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Yet another Eliezer Yudkowsky podcast. This time with Dwarkesh Patel. This one is actually good though.
Listeners are presumed to be familiar with the basic concepts of AI risk, allowing much more in-depth discussion of the relevant issues. The general format is Patel presenting a series of reasons and arguments that AI might not destroy all value in the universe, and Yudkowsky ruthlessly destroying every single one. This goes on for four hours.
Patel is smart and familiar enough with the subject material to ask the interesting questions you want asked. Most of the major objections to the doom thesis are raised at some point, and only one or two survive with even the tiniest shred of plausibility left. Yudkowsky is smart but not particularly charismatic. I doubt that he would be able to defend a thesis this well if it were false.
It feels like the anti-doom position has been reduced to, “Arguments? You can prove anything with arguments. I’ll just stay right here and not blow myself up,” which is in fact a pretty decent argument. It's still hard to comprehend the massive hubris of researchers at the cutting-edge AI labs. I am concerned that correctly believing yourself capable of creating god is correlated with falsely believing yourself capable of controlling god.
This has made it obvious that the /r/slatestarcodex community behaves radically different from the community of 2014.
The top comment on /r/slatestarcodex is:
We also have the "Can Eliezer even pass a calculus test" comment (+39) and "these videos are cringe and embarrassing" (+28).
The founding ethos of the community was centered around charity, scholarship, taking ideas seriously, with a strong disdain for personal attacks.
Now personal attacks are in, Eliezer has apparently fallen from grace, and it's more popular to baselessly speculate that he can't do Calculus than to engage with his actual arguments.
"I don't think Eliezer should be the face of the AI safety movement because he comes off as weird" is a perfectly fine thing to argue, but I remember when making disparaging remarks about someone was done regretfully and respectfully, not with zeal.
Rest in peace quokkas, the world was too harsh a place.
As much as I'd like to make an Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte joke, I don't think this is a case of an earnest nerd space getting coopted by trend-chasers. Most of those comments don't read to me as saying "Like, yikes. NERD", but rather, they want his arguments taken seriously and wish he'd present himself better for the normies.
/images/16809485218250294.webp
This comic misses the point it's trying to make. It focuses too much on the aesthetics of the participants. Ironically falling for the same thing it aims to highlight the negative effects of. And I'm really tired of this sentiment.
Let's say there is a group with objective X.
Newcomers are fine, as long as they stick to maximizing objective X.
Females are fine if they stick to objective X.
Dudebros are fine if they stick to objective X.
It's the derailment away from the objective that is bad, not that "normies" are coming in. And if you think you need to have bad social skills as a precursor to being (or wanting to be) good at things, reevaluate your model of psychology. This comic is especially cringeworthy to me. Why the fuck would you even use the term "dudebro" as a man? What he's too manly for you, a man of more refined tastes? You deserve to be made fun of. Stick to the objective instead of making it about how unmanly you are.
Eliezer is good at whatever he is inspite of his dweebiness not because of it. If someone can link me a positive correlation between dwebiness and IQ, I'm all ears but everything I come across points towards the opposite direction.
"Nerds" have a tendency to overcompensate in the opposite direction of "society" and just assume dweebiness is a proxy for competence.
The comic is an extremely popular meme representation of the pattern I'm talking about. I don't endorse the particulars of it, but do think what it descibes is basically true. The pattern is: thing-focused nerdy quokkas assemble in a space, build something socially powerful, and then the space is subsequently colonized by people-focused power-seeking outsiders. See: Silicon valley culture, 90s to present. (A tragedy described in a certain paranoid rant) And in a million little nerdy hobbies. (This being the farce.)
I do think bad social skills are deeply correlated with a certain type of raw creative energy. They are also correlated with being a quokka. This leads to getting Edisoned as a Tesla.
It's too many times in my life I've found out, on investigation, that my biggest programmer and intellectual heroes are poorly dressed weirdos who literally eat shit out of their toes, for example. Or look like Scott or Yud IRL. These sorts of highly capable misfits get shunted off to the side when it's time for an invention/hobby/movement to go mainstream.
Yes but today, for every misunderstood genius, there's ten assholes who are just misunderstood. You're knee deep in Berkson's paradox, there is no correlation between being an ugly antisocial dweeb and brilliance, they're actually negatively correlated, rather the apparent correlation is because if you're that much of a loser and you're not brilliant no one ever notices you.
agree. survivorship bias means we only see the successful misunderstood geniuses or antisocial weirdos
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