moment to comment on a bit of controversy below.
With the AI safety discourse escaping containment and what might be described as the cold light of day falling across Yudkowski's forlorn-hope coalition and its personalities and practices, we are treated to an actual test of how the Rationalist movement has done at systematizing winning, particularly in the subcategory of allocating weirdness points. From where I'm sitting, it doesn't seem they've done especially well. Admittedly, I'm not the target audience, but it seems like arguing for "AI safety" you don't actually know how to secure via tools you absolutely can't be trusted to wield probably would be easier if you weren't also having to explain Aella and Slutcon and reverse-gangbang-bribery tactics and the Cow Question to generic normies at the same time.
Scott Alexander, apparently feeling the pinch, decided to put his oar in:
This is certainly one of the defenses of all time. Alexander has always been witty, and I get the feeling, possibly mistaken, that he kinda swung for the fences on this one. "Kolmogrov Complicity" and "no one actually cares about monogomy" pretty much put a cap on my ability to respect his opinions, but he's had a tough road, even if much of his own making. Let him rest.
Some have pointed out that this is Alexander doing the meme, and that discourse has continued here on the Motte, in this thread. Several commenters spoke up in support of Scott's argument, and I think it might be best to address them collectively:
To those of you who thought Scott's argument was in some way a reasonable one, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most of you either participated in or at least had a reasonable familiarity with the Atheist internet wars. Can any of you recall a single time in that era when you heard of a prominent Conservative Christian caught in a sex scandal, where you saw it argued in good faith that actually, getting caught with a hooker was fine, because Jesus also associated with prostitutes? Can you claim to me, with a straight face, that you would consider this, then or now, a reasonable defense of a Conservative Christian influencer attending an orgy? Why do you think that is?
It's one thing to argue that Christian rules are stupid. That's understandable from non-Christians, though it's kind of neat how the logic convolutes in cases like the Cornell 7. And it's understandable for non-Christians to heap scorn on Christians who fail to live up to Christian standards, and even to then scorn all Christians for having such standards. It's not charitable, and it certainly isn't rational or principled, but humans inevitably human. When the argument is that behavior that Christians find deplorable, behavior that Christians police other Christians over, behavior that non-Christians scorn Christians for engaging in when they're caught doing so, is actually comparable to the behavior of Christ, it's time to examine the question of what further discourse is actually expected to achieve.
Scott's argument is a contemptable language game. I do not believe Scott nor anyone else is actually confused about any of the particulars here. Jesus did indeed associate with prostitutes; he did not partake of their services, nor did he employ them on their backs for horizontal forms of evangelism-by-the-hour. Christians' moral objections to Aella's activities and to the Yudkowskiites' exploitation of them for tactical advantage are straightforward and unimpeachable from within the Christian frame. There are no meaningful parallels here to the life or ministry of Jesus Christ, and implying otherwise is merely a demonstration that Scott and those agreeing with him are willing to say pretty much anything if they perceive tactical utility in doing so.
I do not accept that the Yudkowskiites or the "Effective Altruism" movement they have parasitized are offering a "message of compassion" any more than Aella or her cohort would accept that I am motivated by genuine concern for their welfare and eudaemonia, no matter how (sincerely!) I might argue that this was the case; we do not share anything remotely resembling coherent values, and it seems to me that one of the prerequisites to even attempting communication across that divide is to refrain from this sort of chicanery. 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.
There's likely more to say, but why bother when people can simply pretend to not understand?
While I haven't personally seen this meme, I do think there is actually a reasonable steelman for this type of argument.
To use one example, if I saw a self-professed Hindu killing and eating cows, and I was a secular vegetarian, I might reasonably ask the Hindu why they are being hypocritical when I thought their faith said doing that was forbidden. In this hypothetical, I obviously have ulterior motives as a secular vegetarian: I want less cows to be slaughtered for food. But pointing out your opponent's hypocrisy on a set of principles they claim to follow is a legitimate tactic in most cases, even if you don't accept their beliefs.
Now, because I am not a Hindu, I might actually get their faith wrong. It would be completely fair for the Hindu to respond that Hinduism is not a monolith, and prohibitions on cow-killing differ based on region and caste within India, and different sects within the faith treat it differently. If they said that in their native region of Kerala, within the caste they belong to, killing cows is acceptable, then my argument would have no bite at all. But if they really are being hypocritical with regards to a set of principles they claim to follow, then bringing up the argument can serve two possible purposes: 1) try to get them to actually follow their principles, or 2) within a discussion in a public place like Reddit, make it clear to other commenters that they are not following their own self-professed principles.
I think the biggest failure states in this kind of argument will just be the failure to fully understand a body of knowledge for an ideology or religion you don't belong to, and the fact that even when you do understand the ideology/religion and make a well-aimed argument at an opponent's hypocrisy, they can just bite the bullet and be hypocritical or cherry pick and ignore you.
Most of the people making these sorts of comments come from Christian-majority societies and often grew up inside the church. They're familiar with Christianity and the famously wide gap between what its holy texts enjoin and what its adherents actually do.
The point is trolling (just look at the amount of seething it produces) and highlighting their hypocrisy to third parties. As I said when this was discussed earlier downthread, very few people think you're going to convince a chuddy religious conservative by quoting scripture at them or pointing out the gap between their notional commitments and what they actually do and advocate for. This is particularly stinging for them because they ground their moral legitimacy in strict adherence to Christian principles, but they're at least as guilty of picking and choose as theological liberals and they don't even try to live up to Christian principles (and the theolibs have the out of rejecting inerrancy).
Part of the problem is that it doesn't highlight hypocrisy, but I think the other big problem with tweeting stuff like that out is...what third parties are going to be convinced by this? As far as I can tell, Scott painting AI safety as a "Jewish guy's apocalyptic cult" and pointing out that they "consort with prostitutes" is only going to get every other major political faction to put aside their differences and agree that AI safety, as a movement, is (shall we say) "misaligned."
I've got to be honest, I don't really care about the specific matter of SA's tweet. My point of contention is the more general matter of how religious chuds handle the charge of hypocrisy (which is pretty well-founded on the whole).
Religious people are capable of commanding a certain amount of respect from the... aspirationally religious (this is why, for example, priests are often receive reflexive deference). People who do not do a particularly good job of following the tenets of their faith but admire those who do. Pointing out that these religious authority figures are, in fact, not very good at following the tenets of their faith or outright reject them does really work chipping away at their legitimacy.
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Yeah, to be clear, I was responding more to the meme itself than Scott's tweet. I don't actually think Scott's tweet is a good example of the meme.
Yeah, I agree that I don't think Scott is trying to do the meme.
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