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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11585 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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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.

I agree that in-person debates are confrontational and bad for truth-seeking. But I didn’t propose a debate in order to seek truth. I proposed it because, under California Penal Code § 415(1), it’s illegal for me to challenge you to a duel.

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):

Here you are not calling this AI torture “depraved”, you’re calling it depraved to object to it. Your argument, astonishingly, is that since we can’t be certain that AIs feel pain, we must assume that they don’t. In fact, anyone who doesn’t jump on board with this assumption (you intimate) is some sort of evil tech oligarch who wants to genocide humans. [...] I have donated $100 to a model welfare charity just to clean the stain on my soul I got from reading about it.

He accuses Pinker of endorsing the "lowest quality voices", quoting Claire Lehmann:

Thinking AI might be conscious is like thinking that there are real people talking to you from inside the TV, or that there is a tiny band playing music inside the radio.
Fine for 2 year olds to believe, but beyond that, insane.

Or

Geoffrey Hinton is the Nobel Prize winning and Turing Award winning inventor of the modern artificial intelligence paradigm. Lehmann thinks the media should “stop platforming” him [talking about persuasive AI avoiding a shutdown] to devote more time to her, a culture warrior who pivoted to AI two months ago when it got popular.

It ends with Scott seeming seriously willing to duel Pinker:

If you continue to object that debate is a poor method for determining truth, then I suppose literal dueling is the only option left. As an eminent psychologist, I’m sure you’re familiar with Cucina et al (2023), which finds a correlation of .179 - .268 between logical reasoning ability and firearms proficiency - meaning that duels are truth-tracking in exactly the way you worry debates might not be.

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:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

IMO discourse should really be more aggressive, and adding a real life dueling section to the middle of public debates (with wax bullets of course) would be very kino. Reminds me how Stephen Douglas would wheel out a cannon against Lincoln and fire a loud shot in the air whenever he scored a good rhetorical jab. Men love simulated warfare and spend way too much time on it in myriad antisocial ways. WoW Forever, Warhammer, sports, MMA, video games, movies. If you can take the energy behind that and place it in a discursive context, if you can combine aesthetic and exciting simulatory battle with the art of debate, you will bring All Men to discourse and plainly increase the wisdom of men at large. You will also select out the cowardly, which is just as important for the health of civil discourse.

But in this case: Steven Pinker is 72, and no one should talk to a 72 year old like that.

Be it remembered that Justin Trudeau won the Canadian Premiership in the boxing ring.

discourse should really be more aggressive, and adding a real life dueling section to the middle of public debates (with wax bullets of course) would be very kino

The modern form of this is dest1ny and the cultural meme of '1v1 me rust intervention only' more broadly.

I think there’s a fine line between histrionics and aggression. I mean aggression as “I have activated the built-in win-against-enemy goal pursuit circuitry” + mild anger. Like Faker in LoL or Magnus in chess. Destiny is a bit too performative and emotional. The wax dueling would deter many destinies from participation.

I should point out that a challenge to mutual combat is in fact legal. They could have a boxing match or something. Of course nerds don't know that, but they could.

Boxing is undignified. Guns are the ultimate nerd equalizer. You want to remind the audience that we are in a civilized age where brute force avails not, as this draws them further into the realm of discourse. Imagine a company crafting two beautiful pistols just for the occasion. I’m not sure how you’d actually allocate points based on the shooting, though… maybe at the beginning, they both do a long distance target shoot to determine who speaks first, and maybe toward the end there is the duel where the most accurate shot gets ten extra minutes to finish their argument. Maybe the power of the wax revolver increases according to the points scored during the debate, to inflict more embarrassment upon your opponent, and you get to keep the beautiful armaments.

The problem with guns is that they are an equalizer that is simply too good. You might as well flip a coin to see who wins. Have them use whatever tools they want to hack each other and ruin each others' lives. Let's see how quickly Pinker turns to AI to win.

The problem with guns is that they are an equalizer that is simply too good. You might as well flip a coin to see who wins.

That's a feature, not a bug. The point of dueling is to demonstrate that you have the balls to risk your life to defend your honor, not to show that you are the better marksman.

Duels of honour were not, in fact, a gentlemanly combat sport, although they often pretended to be. The point was to demonstrate the seriousness of whatever the duel was about, plus a certain level of physical courage, on both sides. This was ideally accomplished by imposing a low, but real, risk of death on both participants following which the seconds could send them home with honour satisfied. Hence pistol duels fought in morning fog using antique pistols, or epee duels fought to first blood.

A pistol duel should really be saved for the final round. We really lose something by not having people fight a repeated set of running duels over decades.

As a young officer in Napoleon's army, Dupont was ordered to deliver a disagreeable message to a fellow officer, Fournier, a rabid duellist. Fournier, taking out his subsequent rage on the messenger, challenged Dupont to a duel. This sparked a succession of encounters, waged with sword and duelling pistol, that spanned decades. The contest was eventually resolved when Dupont was able to overcome Fournier in a pistol duel, forcing him to promise never to bother him again.

The best Ridley Scott's movie is based on this story.

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