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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.
In terms of his appearance, I wonder if he is making a smart choice to wear the fedora and so signal "I know what I come across as and I'm not ashamed" rather than attempt to imperfectly try to hide that he is a nerd.
The fedora meme is not known as cringe outside of online circles making fun of "incels" and weebs, then again, I don't think I've seen anyone wear a fedora in popular culture anywhere for the last 20 years, except for the dapper-looking googler that claimed their LLM was sapient.
In one reality, it becomes a signal that EY is self-confident.
In another, it becomes a signal that he's a loser imagining sci-fi becoming real.
In either case, I don't see the fedora itself being the hinge point on whether he gets cast out as crazy or not. That depends on whether the podcasters-that-be decide whether to take him seriously or not.
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