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Scott Alexander, the guy who hosted the Culture War Thread on his blog slatestarcodex before that landed him in so much heat (from the woke left) that it was moved to reddit under the name /r/theMotte (and from there, subsequently, to themotte.org to preempt a reddit crackdown) comes usually across as a kind and considerate person to me. Charitable interpretations are very much his thing. While he has always engaged in CW topics on occasion, his forays deep into the trenches are rare (and in my impression have become rarer compared to the SSC days).
Apparently, there is a person called Steven Pinker. I have been vaguely aware that there was a book called The Better Angels of Our Nature which was probably authored by someone, but he was not someone I really had on my radar.
From the WP article, he seems solidly Grey Tribe. Believes in a computational theory of mind, Ashkenazi Intelligence Hypothesis, critical of both the woke left (cancellations) and the MAGA right (foreign student restrictions).
The main topic where he disagrees with Scott Alexander is AI x-risk.
Scott has now responded, and his reponse is a bit less than maximum charitable.
While Scott is diligent enough with his technical points, it is clear that he is personally hurt by Pinker's decision to ridicule AI x-risk. So his post is also a broadside fired against him. He cites Garfinkel et al 2017 who "proved" that machines will never be larger than humans using common philosophical arguments for AI being harmless.
Scott points out that while Pinker is busy berating the LW crowd for distracting from the more mundane risks of AI, x-risk advocates are willing to work hand in hand with groups with a more practical focus to combat pro-AI PACs like Leading the Future.
On model welfare (which is certainly not the core topic of the x-risk advocates):
He accuses Pinker of endorsing the "lowest quality voices", quoting Claire Lehmann:
Or
It ends with Scott seeming seriously willing to duel Pinker:
Scott has admitted in the comments that this is already the toned-down version of the post he originally wrote. I think that while he held back verbally (nobody get's called a "Vogon spy in a skin suit" this time), he uses his craft well to show his frustration.
For what it's worth, I think that Pinker is correct that Eliezer is in fact over-confident in p(doom|default-ASI). Just like Pinker is when he declares that any fear of doom is ridiculous.
The main difference is that for practical purposes, it does not matter much if your p(doom) is 0.99 or 0.05. Both would be pressing problems whose solution is the most important thing in the world.
Eliezer was bullish on AI capabilities when that was far out of the Overton window, back when the machines could beat humans at chess at most. Steven Pinker was tweeting that "deep learning has probably peaked" in 2019.
This might be giving too much credit to Pinker, but here is Clarke's first law:
Frankly I never thought Scott was that impressive a thinker. His writing is just fine. Fifteen-twenty years ago there were a lot of bloggers in Scott's milieu; he would not have become important if he had been writing ten years earlier. His chief value, in fact, was that he attracted a lot of debate from different tribes when the internet was polarizing and becoming closed. In the 2000s there was no shortage of forums where lefties and righties could try to debate; by the 2010s these were all closing down. (I'll add I think gay marriage was actually more important than people credit: post-Obergefell a lot of liberals decided that conservative opinions they had previously countenanced were actually too bigoted to tolerate at all.)
Scott got a massive second-wind by being doxxed extremely uncharitably by the New York Times. I don't think, absent that, he would have had the courage to deliberately become a political lightning rod. There are only so many people who would deliberately choose to be controversial and famous, and Scott doesn't have the personality for it. He probably would have gradually diminished his online personality until he could fade into obscurity. (For contrast, Curtis Yarvin tried this same retirement and was not allowed obscurity by Bay-area radicals. The Last Psychiatrist, who was also doxxed, never polarized into a political partisan figure, and he has basically been allowed to become obscure.)
Scott's diatribe against Pinker (who, let me say sit, is also pretty mediocre and often fairly specious) is about what I'd suspect. There's a certain type of moralizing I find certain personality types drawn to: suppressed righteousness. Scott has never dipped his hand in the cookie jar, so now that he can he pigs out on chocolate chip. (And, again, in fairness to Scott, he has been fairly charitable over many years dealing with all sorts of uncharitable critics.) Imagine what it's like to suppress your most combative tempers and finally have an excuse to indulge them. You just have to believe that AI is an existential risk and now that's more important than charity.
(There's a really big difference between peace achieved by suppressing your violent desires and inner peace with no violent desires to suppress at all. I don't want to make that point too harshly about Scott, it's just something I've been thinking about while writing this all out.)
While I may have issues with Scott as a person I do feel compelled to defend him as both a writer and a thinker.
Regarding Scott as a writer; Unsong is vastly superior to HPMOR both as a work of fiction and as vessel for evangelizing rationalist ideals. Yes, I know it's popular but nobody who isn't already a rationalist takes EY or his self-insert fan-wank seriously. Meanwhile The Witching Hour is easily one of my favorite science fiction shorts of all time and I think that if it had been published in Omni or Amazing Stories back in the day, instead of being posted on some guy's blog in 2013, we would be talking about it as a classic of the genre in the same vein as The Last Question or Burning Chrome.
Regarding Scott as a thinker; to my knowledge he has originated 2 (possibly 3) ideas that have since been adopted into the wider western lexicon, even in spaces populated by Scott's "dark matter people" who have never heard of rationalism or EA you'll see "Moloch" being used as a personification of societal issues and "Taxoplasma of Rage" cited as a reason why Story X isn't getting more attention. I've also seen "An answer to Job" cited by multiple priest with no ties to this community. Point being that not many thinkers can claim that level of cultural penetration.
Regarding the rest, I think that the thing that made LW 1.0 and the weekly discussion threads on SlateStarCodex.com circa the early teens special was that they were spaces where genuine cross tribal communication could occur, but eventually the owners of those spaces decided that they did not want to serve that role, and something valuable was lost.
I find myself thinking about this when ever I see comments about how woke "owns the discourse" or "won the internet" because they didn't, what they did was win here, and because that channel of cross tribal communication was cut there are a lot of people who simply don't realize that.
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The most delicious of moral treats. With infinite negative consequences you can justify anything. Like Yudkowsky's proposal to bomb foreign data centers even if it certainly leads to nuclear warfare. Anchoring your justification on infinity makes any action permissible.
Yudkowsky advocates an international agreement to set the conditions under which data centers would be bombed. That agreement would include China.
That agreement would not include China because they refuse to cooperate on this matter. They're already denouncing America trying to lock in a permanent advantage. If somehow impossibly they signed it, they'd violate it anyways. Then we can go to plan B: nuclear warfare because they cheated.
And worse yet Yudkowsky's example was Russia refusing to abide the agreement. Russia is quite oppositional and has by far the world's largest nuclear arsenal. Yudkowsky made sure to choose the most extreme example and hard commit to the upcoming nuclear war because of a hypothetical Russian data center.
In real life there are international agreements. A few European countries sign an agreement to not use cluster bombs. They don't have any and would have no use for them even if they did. The US and Israel don't sign the agreement. So we have cluster bombs and are not bound in any way to refrain from using them. This is of course denounced as "violating international law". I'm looking forward to China and Russia "violating international law" as understood by EU technocrats and Yudkowsky's proposals. They'll do it and then we can move past any mistaken understanding that we can international treaty our way out of this problem.
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Truly blinded by the beauty of thier weapons.
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AI doom isn't actually an infinite negative consequence, but it's orders of magnitude bigger than most other things, so yes, it does justify WWIII if WWIII will stop it.
(Yudkowsky doesn't advocate bombing Chinese datacentres right now, only if the PRC refused to come to an agreement or cheated on the agreement.)
The basilisk is infinite negative consequences for some people in particular. Yudkowsky most of all. I don't take this at seriously, but he does and had multiple online meltdowns over it. In his mind he's being credibly threatened with hell in a way his atheism won't protect from. And he fears for his child's future due to the ruin this will bring. Quite a tough spot to be in.
That's nuclear war with one extra step. They're already pretty mad about America restricting their ability to get more compute and also bypassing the restrictions. They both won't agree and would cheat even if they somehow did.
No. Yudkowsky doesn't believe in Roko's Basilisk. He tried to wipe it (which he's admitted was a mistake, because lol Streisand Effect) because a bunch of other Rats were having meltdowns and going suicidal over it, and he wanted to nip that in the bud.
Yudkowsky is not worried about suffering hell.
The extra step is important. Doing WWIII without trying diplomacy is something even I'd balk at.
Also, the CPC doesn't want to die any more than we do and has at least some idea of the danger.
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Believing hell can be visited on earth is the same manner of sin as believing heaven can be visited upon it.
Men who talk themselves into absolute license are evil. There's no exception for "this time it's different". It's always this time.
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I don't know why you and the @quiet_NaN are accusing Scott of being uncharitable. His open letter was not uncharitable, it was certainly aggressive and impolite but charitability would imply Scott was making unfair assumptions about Pinker's arguments which he didn't do as far as I can tell. Scott has been vicious in the past plenty of times.
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I don’t know about a thinker, but he is an excellent writer. His Bay Area house party series for instance is truly fantastic. His last piece was far too vitriolic for me with too much sneering. It’s not a sin for someone to be wrong on the Internet after all.
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