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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   25816 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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In the proximate inciting tweet Pinker calls the "scenarios preposterous" and says "the presumption of inevitability encourages fatalism, panic, and distraction from the more mundane and realistic safety challenges."

Accusations of the kind of inevitability that encourages fatalism implies that the safetyists^1 are encouraging inaction or hopeless panic, it's well worth Scotts time and in no way bad faith to rebut this. It's a response to Pinker's claim and in no way bad faith to defend his position. I really don't see how any of this can be accused of bad faith. Pinker does in fact accuse the safetyists of fatalism and Scott does in fact not believe they are fatalists, this is a very valid and fair argument to engage in.

^1 Pinker calls them doomers which I consider to be a kind of bad faith labeling given the safetyists have preferred designations and the very label embeds the very accusation of fatalism Scott is writing about)

I agree that it's more than fair to push back Pinker on fatalism level 1(that AI will kill everyone and not have mundane level of danger)! And he did it well in RAND section. Why did Scott needed to make a section about inevitability level 2(that we can't pause AI)?

Where is he doing that exactly? Or maybe I'm not understanding your complaint. I think he kind of needs to go into why one might expect complications even given a pause because that's the actual problem statement that the safetyists are engaged with and Pinker has noted that he thinks their problem is fabricated.

For example, in the tweet that made me challenge you to a debate, you said that “The presumption of inevitability encourages fatalism”. I don’t think this was a vague statement about some hypothetical person - it was in the context of an article which focused on Eliezer Yudkowsky and our community.

Do we encourage a “presumption of inevitability”?

One of the biggest groups organizing ordinary members of the public to protest AI risk is called Evitable. Its homepage looks like this:

Still, you regularly talk about how fatalistic everyone is. Even in your open letter, you write that we are “issuing exact probabilities of human extinction (including 100 percent)”.

I challenge this. I have searched long and hard, and I cannot find a single example of any AI risk advocate issuing a 100% p(doom). I asked an AI to search for this, and it couldn’t find any example either. Wikipedia has a list of people’s p(doom) values, and none of them are 100% either3.

In fact, most people in the community think doom is less likely than not. I’ve previously said that I think there’s about a 25-30% chance that AI drives humanity extinct. Geoffrey Hinton has said 10-50% chance. Dario Amodei has said 10-25%, Elon Musk 10-30%, and the average AI researcher in Grace’s 1,600 person sample said 18%.

There are some people who are more pessimistic; my AI 2027 co-author Daniel Kokotajlo says 70-80%, and Eliezer Yudkowsky says 95%+. But both of these people have devoted their lives to fighting back, which is the opposite of calling it inevitable and being fatalistic.

the actual problem statement that the safetyists are engaged with and Pinker has noted that he thinks their problem is fabricated.

That's fatalism level 1(that AI will kill everyone and not have mundane level of danger). Again, I think Pinker is being very stupid here, I would prefer Scott not doing level 2 switch in one section

I'm sorry, maybe I'm being dense but I just really am not groking what the mischaracterization is here. Is it conflating p(doom) and p(doom|pause)? I don't think he's doing that but I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Is it conflating p(doom) and p(doom|pause)?

Yes

I don't think he's doing that but I don't understand what you're trying to say.

He is doing that! He said in the comments that these are different levels of fatalism! Pinker objects high p(doom)

Ok but P(doom) necessarily contains p(doom|pause). you can't accuse them of being fatalist and then object to them pointing out the future that they're trying to affect which mitigates their fears. but maybe you mean p(doom|!pause)? But you say Pinker doesn't really believe P(!pause|danger) possible so you'd imagine this would collapse into agreement, but Pinker remains in disbelief of the existence of danger which is the big frustrating disagreement.

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