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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34999 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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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:

(+77) Why the f--- is he wearing a fedora? Is he intentionally trying to make his arguments seem invalid? Is this guy actually a pro-AI mole to make anti-AI positions seem stupid? Because while I have not yet listened to his arguments, I must say he's already pissed in the well as far as first impressions go.

(+72) Forget the fedora. It's his mannerisms, his convoluted way of speaking, and his bluntness. He's just about the worst spokesperson for AI safety I can imagine.

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.

I've been on the "Eliezer is a crank" train for years. This is the guy who proposed the virtue theory of metabolism.

He's also a middle school drop out due to extreme emotional problems. Or an "autodidact" as he puts it. But also he says he can only work a couple hours per day. I'm really doubtful of the quality of his self-education. Let's not overestimate his calculus ability. I seriously doubt he could pass a college calculus exam.

But to be fair I bet most college STEM grads would also not pass such a test. I'm a tech bro, there's virtually no calculus at my job. The principles from calculus are useful, but I almost never have used the equations outside of school. I also rather doubt Eliezer keeps practical calculus skills sharp through regular use.

And this is not meant as a personal attack on him. It is to balance charity with a realistic appraisal of his abilities.

calculus is very broad concept . maybe most could pass intro calc

I think we are talking about the kind of undergrad exam where you have you have to evaluate a bunch of fairly difficult but still turn-the-crank type integrals and also some fairly easy ODEs.

I took undergrad and it was not like that at all. simple integrals, differentiation, and no ODEs. ODEs were not in my 1st year class.

Sounds about right. But I'm thinking about what would constitute a hard calculus exam while still being "just calculus".

I once bombed an exam a bit easier than the one I described, and it was actually the only subject I failed in Uni.

I have to laugh because over here in Europe, that’s our high school math. Even ODEs were introduced there but not gone through in any meaningful depth.

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