site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37989 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Was a bit surprised to see this hadn't been posted yet, but yesterday Yudkowsky wrote an op-ed in TIME magazine where he describes the kind of regime that he believes would be necessary to throttle AI progress:

https://archive.is/A1u57

Some choice excerpts:

Many researchers working on these systems think that we’re plunging toward a catastrophe, with more of them daring to say it in private than in public; but they think that they can’t unilaterally stop the forward plunge, that others will go on even if they personally quit their jobs. And so they all think they might as well keep going. This is a stupid state of affairs, and an undignified way for Earth to die, and the rest of humanity ought to step in at this point and help the industry solve its collective action problem.

The moratorium on new large training runs needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. If the policy starts with the U.S., then China needs to see that the U.S. is not seeking an advantage but rather trying to prevent a horrifically dangerous technology which can have no true owner and which will kill everyone in the U.S. and in China and on Earth. If I had infinite freedom to write laws, I might carve out a single exception for AIs being trained solely to solve problems in biology and biotechnology, not trained on text from the internet, and not to the level where they start talking or planning; but if that was remotely complicating the issue I would immediately jettison that proposal and say to just shut it all down.

Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for anyone, including governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

if its presence in the CW thread needs justifying, well, it's published in a major magazine and the kinds of policy proposals set forth would certainly ignite heated political debate were they ever to be seriously considered.

"Yudkowsky airstrike threshold" has already become a minor meme on rat and AI twitter.

I've lost pretty much all respect for Yudkowsky over the years as he's progressed from writing some fun power-fantasy-for-rationalists fiction to being basically a cult leader. People seem to credit him for inventing rationality and AI safety, and to both of those I can only say "huh?". He has arguably named a few known fallacies better than people who came before him, which isn't nothing, but it's sure not "inventing rationality". And in his execrable April Fool's post he actually, truly, seriously claimed to have come up with the idea for AI safety all on his own with no inputs, as if it wasn't a well-trodden sci-fi trope dating from before he was born! Good lord.

I'm embarrassed to admit, at this point, that I donated a reasonable amount of money to MIRI in the past. Why do we spend so much of our time giving resources and attention to a "rationalist" who doesn't even practice rationalism's most basic virtues - intellectual humility and making testable predictions? And now he's threatening to be a spokesman for the AI safety crowd in the mainstream press! If that happens, there's pretty much no upside. Normies may not understand instrumental goals, orthogonality, or mesaoptimizers, but they sure do know how to ignore the frothy-mouthed madman yelling about the world ending from the street corner.

I'm perfectly willing to listen to an argument that AI safety is an important field that we are not treating seriously enough. I'm willing to listen to the argument of the people who signed the recent AI-pause letter, though I don't agree with them. But EY is at best just wasting our time with delusionally over-confident claims. I really hope rationality can outgrow (and start ignoring) him. (...am I being part of the problem by spending three paragraphs talking about him? Sigh.)

People seem to credit him for inventing rationality and AI safety, and to both of those I can only say "huh?".

This seems pure pedantry. Obviously, the concept of rationality and ideas around optimizing for truth or utility have existed for a very long time. And there is plenty of science fiction which featured dangerous AI.

But I really can't imagine anyone even vaguely familiar with Yudkowsky or AI alignment or the rat-sphere would struggle with the claim that Yudkowsky "invented rationality and AI safety."

Capital-R Rationality is the modern groups that formed around the Bay-area subculture which Yudkowsky largely founded. It is MIRI, CFAR, Effective Altruism. It's Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, Julia Galef. It's LessWrong, SSC, and even this very forum.

And AI Safety? Yes, the concept existed. But the entire modern edifice of AI alignment all arose from Yudkowsky's initial writings on LessWrong. He was responsible for drawing attention to it, he lead MIRI for a while, he set down a great deal of theory.

I'm really struggling to believe someone smart enough to post on TheMotte would so easily be confused by this.

I want to be clear that this is coming from somebody who once liked his writings. I didn't worship him. I didn't learn much from him. But he has always had a fun and unique writing style.

But believe me, there's no confusion here. Capital-R Rationality may be something that crystalized around LessWrong and the Sequences, but the concepts of rationality are hardly new; we're building on a legacy of humans struggling to explain the Universe that has been built over thousands of years. Yudkowsky wrote some entertaining essays, some of which are insightful (and some of which are silly, particularly when he veers into fields of science he doesn't know well). You could credit him with collecting and indexing a few good ideas. But he's very bad at practicing what he preaches - Scott, for instance, is far better at actually making and testing predictions than Yudkowsky. I suppose cult leaders don't usually lower themselves to the level of scrubbing the temple floor.

As for AI Safety, no. No, no, no. There's absolutely no defense for his egotistical claim in the April Fool's post. Futurists have been discussing AI safety since at least Asimov's Three Laws. What do you think AI researchers did before him, shrug and go "hmm, I wonder if making this neural net behave is something I should study sometime"? Maybe I can trace one particular flavour of the "edifice" to his writings - superintelligence-goes-FOOM-breaks-out-of-black-box-and-builds-nanotech-in-a-bio-lab - but AI safety as a whole would still exist and look pretty much the same without him. Arguably, it would be healthier, with the many people with different intelligent perspectives not being drowned out by his singular view and stubborn insistence that he knows the unknowable future.

Thank you for clarifying your points, but I think this ultimately falls into a disagreement about what the invention of a concept is. It seems you don't really disagree that Yudkowsky invented Rationality as a subculture, you just don't find it particularly impressive - which is fine, but I doubt most readers are confused reading about the difference between the subculture and the idea of rationality.

On AI Safety, I am very skeptical of your claim that current discussion around AI safety would look the same without Yudkowsky. I'm sure in a counterfactual world that someone like Nick Bostrom or whomever would still come up with many of the ideas, but this is true for most things. Yudkowsky definitely had an outsized influence, and I think if the next AI researcher survey put out a question about major influences, he would definitely perform very well.

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