This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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?
All of the replies here still are trying to rationalize the joke here usually in isolation without considering the broader context of what's been going on in the public sphere as of late. It's really hard to know when this all started, you could say it was after the datacenter stuff was reaching a fever pitch, after the (obvious at the time) lies about "pacing the frontier" from Anthropic and OpenAI, the hacks by OpenAI, etc. I'm not sure.
In any case, a lot of people started to question who this AI safety movement was (as one of the broad reasons for calling for regulation was to get a legally enforced competitive advantage) and basically saw the only people talking about it. There were a bunch of controversies over the last few weeks regarding certain conventions, the venues at which they were hosted, the people going on Xitter and writing articles about how trading human life for insect pain is net good. You have DoW directly saying that EA and all that it stands for is anti-American. And so on and so forth. This really wasn't "one day, for no reason at all, Scott Alexander woke up and made a joke and some Xitter people got mad." No, it's a series of basically serial and parallel controversies over a relatively short time period that have bubbled up such that people who are outside the general sphere are aware of them.
Yeah, people know it's a joke. It's generally seen as an incredibly poor taste joke though or at the very least one that fails to read the room.
These things escaped containment and before you know it, the general consensus, regardless of accuracy, among those are aware is that rationalists/EAs/SF cultists are "misanthropic doomer heretical sex pests" who are somehow at the upper echelons of these companies (Anthropic primarily, but OpenAI also) and who don't actually hold morally consistent values ("building the torment nexus" for profit while railing against it) and regularly flaunt social norms and laws (CFAA) with reckless abandon.
Are they wrong? I mean, I don't know if there's a pure-rational EA-based case for patriotism and American exceptionalism, but I certainly didn't notice a lot of people in EA circles looking for one and trying to build one up. I suspect if somebody seriously and earnestly did so, they'd be expelled from a lot of EA spaces. I mean, I understand there could be a very different view about what "American" is about, but if we talk about what a middle ground conservative working for DoW understands about it, how much the EA movement is his friend and how much it is his enemy? I am not asking who is right and wrong between them, but if we stand on the position of DoW, what would be the correct evaluation of EA from their side?
AI-risk-concerned EAs are, if nothing else, generally very keen that America achieve a certain pivotal technological discovery before China does. If you can't bond with the DoW over being paranoid about China, what can you bond with them about?
Are they paranoid about China or is their only problem with China that they think they can control the US government easier than they can control the CCP? Imagine if CCP told them "you know what, we decided you are right and we're pausing our AI research, but we are kind of concerned the US would gain unfair advantage. So we need you to, you know, sabotage US a little - not a lot, just to maintain parity, nobody is going to get hurt and everybody wins!" Would they take the deal? I know a lot of their ideological predecessors took the similar deal with the USSR and the nukes...
Well, really I was kind of joking here - it's just a fun empirical fact that if someone online is very worried about China in some way, I can tell you with absolute certainty that they are either a right-wing patriot or deep in the weeds of AI safety. It's not a very deep observation, though I do think it counts for something.
Regardless, I wasn't thinking of the recent "pause AI" efforts so much as the historical focus among the ratsphere on the necessity of cracking aligned AGI in the West lest China succeed first and turn the lightcone into a CCP boot stamping into a human face forever. Strong anticommunism, and indeed positive enthusiasm about capitalism, remain mainstream within the Grey Tribe in a way they long ceased to be within the Blue Tribe, to whatever extent they ever were.
Or they read the Maritime Executive at lunch and keep an eye on the South China Sea shenanigans.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This being entirely untrue must have been explained to you before, why spread the lie?
Because you can't 'explain' away an opinion. You can only disagree with it, which you do. The case rests on factors that you consider non-salient, deductions which you consider to be false, and intuitions you don't share.
You can look up the proposed bills, it's simply not the case that they give the labs asking for them a competitive advantage. It is not an opinion. It is untrue. It is a lie.
The vote difference with no actual rebuttal is pretty funny. People you trust are lying to you. You should not trust them. These are lies cooked up by A16z type people because they want to be able to produce their slop gambling porn simulators more cheaply. That's the faction who's lies you're swallowing and you're getting mad at people for pointing it out.
Are you arguing that people who "want to be able to produce their slop gambling porn simulators more cheaply" would be negatively financially impacted by the proposed regulations and then at the same time that these same proposed regulations don't create a competitive advantage for frontier labs with deeper pockets? How do you figure that?
They don't want any regulation ever or for things to slow down, more broadly they hate the frontier labs in general. There are a few groups in this category, some are angry that they passed on investing in the labs early on in favor of crypto. Broadly their preferred future looks something like the labs burning the money of other investors to produce powerful models that chinese labs are allowed to distill and then they can run them locally to power their anti-social revenue extracting products. They see themselves as the "application layer" that Huang often talks about. They have very little vision about the future of AI and broadly only care about what makes their low effort wrapper start up more money.
Can you explain the alternative view? Can you point to a regulation proposed by any of the labs that would actually hurt the little guys more than the frontier labs? Or at all?
As per our discussion last month, it seems pretty clear that Anthropic's proposed regulations would hit "little guys" like Mistral, and their regulations impose a burden on small companies, burdens are costly, cost hurts, ergo is seems pretty clear that the regulations would hurt little guys. (This does not necessarily mean that regulations are bad.)
With that being said, I'm still not clear on your argument. If your position is that the regulations wouldn't hurt the little guys, or would hurt the frontier labs (whom you say they hate) more so than the little guys, improving the competitive position of the little guys, then why are the little guys against the regulations?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
what is an a16z type person?
More generally, I have a fairly embedded prior that the AI companies are in fact actively attempting to secure a regulatory moat, wherein they are the only companies legally permitted to provide AI services. Actions they've taken, particularly the "rogue" hacks, appear to me to fit this model quite well.
Am I being lied to? which bills are supposed to disprove this prior, and why?
Andreessen Horowitz circle, I outline the perspective here.
From which bills did the priors originate from? Openai and Anthropic have both published blueprint suggestions that explicitly exempt anyone doing training runs below 10^25 FLOP earn less than $500M in AI revenue or spend less than $1B a year on AI R&D. If the worry is that the regulations would create a moat we could actually talk about the regulations and demand they be written such that a moat wouldn't be created. But the people pushing this point have not read any of the proposals and do not care about the moat argument besides its use as a soldier.
How much do OpenAI and Anthropic spend/earn/train?
As I understand it the moat argument is that OpenAI and Anthropic want to create a regulation cartel to shut out any other upcoming competitors. If the exemptions are low enough that any competitor exempted wouldn't be able to reach anywhere close to the quality OpenAI/Anthropic provide (and thus can't actually compete) while being too regulation-choked to compete if they try to rise any higher, then it sounds like a moat.
More options
Context Copy link
They didn't originate from bills, but from my understanding of AI safety discourse, the version of that discourse being presented by the lab leadership, their calls for regulation, their market position, and the general way they've been generating "scary" AI incidents that don't seem organic and do seem to bolster their calls for "regulation".
...how is this not a moat?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's particularly dumb because there's plausible reason to think Vance at least had read Scott back in the day. I feel like 2014 Scott would have noticed the opportunity, and taken advantage of the audience to make a reasoned, decently-targeted pitch. But modern Scott would lose his polycule if he published "An Open Letter to Whichever of You Fuckers Is JD Vance", so, alas.
I think https://ai-2027.com/slowdown#slowdown-2028-03-31 might be that pitch. It pretty much openly promises Vance the crown if he joins the movement. The real power will belong to the Oversight Committee, of course, but he can have whatever is left of the remainder of the earthly power, after all, somebody needs to keep the lights on.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What parts of that aren't actually true?
For the rationalists, particularly Yud, Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, gwern, even Aella:
Misanthropic: AFAIK not at all. The Scotts wrote anti-feminist screeds but they seem to target “radical feminists” (i.e. man haters) and explicitly don’t regard women any lower than men. Aella projects her sex drive onto other women, I think her claims overgeneralize but aren’t critical.
Doomers: yes
Sex pests: they have weird sexuality but seem to respect consent and don’t seem to bother people outside broadcasting themselves, so I don’t see how they’d be “pests”
Upper echelons of AI companies: moreso than average, but none of the aforementioned rationalist leaders control the big companies, or are anywhere near the top
Morally consistent values: again, Anthropic employees may not have them, but not all rationalists work on Anthropic, and the aforementioned seem to be of the few people who actually at least try to be consistent
Social norms: yes. Laws: no AFAIK
Don’t get me wrong, the rationalists are imperfect. But the naive public mixes them up with incels and Zizians who are different. My opinion is they are friendly, pacifist, and logic “smart”, but somewhat insane, very weird, and (like all smart people) tend to self-deceive into missing the obvious.
“Effective altruists” the idea is OK, but I won’t defend the official movement after they re-hired Caroline Ellison. And “SF cultists” can by definition fit whatever, depending on what vague cult you’re referring to.
I think you got "misanthropic" and "misogynistic" mixed up.
Yes
Still, they aren’t hateful either. Their lack of socialization is from shyness and autism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Effective Altruism and the Rationalist movement are so intertwined that it's hard to separate them out, and the Rationalist bubble has/had a lot of their own specific problems. To be fair to them, they all started off being maximally open-minded and tolerant, which meant that of course every scammer, grifter, and sociopath immediately zoomed in on them as pigeons for the plucking. Remember the case a while back of the sex pest guy grooming a runaway fifteen year old (though she probably wasn't fifteen when he got his paws on her EDIT: seems the victims were nineteen) and getting everyone else who knew of them to keep their scruples to themselves by threatening to commit suicide* whenever anyone said "Dude, this is maybe not 100% consensual"? And because he was so popular in the movement and had successfully inserted himself into a lot of the groups and movements as "genuine original thinker with amazing ideas that can radically change society for the better" plus presented himself as a neurodivergent victim of oppression due to his unconventional sexuality, they all held their tongues where normal bigots like myself would immediately have booted him out as a rapist and called the cops. He weaponised empathy and successfully guilt-tripped them all, until someone eventually grew a backbone and did something about it. And still nobody called the cops because that's not the done thing.
That's the dark flip-side of "we don't judge anyone on age or ability or mental stability or unconventional lifestyle, we accept you as you are and if you say you're mature enough then chronological age is just a calendar date" acceptance. A lot (the majority?) suffered from maybe mild bullying or at least standing out as the nerdy, geeky, awkward weirdo at school and in their private lives, so they bent over backwards not to be like that once they were building their ideal society. And that is blood in the water for the sharks. See how good ol' Brent, for example, used all the jargon of the sub-culture and brainwashed the nice people around him into the mindset of "well we're discussing this rationally not emotionally so we are Doing The Work and not being normies and so his conclusions must be correct and reasonable, because just being squicked by what is going on is the disgust response which is Conservative and we are not Republicans!" Extraordinarily easy to manipulate people into doing what you want and agreeing with you if you just use the right words in the accepted manner.
And in every context, this is how you get "Good old Bob/Tim/Sam/Jason, they're a vital part of the organisation, I can't believe these accusations because he's not that kind of guy, there must be a reasonable explanation and the accuser must be motivated by bad things".
*I would have called his bluff re: the suicide if I were there by marching into the kitchen, grabbing the sharpest knife I could find, marching back out, and slapping it on the table before him with "there you are, be my guest, go right ahead". But I'm not a nice person or a quokka.
I resent this derogatory mention of my species! I’ll have you know that we pigeons pass the mirror test and can recognise words!
More options
Context Copy link
This is true: the problem with an organization formerly of nice but naive people is that it doesn't reject sociopaths, and now it's an organization with sociopaths. And violent schizophrenics, and shrimp welfare-ists.
However, every large movement has a set of awful members, since anyone can say "I am part of X". And I think the big rationalist organizations are getting better at finding, excluding, and if stuff happens denouncing their awful members. By now Brent is well-known as a sex pest, and while I unfortunately expect future abuser revelations, they seem less common. The EA leaders are parodying themselves by maintaining Caroline Ellison, but while the rationalist leaders share the EA ideas, I think they've stopped associating with their people.
Brent, and Worst Boyfriend Ever, edit: John Wenworth is on the outs though that seems to be more for writing than behavior /endedit, and how many others that are less famous and just kept on a member's-only list of missing stairs?
Felons have fewer options so she can be paid less, ergo, more effective per dollar. Classic EA!
Isn't Scott still housemates with Kelsey, EA journalist extraordinaire?
More options
Context Copy link
To be fair to the EA set, it's not them in general but one guy and his organisation in particular that have rehabbed Caroline, and since this guy is also hanging on to the FTX money and refusing to hand it back (I liked all his 'I can't comment on this because our lawyers said not to but it'll be a cold day in Hell before we hand over a cent to the bankruptcy administrators despite all their suing us' replies in the general response to the reaction to him announcing her officially), I get the impression he is rather steelier in character than the general run of the EA crowd. The Sam Altman of EA, if you will 😁 ("that money MY money now, and gimme more money too!")
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've read different accusations:
It certainly does seem like you're frozen out to a degree if you don't put your keys in the bowl. I don't know how else to explain away Scott going so incredibly native in spite of his earlier opinions.
More options
Context Copy link
I doubt monogamy would make them view you any less. AFAIK Scott Aaronson is in a traditional marriage. It’s more like, if you’re in a BDSM polycule they won’t view you any less either.
Also the least-central person on that list, and not in the Bay Area.
"View you less" might be a little strong. "Consider you less open-minded and thus less trustworthy on certain dimensions" is more plausible, though I think very few would be explicit about that like John Wentworth was
More options
Context Copy link
So... the monogamous are accustomed to
privilegethere being a glass ceiling for people who engage in unconventional sexual practises even if they exclusively involve mutually consenting adults, and nowequalitythere not being such a barrier feels likeoppressionhaving the glass ceiling blocking them?More options
Context Copy link
I agree with you, but it's an easy vector of attack. You just need to shout two things at once (I think that's called concern trolling):
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Being very charitable, this may be a "suffering from success" situation. Those circles seem to take sex pest issues very seriously. Alternatively phrased, they seem frequently riven with bloodbath infighting over sex pest scandals. It is possible that, like the Boy Scouts, their sincere and well above average efforts to tackle the Sex Pest Problem means the issue appears vastly more salient than among other comparable subcultures.
Being very charitable, of course. Being more realistic, autistic sex-positive dorks are going to attract sociopaths like flies to shit.
I cannot help but wonder at the prevalence of a cluster B parent in the lives of the autistic sex-positive dorks in question. I know this is my own experience talking here, but I strongly believe that having been conditioned to accept a sociopath's behavior as "normal", those dorks would naturally be more vulnerable to manipulation, hence spawning perpetual Drama.
I'm definitely autistic and (at least from my perspective, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about): growing up, my parents were very stable, but I was still vulnerable to manipulation because my social skills were regressed, and probably moreso because I was shy and conflict avoidant. I think good parenting physically (i.e. without my input) kept me away from horrible abusers and communities I'd meet them, like the shadier parts of the internet.
I think a large group of autists unable to kick out a small group of sociopaths is different, it requires different social skills that aren't even common in neurotypicals, because I notice it happening in mostly neurotypical communities.
I want to preface this comment by restating that I am also judging primarily by my own experience here, so this is definitely a YMMV situation. Additionally, I would agree that normies aren't particularly well equipped to deal with sociopaths either, but I would nevertheless liken their comparative advantages to having bronze age tools and weapons as opposed to stone age ones, by virtue of their natural ability for nonverbal communication. If, on top of that, the autistic individual in question was raised in the classic autistic father/borderline mother pairing, then there is likely, at the least, an additional layer of cognitive distortion hampered by mother's chronic gaslighting that must be overcome, and likely a host of maladaptive coping mechanisms as well, and here I am thinking of things like Scott being totally cool with polyamory and yet tweeting about his intense jealousy in the moment, because I personally identify with that exact sort of hacking around actual feelings via thoughts and habits. I did far too much of that, to my cost, as said ability was something that steadily degraded until it broke down completely in middle age.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Beyond what @Goodguy said below, the "building the torment nexus while railing against it" thing also seems at risk of being an instance of what they seem to call the "Goomba fallacy" these days (dumb name that tells you nothing about what it is, but that's all we have). Most EAs are not in a position to contribute anything of substance to the ongoing construction of the Torment Nexus, and might even be net delaying it by sapping funds that might otherwise go towards it.
More options
Context Copy link
The misanthropy. To me they don't seem more misanthropic than the average person.
The doomerism. To me they seem on average to actually be more optimistic than the average person.
The heretical nature and flaunting (Edit: or flouting) of social norms and laws is somewhat true, but I don't see that as a necessarily bad thing. It really depends on the context.
The sex pest characterization. They don't seem to engage in being sex pests any more frequently than people in the general population.
And I say this as someone who is often critical of them.
Misanthropic probably means doesn't yuck it up with a random person while waiting in line for a movie, or, not as gregarious as a car salesman.
It's more the "10 shrimp matter more than a human toddler because pretend math".
I think most of them just indulge this as a thought experiment. They wouldn't actually choose 10 shrimp over one toddler if forced to make the choice in real life.
Also, they don't think of their moral position as morally valuing humans less, they view it as valuing humans the same as before, while correcting the previously incorrectly low appraisal of the moral value of shrimp.
An argument can be made that since resources are limited, morally valuing shrimp more amounts to the same thing as morally valuing humans less. However, I think that the intent matters. The EA people by and large don't seem to intend to be misanthropic. I don't even detect subconscious misanthropy from them, at least not any more than the average person has. To me, their seeming lack of the normal pro-human stance seems to be genuinely motivated by taking logical arguments to their conclusions and by unusually high degrees of empathy for beings like shrimp, not by bitterness against humanity.
That said, I don't know any people like this in "real life". So I'm just going by the impressions I get from reading a small amount of online content.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
flout
@999
Ah. Lol. Nice catch.
Both flaunting and flouting works, for different examples of the group in question.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link