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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:
AI X risk is just this round of global warming catastrophism(we're going to be underwater by
200020122020[oh wait, that was a different ridiculous hysteria we'd all be better off ignoring]) because seriously, datacenters are fragile and require constant inputs from outside that we can just cut off. Like against Skynet we can take some collateral damage if we've got to. It's not worth worrying about, it's just another made up problem to justify giving ridiculous people more power. In this case, a literal sex cult.Arguments like these should be left to twitter, unless you want to bring proper evidence for them
what part are you objecting to and what evidence will you accept
would you prefer the arrangement "apocalyptic cult that happens to put an incredible emphasis on certain kinds of sex, but that is not technically the focus of the cult"
I'll list objections to this statement:
Any form of evidence is fine
I don't think the below constitutes evidence that will satisfy you, but thank you for being specific, and hopefully the below provides a jumping-off point for anyone else that wants to try to draw all the connections.
I think "sex cult" is a convenient but somewhat exaggerated shorthand for the actual situation.
Zizians were motivated in part by x-risk (and huge amounts of mental illness). Confirmed cult, but also fringe and defunct.
One catch to providing evidence is that there isn't one cult, there's more like half a dozen with varying degrees of evidence, intensity, and overlap.
I strongly disagree that the majority or even plurality matters, because it's hierarchical and it's the small tight-knit social sphere at or near the top, that are friends/siblings/housemates/non-monogamous partners/polite ex-partners/orgy attendees with each other and with the people they want to regulate their industry.
Probably no more than 100 people total with various overlapping relationships because it's such a small yet important field, and certain people have substantially outsized influence therein.
That is inherently to the race dynamic that Anthropic pushes, that getting to AGI first means you set the morality of the future.
Aella is the keystone of the sex accusations and complicating factor here, depending how charitably (or not) one wants to take her interactions with the field, with her likely-joking-but-hmm offers to provide reverse gangbangs as a reward for any researchers leaving top AI companies, doing that infamous couch photo with Yud and other AI researchers/whatever you want to call them, etc. I think she is ultimately net-negative for the rationalists, and their interest in circling the wagons when she gets critiqued is what causes people to say EAs/rats consider the weird sex stuff more important than AI safety.
Borrowing from Ian Duncan, important links in the original not reproduced here:
emphasis mine because lol
Plzdontkillus is co-run with Ronnie Fernandez, who is the ex-husband of Holly Elmore, president of Pause AI US. It was the application for this camp that had the infamous Cow Question, to select for a certain kind of person willing to answer obscene and gross hypotheticals. Further complications involving Aella would mean delving into SlutCon and RedMeansNo discourse, which I don't really have the time for currently. Continuing from Ian-
Daniela being, of course, the more famous Dario's sister. And this is only a fraction of the interconnections!
Indeed, so I'm not sure this really proves anything except that some crazy people were also rats/safetyists/etc.
You are correct that there are multiple overlapping groups here - as I just mentioned - and each one could be a cult, and it's difficult to demonstrate that for each individual group. Rationalists, AI safetyists, Effective altruists, and probably more offshoots from those groups, and people who may be members of all, some, or none of those.
But if we go back to the original point, hydro talked of a "Literal sex cult". Unless I'm mistaken, I'm going to take that to mean people who attend Aella's Slutcon and similar events. Now I'm extremely skeptical that going to some events run by a prostitute makes you part of a cult, but let's put that aside and assume it is a cult for now.
Now, how many people who fit the above are also AI safetyists or involved in x-risk somehow? I very much doubt it is even a small minority.
But you do say
I don't think I fully agree with this point either, but I'll grant it for now. Who are the key people in this field?
Is it Yudkowsky, MIRI, and the many related safety organisations? Does the UK's AISI count?
Is it the labs? Is it specific labs, like only Anthropic and OpenAI but not Google or X? Is it specific people at specific labs?
I might accept that a good chunk of the MIRI crowd could also be attendees of SlutCon, although that would be an assumption. But AI safety organisations are now so widespread that it surely isn't true for the majority of them. And it definitely isn't true for the major labs, even if you limit it to just some people.
The latter sentence is relevant, as you then say
Which gets straight to the argument that pretty much all the E/accs, Open weights people, AI skeptics, and others use: that AI safety is an excuse for regulatory capture by Anthropic/Amodei/OpenAI/Altman. Not MIRI or any of those groups. The big labs and the CEOs and the investors. And are any of these people attendees at Slutcon?
I would accept the argument that some proposals specifically name METR as a key player, and METR may have Slutcon people, and therefore it is still fair to say that a sex cult to using AI safety to gather power. But it is a very stupid argument because
a) the proposals would basically give METR people a small sinecure, nothing really beyond their existing positions in the AI industry
b) there are a ton of proposals that have nothing to do with METR
and
c) I would wager that 99% of people interested in AI safety would gladly throw METR to the wolves in order to get any of the above proposals implemented.
Everything after this is basically Ian Duncan stating that there is a weird prostitute who has ingratiated herself with a number of AI people, and because a lot of AI people know other AI people, therefore aella knows them. But really what both Duncan and hydro are trying to do is state "Here is this low status person who associates with this other group. This group must therefore be wrong and low status!"
Given that this argument has appeared here on the motte, I think you would have to grant your position that aella is a net-negative for AI safety and rationalists, as there are clearly a lot of people willing to be taken in by such drivel. But we should at least recognize that it is drivel
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