site banner
PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   26317 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What's the bad faith accusation here? Don't want to play 20 questions to get to it.

Here is the Scott in the comments

I think there are two levels of non-fatalism:

  1. Nonfatalism about alignment - "maybe building AI will go fine"
  1. Nonfatalism about pause - "building AI definitely won't go fine, but we can stop it and create a safe future for our species without it".

I think I have level 1 and Eliezer has level 2, but that these aren't really that cleanly separable, because even Eliezer believes the point of a pause is to get us to a point where we can do much better alignment research, and THEN maybe building AI will go fine.

There might be some people who believe even with a pause and decades of alignment research we can never make building AI go fine, but I think they're less central to the movement than Eliezer, and even they think we can still have things go fine by not building it.

I think it's fine to treat this the way I did in the post, because in context Pinker is using our "fatalism" to cast us as saying that people should just panic and stop having kids and assume the future definitely sucks, whereas I think even level 2 is sufficient to say we may have a bright future and should be optimistic and work toward it.

No, Steven Pinker talks about level 1. He believes that humanity will stop if it would be dangerous. He broadly agrees with Gary Marcus in his efforts to put liability on labs. He said that he would admit being wrong when AI would harm/kill at least a single human to pursue his goal (but not in the case if terrorists would misuse it and tell AI to kill people)

I think you have the accusations backwards? Pinker is accusing Scott and company of fatalism, it's not bad faith to defend against that claim. Where's the actual misrepresentation of Pinker's ideas?

My bad, the formatting broke when I try to copy. Pinker doesn't talk about fatalism level 2(we can't pause AI), he talks about level 1(AI will kill people). Scott argues that Pinker talks about level 2 in the section about fatalism. I'd say treating them the same is misrepresentation.

Kinda disingenuous to not mention Roman Yampolskiy who goes with 99.9%–99.999999% P(doom) too, but at least it's not misrepresentation of Pinker's argument

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.

More comments

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats