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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I don't know. I don't believe the AI doomerism, but neither do I believe the AI pollyannas about how Fairy Godmother AI will solve all the world problems and we'll all be rich and living high on the hog.

And while I try to be sympathetic to Aaronson because I do think he is severely neurotic and troubled, lines like this have me facepalming:

It was also defined by my struggle against the bullies—i.e., the kids who the blankfaced administrators sheltered and protected, and who actually did to me all the things that the blankfaces probably wanted to do but couldn’t.

Dude, mate, pal: I've worked in a school and related areas. The "blankfaces" don't want to stick your head down the toilet, they don't think of you as anything other than "okay, another problem to be solved", especially if your parents were on the phone every five minutes about how unfair it was that little Scott wasn't allowed to jump ahead three grades in maths.

This is someone smart, who works in academia, is married with kids - and is still going through the world as the scared and resentful 12 year old who was bullied at school. If he thinks AI is going to recognise him as a kindred 'high intellect' and be on his side, he needs to wake up fast. AI won't recognise or think of anybody as anything, it'll be a tool in the hands of whoever brings their product to market first.

If the doomerists are anyway right, he'll be just another one of the fleshbags. For someone who seems to live in a constant state of "I'm Jewish, so everyone wants to Holocaust me", I can see why he'd pin his hopes on machine intelligence being the boss of the world. But he's wrong - sure, the machine won't care that he's Jewish, but it also won't care that he's smart for a fleshbag. He's just more paperclip material.

It was also defined by my struggle against the bullies—i.e., the kids who the blankfaced administrators sheltered and protected, and who actually did to me all the things that the blankfaces probably wanted to do but couldn’t.

As a fellow bullied ex-kid (as I am guessing many on this forum are) with a half-decent career, I have only seen ambitious bullied kids end up 2 ways. Either they reflect on it, and move on by empathizing with the social circumstances that led to their unfortunate bullying or they hold onto to it with seething resentment.

The latter make for the worst kind of bully. They should never be trusted with any kind of power. They only ever assign bad intentions to anyone doesn't like them, and view all conflict as strong-crushing-the-weak and not the misunderstandings/incompatible incentives that they actually tend to be.

Aaronson is too traumatized to be trusted to fairly distribute chocolate among a lot of kids. Letting him play daddy to world defining AI, would be catastrophic.

As a fellow bullied ex-kid (as I am guessing many on this forum are) with a half-decent career, I have only seen ambitious bullied kids end up 2 ways. Either they reflect on it, and move on by empathizing with the social circumstances that led to their unfortunate bullying or they hold onto to it with seething resentment.

I dunno how true this is. Consider notable incidents of corporate fraud. Do any of these perpetrators have especially bad childhoods or history of being bullied? I think narcissism and grandiosity are the underlying trait here. These seem to be traits more consistent of bullies than the bullied.

Some killers grow up in horrible households, but others the opposite (notably Leopold and Loeb) .

Do any of these perpetrators have especially bad childhoods or history of being bullied?

I wouldn't expect to know either way. Whether or not someone was bullied isn't usually public knowledge

I don't know why then so many people default to the bullying explanation for explaining bad behavior when it's not even something that is readily known. Maybe pop culture or media are to blame. It just seems like a convenient or plausible explanation.

Looking at the biggest frauds pre-FTX (WorldCom, Enron, Madoff, and Theranos) all but one CEO/founder was raised in an upper middle class home. Bernie Ebbers parents were serious enough missionaries he grew up in multiple locations like a Navajo reservation and others.

I think you're mistaking A->B for B->A. Some bullying victims grow up to be horrible people, but not all horrible people were bullying victims.

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