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I just got done listening to Eliezer Yudkowski on EconTalk (https://www.econtalk.org/eliezer-yudkowsky-on-the-dangers-of-ai/).
I say this as someone who's mostly convinced of Big Yud's doomerism: Good lord, what a train wreck of a conversation. I'll save you the bother of listening to it -- Russ Roberts starts by asking a fairly softball question of (paraphrasing) "Why do you think the AIs will kill all of humanity?" And Yudkowski responds by asking Roberts "Explain why you think they won't, and I'll poke your argument until it falls apart." Russ didn't really give strong arguments, and the rest of the interview repeated this pattern a couple times. THIS IS NOT THE WAY HUMANS HAVE CONVERSATIONS! Your goal was not logically demolish Russ Roberts' faulty thinking, but to use Roberts as a sounding board to get your ideas to his huge audience, and you completely failed. Roberts wasn't convinced by the end, and I'm sure EY came off as a crank to anyone who was new to him.
I hope EY lurks here, or maybe someone close to him does. Here's my advice: if you want to convince people who are not already steeped in your philosophy you need to have a short explanation of your thesis that you can rattle off in about 5 minutes that doesn't use any jargon the median congresscritter doesn't already know. You should workshop it on people who don't know who you are, don't know any math or computer programming and who haven't read the Sequences, and when the next podcast host asks you why AIs will kill us all, you should be able to give a tight, logical-ish argument that gets the conversation going in a way that an audience can find interesting. 5 minutes can't cover everything so different people will poke and prod your argument in various ways, and that's when you fill in the gaps and poke holes in their thinking, something you did to great effect with Dwarkesh Patel (https://youtube.com/watch?v=41SUp-TRVlg&pp=ygUJeXVka293c2tp). That was a much better interview, mostly because Patel came in with much more knowledge and asked much better questions. I know you're probably tired of going over the same points ad nauseam, but every host will have audience members who've never heard of you or your jargon, and you have about 5 minutes to hold their interest or they'll press "next".
Yud is not trying to sway honest-to-God normies with this podcast tour (and people who've greenlit this multipronged astroturf of AI doom don't expect him to either, but that's a conspiratorial aside). He never could be popular among normies, he never will, he's smart enough to realize this. His immediate target is… well, basically, nerds (and midwitted pop-sci consumers who identify as nerds). Nerds in fact appreciate intellectual aggression and domination, assign negligible or negative weight to normie priors like «looks unhinged, might be a crackpot», and nowadays have decent economic power, indeed even political power in matters pertaining to AI progress. Nerds are not to be underestimated. When they get serious about something, they can keep at it for decades; even an autist entirely lacking in affective empathy and theory of mind can studiously derive effective arguments over much trial and error, and a rationalist can collate those tricks and organize an effective training/indoctrination environment. Nerds will get agitated and fanatical, harangue people close to them with AI doom concerns, people will fold in the face of such brazen and ostensibly well-informed confidence, and the future will become more aligned with preferences of doomers. Or so the thinking goes. I am describing the explicit logic that's become mainstream in one rat-adjacent community I monitor; they've gotten to the stage of debating pipelines for future AI-Alignment-related employment, so that the grift would never stop.
But on the object level:
You assume there is a minimal viable payload that he has delivered to you and others, and which is viable without all that largely counterproductive infrastructure. That is not clear to me. Indeed, I believe that the whole of Yud's argument is a single nonrobust just-so narrative he's condensed from science fiction in his dad's library, a fancy plot. It flows well, but it can be easily interrupted with many critical questions. He describes why timelines will «converge» on this plot, the nigh-inevitability of that convergence being the central argument for urgency of shutting down AI, but its own support is also made up of just-so stories and even explicit anti-empiricism; and once you go so deeply you see the opposite of a trustworthy model – basically just overconfident logorrhea.
That's exactly why Yud had to spend so many years building up the delivery vehicle, an entire Grand Theory, an epistemological-moral-political doctrine, and cultivating people who take its premises on faith, who all use the same metaphors, adhere to the same implicit protocol. His success to date rests entirely on that which you're telling him to drop.
Here's how Zvi Moskowitz understands the purpose of Yud's output, «its primary function is training data to use to produce an Inner Eliezer that has access to the core thing». (Anna Salomon at CFAR seems to understand and apply the same basic technique even more bluntly: «implanting an engine of desperation» within people who are being «debugged»).
In a sense, the esotericism of Yuddite doctrine is only useful, it had insulated people from pushback until they became rigid in their beliefs. Now, when you point at weak parts in the plotline, they answer with prefab plot twists or just stare blankly, instead of wondering whether they've been had.
Nerdy sects work; Marxism only the bloodiest testament to this fact. Doomsday narratives work too, for their target audience (by the way, consider the similarity of UK's Extinction Rebellion and Yuddites' new branding «Ainotkilleveryoneism»). They don't need to work by being directly compelling to the broader audience or by having anything to do with truth.
P.S. Recently I've encountered this interesting text from an exactly such an AI-risk-preoccupied nerd as I describe above: The No-Nonsense Guide to Winning At Social Skills As An Autistic Person
His social well-being is now literally predicated on his investment in EA-AI stuff, so I'd imagine he goes far, and this easily counts more for Yud's cause than 10k positive comments under another podcast.
Honestly, nerds of the type you’re speaking of hold very little power. The guy at the computer terminal building a new app or program or training an AI are doing it at the behest of business owners, financial institutions and in main, people with power over money. The agenda isn’t set at the level of the guy who builds, it’s set at the level of those who finance. No loans means no business.
As such I think if you were serious about AI risk, you’d be better off explaining that the AI would hurt the financial system, not that it’s going to grey goo the planet.
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