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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:
I'd say that I lost some respect for both of them through this argument, but to be honest I don't think I ever had much respect for Pinker. The ignorant and strawmannish Enlightenment Now really ended any sympathy I had for him as a thinker. Nonetheless, Pinker's letter to Scott was courteous and concise; I think you can tell that Pinker is a better or at least more professional writer.
Scott's response... to be honest, it reminded me of point six here. The world Scott is in is small and homogenous - there's an awful lot of citing Omohundro and Hinton, and after a while one starts to think that that's because he's only got a handful of people, and is shocked and appalled that anybody disagrees with them. Scott does land some real hits on Pinker - the RAND study mistake is an embarrassing mis-step by Pinker - but also avoids some of Pinker's stronger arguments, and sets up his own straw men.
I'm not particularly interested in nitpicking many of the specific disagreements, especially because plenty of them leave ample room for both to be, in a sense, right. Pinker is correct that 'intelligence' can't be modelled as a single variable; Scott is correct that nonetheless it is reasonable to talk about 'intelligence' in a general sense.
What stood out to me, personally, was the way that the mask came down a bit, and setting aside all disputes about facts, Scott is dedicated to normative commitments that I think are repulsive, or frankly insane. Consider:
I'm sorry, but this is lunatic. We need to invest in language models or human civilisation will be permanently stunted? What? He's got some sort of science fiction eschatology in mind that seems both absurd on the factual merits and, perhaps more importantly, morally blinkered. While I did always know that Scott had some of those bizarre transhumanist beliefs (and I'm certainly not a convert to Phil-Torres-like conspiracism), it is, at least, a useful reminder that he approaches the whole issue of technology from a bizarre starting point that I cannot sympathise with.
This is a fair point. Based on people's answers to questions like "does AI pose an existential threat to the human race?", you should not be able to predict their opinions about completely unrelated topics like polyamory, gender ideology and factory farming. But in practice, you can, and with remarkable accuracy.
If I pointed this out to anyone in this Bay Area bubble, they would scoff and say that believing 2+2=4 is heavily correlated with belief in gravity and natural selection: the reason we all have the same opinions about AI, polyamory and gender ideology is because smart people who believe one obviously true thing tend to believe in other obviously true things as well. We're the "reality-based community"!* (Feel free to make your own "rationalist"-themed lawn sign.)
The less charitable explanation is that the Bay Area has become an ideological echo chamber, and that this is bad. A lack of viewpoint diversity will probably hurt the AI doomer movement in the long run, in ways that ironically mirror what's going to happen to future LLMs. With so much content (text, images, videos, music) on the internet now being AI-generated, the next generation of LLMs will be heavily trained on content which is itself AI-generated, resulting in incestuous artefacts and mode collapse. Similarly, the opportunity for novel, creative solutions is massively curtailed if everyone is reading the same articles, donating to the same candidates, attending the same house parties and fucking (literally) the same people.**
Scott complains about the way Pinker characterises the AI doomers as a "cult" who recite the "catechism" of their creed. Comparing group X to a religion or a cult is indeed a cheap way to make that group seem ridiculous, and the fact that so many AI doomers have similar ideas and concerns could well be evidence of independent convergence as opposed to top-down indoctrination. But leaving AI aside – surely Scott would agree that for people in this space who live in the Bay Area, there is a catechism, right? There are opinions unrelated to AI that you're expected to hold, opinions you're expected not to hold, and expressing those in the latter group will land you in hot water. I'm not persuaded that a genuinely brilliant AI researcher with novel ideas about how to improve alignment (but unorthodox opinions about gender ideology, which he makes no effort to hide) would be welcome in the Bay Area, and I think that should be cause for concern for anyone who's worried about AI as an existential risk. If nothing else, it makes you seem unserious, in the same way that buying up seafront property makes people reasonably question how serious you are about rising sea levels. "AI IS GOING TO KILL US ALL, ANYONE WITH A MODICUM OF CODING SKILL SHOULD DROP EVERYTHING AND HELP OUT (those exclusively in favour of monogamous relationships need not apply)" is not a good look.
"What – just because AI will kill us all, we have to stop caring about shrimp welfare and throw our trans comrades under the bus?" Part of me wants to say yeschad.jpg. Another part of me says: look, you guys are the ones saying that any intelligent agent with a goal would organically converge on the sub-goal of self-preservation, natural selection be damned. You can't advocate for trans rights if you're dead. So either you don't really think AI will kill us all, or you'd better start holding your nose and tolerating the presence of talented, creative individuals with whom you disagree.
*I'm sure Scott found it suspicious that, in 2020, support for lockdowns was so heavily correlated with support for ignoring those lockdowns to attend BLM protests – but he finds the same phenomenon unremarkable when it afflicts his in-group. The speck in your brother's eye, the plank in yours etc.
**There was an article in the Washington Post where someone is quoted as saying "All of the Zoomers that work for me are bisexual, and all of them have long covid. I’ll believe long covid is real when someone who is not bisexual has it." I saw a post on Substack the other day which edited it to read "I'll believe AI poses a threat to the human race when someone who hasn't had sex with Aella says so."
And yet, per Yud, every cause wants to be a cult (Scott himself posted on this topic too). How is he of all people surprised and even offended by comparisons to cults, surely he's smart enough to look past the emotive connotations? Isn't that just evidence that they're winning, or at least are on the right track w/r/t community building?
Less charitably - now that AI doom has gone from a fringe obsession to something actually resembling a movement with visible political influence and cultural cachet, is he finally concerned about how stuff like this reads to normies, whose support is instrumental in advancing their cause?
Kek I'll remember this one, thanks. I still think calling rationalists writ large a sex cult is uncharitable - weird sexual practices aren't a defining trait of their culture - but I agree that at this point it's undeniably a trait, can't be easily written off or ignored as convenient, and is bound to cause some friction
pun not intendedin the long march towards the mainstream.It's surely a tiny fraction. But still, relative to other scenes, which have zero who've made it with Aella, that's something.
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I disagree, on "see what you can't critique" grounds. Complaining about the weird sexual practices generates more outrage and more circling of the wagons than critiquing mosquito nets. Everything else is thought experiments; this is personal. Ergo, it is a defining trait.
Being more sensitive about their [personal] sex lives than their [political] beliefs is definitely not unique to rationalists, the tendency is virtually universal. Would you not object more harshly to someone criticizing you for who you sleep with, who you feel attracted to, than if they'd just called you a X-triber or tried to point out how stupid your politics are?
I didn't say it was, either.
With the whole "we try to be more aware of our biases!" thing they should do a better job at not falling into the same traps as everyone else, and yet, they are only human, however much some of them resent that fact. If anything there are certain blind spots that they are worse at than non-Rationalists of similar socioeconomic status.
Ehhhh it depends on the context?
I mean yeah, I probably would react more harshly, but we're not talking just like "I don't like your partner" or "I don't like that you're [orientation]," and it's not specifically one-on-one either. "A meaningful swathe of your social group is into """consensual non-consent""" and projecting your morality onto the culture through AI; this will ultimately be bad for 99% of people" is not merely disliking their sex life; it's what their sex life says about their approach to morality/culture/socialization/etc.
I don't have links handy so take this with as much salt as you like, but during one of the poly discourse blowups back when the CW thread was still on the Slatestarcodex subreddit, there seemed to be a split between the vocally poly (possibly overrepresented in the Bay Area) and people that said they were poly but quiet about it (who I don't think were so geographically concentrated, and came across resentful of the vocal types for giving them a bad name). The rationalists live their sex lives quite publicly, with one in particular living hers professionally publicly, and that's what generates the circling of the wagons.
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