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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:
Something that has always stuck with my about Scott is that he had a rough time in High School, especially with bullying, and, from time to time, this bursts forth in his posts. He's open about his bad experiences back then.
I think it's odd that any person over 35 would still have that much emotional resonance with anything short of real-deal physical / sexual abuse from childhood and adolescence. To my knowledge, Scott doesn't claim anything to that level. Charitably, it seems like he was truly a very bad fit for traditional classroom schooling. Lump extra bullying on top and that's a hard way for a Sensitive Young Man to be.
But life turned out pretty good for Scott.
Full emotional maturation is probably a rare occurrence in any given lifetime. We all have a thing that will set us off even if we can placidly endure nearly everything else. I consider my father to be perhaps the most patient man I've ever personally known. When traffic of any level is present, he turns into a howling college football coach ("ARE YOU KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW WITH THAT FUCKING LANE CHANGE!").
But Scott's "thing" puzzles me because it appears that he press his own button most of the time. This tiff with Pinker comes across like a dressed up schoolyard spat. I mean, Scott literally brings up dueling. It's like the nerdy kid finally getting his dander up with the bullying and leveling the challenge; "You and me! Basketball court at 3:30." Somewhere in the background, Aella looks at Scott in a new way, holds eye contact, and gives a shy smile while she tucks her hair behind her ear.
This is not so rare in my experience. It is why I am heavily anti-bullying. Childhood and adolescence is when you build intuition of how the world works. If you drop something, it falls. Hit a hard object and you get hurt. You won't fly no matter how hard you flap your arms.
However, not everything is so clear cut. For social situations in particular, people tend to take whatever rules applied to the people they spend time with growing up and assume they hold true for the wider population. This is why childhood bullying is so insidious. Whatever way you find to cope will naturally stick with you well into adulthood. If you assume you deserve it, then you will believe yourself lesser than everybody else and become an easy victim. If you assume people around you are assholes, you become a misanthrope. Assume that they were good people misguided by human nature, and you start forming strong opinions about group dynamics and overruling instinct through rational thought. Maybe you view any kind of discrimination as evil, or any kind of ingroup bias as bad.
It is not a given that this will happen of course, but I have met a decent amount of adults who never "got over it". These ideas are often self-reinforcing, and people take them for granted to the point that they never even think to challenge them, because they feel as natural as gravity itself.
Yes, that's the purpose of bullying: to socialize the bullied into their lesser role.
Most bullies really don't think that far ahead, and the "lesser role" often turns out to limit the potential of the bullied significantly. So the victim loses out on quality of life while society at large lose out on that person's abilities. The only winners are the bullies who get to have fun and/or temporarily cement their social status.
I'm not really for bullying, but to play devil's advocate, the former doesn't matter - how far ahead to beavers think when building a dam? - and the latter could very well be to the benefit of society - the kinds of people who came into positions of power after "anti-bullying" became a thing, did massive damage to society and our culture.
I do not see a lot of typical victims in power. In mainstream perhaps, there are more. Those who get in power are, as the other guy noted, still the bully type, even if not the locker-showing jock type.
If you're thinking of the modal trans activist moderator, he wouldn't be bullied into insignificance, he'd just adapt to grow up into a duckspeak comissar of some other ideology.
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