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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?
Eliezer Yudkowsky posts a follow-up:
Oh, wow. This is just writing "I think all Christians are heretic morons" on a big banner and waving it about, isn't it? Credit for the balls but I see why the coalition assembly isn't going so well.
I mean, it's marginally better that the Talmudic POV that Jesus is suffering in hell by being boiled in feces.
Also that Jesus's dad was a Roman soldier named Pantera who cuckolded Joseph.
I get the orthodox Jews of the day being extremely pissed-off about the association with yet another rabble-rousing itinerant preacher stirring up trouble among the masses after the Romans just finished stomping on the previous rabble-rouser, so they very much wanted to make it crystal clear to the Emperor that "these guys are nothing to do with us".
It's the liberal Christians I do not understand. Why not just say "We're too smart and modern to believe in the Virgin Birth, Mary was just some dumb broad" instead of torturing meaning into nonsense by "Now the reason people talked about the Virgin Mary was, and we all know virgins don't get pregnant without sex, is that she was a girl who was raped. That's how she got pregnant by a guy not her betrothed, without being a slut. And the villagers used to refer to her as "Mary the virgin who was raped", and eventually that just turned into "Mary the virgin" and then "the Virgin Mary". You see the simple explanation that doesn't require us to turn off our brains and believe in pregnancy without sex? Evidence for this? It, uh, came to me in a dream?"
I swear, this is a real liberal denomination example I read online years back. One of those "we cosplay by dressing up in the vestments and using the historical language, but we don't really believe all that stuff, except about niceness. We believe in niceness" mainline churches. I may mock Pastorette Babs in Talarico's Presbyterian church, but she is at least upfront and honest about what she does not believe.
The Romans would have loved to have a Hellenized version of Judaism develop which extolled political quietism, the dutiful paying of taxes, a comical level of non-violence and the acceptance of foreigners into the fold. To have the Son of God tell the powerful Roman military captain “you have more faith in God than any Jew”, to have John the Baptist tell the Roman soldier “you’re doing perfect, just be happy with your pay and don’t be corrupt”, paraphrasing, this would be the Roman dream.
We can be pretty sure why Jesus was killed because the Christian sources and the Jewish sources converge on a key point: He was a threat to the Pharisee’s power, ie the proto-rabbinical stranglehold over Jewish culture. And so we read in Rambam that he “cause[d] difficulty to the Jews and sway[ed] the people away from God” and thus deserved to die, and we read in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue from 150ad that the Jews had a curse on Christians in their synagogal prayers. This later developed into the Birkat ha-Minim still prayed daily by Orthodox Jews: “Let the Christians (notzrim) and the heretics perish as in a moment. Let them be wiped out of the book of life, and with the righteous let them not be written”. This term is what Paul is called the the Jews in Acts 24:5: a Nazarene stirring up dissension / trouble among Jews. Obviously this is embarrassing for Orthodox Jews, so they try to whitewash the term and claim a false etymology, because praying every day for Christians to immediately all die is insane. But the mass of evidence points to this and even today “notzrim” is a term used by Israelis for Christians.
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