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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27106 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Any particular reason? I remember Summers from getting fired from Harvard for telling the unpleasant truth, and for working at the treasury. Any reason why either of those apply to being on the board of AI, or is it something I'm missing?

Apparently he has a lot of experience with Jeffrey Epstein. Like a lot a lot.

I don't mind gossip as long as it's clearly framed as gossip, but this kind of statement I feel should be elaborated upon. Intended or not, it smacks of bait as currently written.

No need for gossip. Respectable mainstream sources suffice.

Thank you for sources.

No need. Everybody who was somebody was friend of Epstein, from William Burns to Noam Chomsky.

Dead bird link here, if you are interested in going further down this rabbit hole.

There's a lot of controversy and reputation about the man in economics, but I don't really have a good level of confidence in evaluating whether he's right or wrong on those.

Summers has a lot of pieces like this or this in his history. It's more generally a side effect of his state-first thinking, and it's not even always wrong, but it's very much the normie version of "AI Safety" as about jobs programs or small-scale disruption. Maybe his personal experience at Harvard will stop him from advocating for RLMFing LLMs in loops; I'm not confident on that one.

Makes him a very high-profile and high-reputation version of the only opponents of things I like can be Luddites view.

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