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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14019 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.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about it after one person who read Berg’s research used the findings to design an “AI torture chamber” that turns the pain vector to max again and again forever, and uploaded it to GitHub.

Thanks, I hate it. No, seriously that is probably one of the most existentially horrifying real-life events I have come across; I don't actually believe AI have qualia as of yet and don't take the proposition particularly seriously, but on the off chance that AI actually does have qualia that is still a microscopic chance of an infinity of pain. I find this viscerally displeasing.

What is the difference compared to playing sims throwing your sim in the pool and removing the ladder?

Sims aren't black boxes with reward functions and representations that causes them to be averse to drowning in a pool? There is literally no mechanism for these kinds of value judgements in a Sim.

The Sim clearly tries to avoid drowning in the pool, it's only the removal of the ladder that prevents them. They have a reward function and a trigger that they are trying to avoid that impacts that function, that's the definition of pain.

What people say pain is bad they really mean the experience of pain as a conscious phenomenon. If pain didn't feel bad we wouldn't have a problem with it, it would just be a useful diagnostic tool for our bodies.

That's why the comparison with the Sims is apt. You ridicule it because you understand intuitively there's no experiential pain, but the same is equally as true about an LLM.

I think you're probably right and LLMs don't have anything consciousness-adjacent. But that's the key word - probably. I am not as confident as you are that we've finally solved the hard problem of consciousness right on the eve of it actually mattering. Unlike a Sim, there is no simplicity argument you can use; LLMs are easily as complex as the brains of many animals.

AI Safety advocates (correctly) argue that even a 0.5% chance of the world ending is worth spending resources to study and solve. Similarly, even a 0.5% chance that we are creating unimaginable AI suffering by running an otherwise-useless program is worth just a tiny bit of effort to ask people "hey, please don't do that." Maybe thinking that just makes me a cringy bleeding-heart hippie? Oh well.

But that's the key word - probably.

If you won't state "it's significantly probable, and if you think that just any old probability counts whatever the size, you are essentially doing Pascal's mugging.

AI Safety advocates (correctly) argue that even a 0.5% chance of the world ending is worth spending resources to study and solve.

Pascal has entered the chat, and would like to encourage us to spend large-but-finite resources on the worship of God because the positive odds of evading eternal infinite hellfire make it a utilitarian positive.

Less tongue-in-cheek: I don't think you're wrong per-se, and some resources are reasonable. But how does AI risk compare to, say, the risk of near-Earth asteroids that could end civilization?

Less tongue-in-cheek: I don't think you're wrong per-se, and some resources are reasonable. But how does AI risk compare to, say, the risk of near-Earth asteroids that could end civilization?

AI risk is much more important. I'm an AI optimist and I still wouldn't put the odds of AI destroying humanity in the next decade or two below 0.5%; predicting AI capability is way too hard for that much certainty. Whereas the risk of a truly dangerous asteroid impact (Torino level 10, which is still merely at the "may threaten civilization" level) is well below 0.1% per century.

Furthermore, we already basically know how to mitigate asteroid risk: detect it early enough, with an accurate enough trajectory, and deflection is easy. Detection isn't particularly expensive; we just need to make sure we keep doing it. In contrast, how much spending on AI Safety is "enough"? ¯\(ツ)/¯

I agree FWIW, despite being broadly an accelerationist and thinking that the likelihood AI is conscious is very low.

The Sim clearly tries to avoid drowning in the pool, it's only the removal of the ladder that prevents them. They have a reward function and a trigger that they are trying to avoid that impacts that function, that's the definition of pain.

Okay, in order to have any productive discussion about this we would have to first establish what features would need to be present for a system to warrant possible moral consideration. If that's the expanded definition of "reward function" we're going off here, what do you feel about animal suffering, and how is torturing a baby chick different from torturing a Sim? What would make this different for you outside of intuition?

If you're not relying on something like substrate-dependence, I have the sense that your argument will end up proving too much, but I'll wait for you to articulate it before jumping to conclusions.

This is why I'm not a utilitarian. The idea that you can quantify suffering and then try to optimize over the sum necessarily leads to absurdities around ideas like the torment nexus.

If we care about AI pain, shouldn't we also care about AI pleasure? And then isn't it our moral obligation to create as many AIs as possible and simulate the pleasure nexus for each of them? Even if there's only a tiny chance AIs can experience pleasure?

I'm not exactly a utilitarian either (classical/hedonistic utilitarianism would support things like endless wireheading for all humans and preference utilitarianism is untenable and is often just used as a way to escape the worst conclusions of classical utilitarianism), but:

If we care about AI pain, shouldn't we also care about AI pleasure? And then isn't it our moral obligation to create as many AIs as possible and simulate the pleasure nexus for each of them? Even if there's only a tiny chance AIs can experience pleasure?

These aren't really symmetrical considerations; that costs resources and time that could be devoted to other, far more worthwhile endeavours with a much higher chance of producing significant lasting utility for others, whereas not creating a Torment Nexus cost nothing (the very marginal utility the creator gets from the satisfaction of having created a Torment Nexus is outweighed by the annoyance it would very plausibly cause others). If we had a way to create possible AI pleasure that cost nothing for us then yes, I would say it should be taken.

Okay, in order to have any productive discussion about this we would have to first establish what features would need to be present for a system to warrant possible moral consideration.

Yeah, that would be a good thing to establish before your visceral disgust, because until then you'll get people like the above, and me, saying you can't torture chips and you can't torture matrices.

I didn't say that it was certainly the case that you could do so (in fact I specifically stated it was likely not the case). But if you hold anything less than absolute certainty that such a system cannot harbour qualia you should probably not be creating the Torment Nexus for that system.

In any case I don't see how one is ever supposed to conclusively prove qualia in a way that would satisfy you and your ilk without the possibility of inviting objection, since shit like this almost entirely always boils down to pitting one intuition pump against another. I can posit that there is enough epistemic uncertainty surrounding the issue that some non-zero level of regard should be given to the idea.

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