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Notes -
More developments on the AI front:
Big Yud steps up his game, not to be outshined by the Basilisk Man.
Now, he officially calls for preemptive nuclear strike on suspicious unauthorized GPU clusters.
If we see AI threat as nuclear weapon threat, only worse, it is not unreasonable.
Remember when USSR planned nuclear strike on China to stop their great power ambitions (only to have the greatest humanitarian that ever lived, Richard Milhouse Nixon, to veto the proposal).
Such Quaker squeamishness will have no place in the future.
So, outlines of the Katechon World are taking shape. What it will look like?
It will look great.
You will live in your room, play original World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on your PC, read your favorite blogs and debate intelligent design on your favorite message boards.
Then you will log on The Free Republic and call for more vigorous enhanced interrogation of terrorists caught with unauthorized GPU's.
When you bored in your room, you will have no choice than to go outside, meet people, admire things around you, make a picture of things that really impressed with your Kodak camera and when you are really bored, play Snake on your Nokia phone.
Yes, the best age in history, the noughties, will retvrn. For forever, protected by CoDominium of US and China.
edit: links again
My opinion on hard-core rationalists has stayed fairly stable over the years : "Listen to their opinions, never give them power."
Their utilitarian framework malfunctions if an apocalyptic outcome presents itself, no matter how miniscule its probability. After all, the apocalypse has negative infinity utility, and infinity x anything = infinity. At that point, you can stop listening to anything that comes out of a rationalist's mouth.
Once they have decided that alarm is the right course of action, the second problem arises. Rationalists will do everything except actually go work in the discipline they are so sure is important to the future of humanity. Entire AI ethics departments spring up, with not a single person having passed undergrad level calculus. If you care about AI alignment, then go join Anthropic and run actual experiments, instead of creating (horrific) castles in the sky. Go do a masters and learn enough math to avoid making a fool of yourself on twitter.
Scott excellently calibrates the strength of his opinions to his confidence in the subject matter. Gwern and Dynomight are excellent in his regard too. Aaronson & Yud on the other hand frequently suggest extreme actions in domains they have little visibility into.
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