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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26695 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Prestige Biotech

TIME reported:

Recently, many California residents were disturbed to learn that a small, privately-operated bio lab in the Central Valley town of Reedley was shut down by Fresno County Department of Public Health officials after they found that it had been improperly managing almost 1,000 laboratory mice and samples of infectious diseases including COVID-19, rubella, malaria, dengue, chlamydia, hepatitis, and HIV. The lab was registered to a company called Prestige Biotech that sold a variety of medical testing kits, including for pregnancy and COVID-19, and it was likely storing disease samples for the purpose of developing and validating its testing kits. Government authorities are still investigating the company’s history, but it appears to have previously operated a lab in Fresno under the name Universal MediTech, where city officials flagged it for investigation regarding improperly stored chemicals.

This, if anything, seems to be an understatement, since the initial federal investigation starts with:

On September 6, 2023, the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (“Select Committee”) issued its first subpoena as part of its ongoing investigation into theillegal facility that local authorities uncovered in Reedley, California.The subpoena, signed by the Chairman with an on-site visit by the Select Committee’s Chief Investigative Counsel and two investigative staffers, uncovered thousands of pages of documents, hundreds of photographs, and hours of video.This evidence, alongside interviews of local officials and other investigative steps, revealed troubling gaps in federal pathogen safeguards. These gaps allowed a wanted fugitive from Canada, who is a PRC national who had previously stolen millions of dollars of American intellectual property, to operate an illegal facility that contained “thousands of vials of potentially infectious agents” in Reedley, California.

and quickly turns to :

Approximately 1,000 mice were kept in inhumane, overcrowded conditions.When local officials asked a worker who “appeared to be in control” of the mice, she replied that they were transgenic mice that simulate the human immune system that were “genetically engineered to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.” In subsequent interviews with individuals who were at the warehouse, local officials learned that workers were tasked with caring and cleaning for the mice and, on numerous occasions, the Reedley Biolab operators had held back their pay.One of the workers who tended to the mice told Officer Harper that he and his children had become sick close in time to when he was tending the mice.The worker stated that he was instructed to discard any dead mice that he found into a dumpster...

The CDC did not note an Ebola label on the freezer in its report. When asked about the freezer labeled Ebola in a subsequent email, the CDC official noted that the CDC “would typically look for the vial to be labeled as Ebola,”that they “didn’t recall seeing a fridge labeled as Ebola,”and asked for a photograph of the freezer. A photograph was not available. The Select Committee has received written statements reporting the presence of the label.

The AP has a... more forgiving description, though that's damning with the extent it bends over backwards. Let's all get the obvious jokes out of our systems first. My personal favorite so far is "I didn't even know there was a wet market in Fresno", but if you have a particularly good one (maybe Black Dynamite?), fire away.

There's a bit of an obvious question, here, and it's "what the fuck".

And there is a plausible, charitable explanation. Looking at the current charges that fugitive from Canada is facing, it's quite possible that this lab was genuinely making lab tests, using these viral agents and lab mice to validate each batch, and just took 'move fast, break things' to an extreme level. Even the Ebola-labeled fridge, if it did have ebola samples, could maybe be about various biosensor demands that even pre-COVID were already being floated around; it's also possible that Zhu just got the thing on discount from a normal lab and didn't wipe off the marker. If that was the case, perhaps the strangest thing is here's that the scuzzy Engrish medical stuff marketed by a fraudster with a couple different IDs with different names on them, was actually trying and moderately-'real', even if it also had tremendous unnecessary risk and iffy environmental awareness. The criminal complaint even has a dedicated note for :

Despite media reports that UMI and PBI may have been manufacturing bioweapons, no evidence supporting those reports has been found to date. Any and all pathogens and toxins that have been found during the government’s investigation appear to be related to the manufacture and distribution of various IVD test kits.

... but that answer is a little complicated by rough questions about who, if anyone, has actually been looking. Beyond the CDC's apparent unwillingness or inability to test any of the samples found at the lab, it's not clear where they came from, or what Prestige would have been doing with them. Prestige mostly sold pregnancy tests, drug tests, so on.

And the charitable story has more than a few holes: none of the public documents show much evidence of Prestige BioTech's ability to manufacture the scale or variety of tests that they published, and the congressional investigation suggests that the company may have simply relabeled non-US-manufactured (and possibly non-US-certified) ones. It's illegal to import many of the found infectious agents without a license that Prestige did not have, and so the CDC may have presumed that they were provided by US companies... but it's a little worrying if some rando can order supplies of dengue or malaria without anyone caring. Compared to what happens if you try to order the wrong chemicals from a supply shop, that'd actually be worse.

... but it's not clear what, if any, alternative explanation would make more sense. Assuming for the sake of argument that Zhu is an undercover agent for the Chinese government, they don't exactly need James Bond to get Dengue fever samples. Nor would someone wanting to mix up bioweapons find it particularly useful to save on shipping by doing in-situ development. Perhaps there's something particularly funky about these particular breeds of transgenic mice, and given Zhu's previous modeus operandi of stealing biotech IP that would be in line with other practices, but there's no obvious way to get there from here, and a ton of inexplicable chaff around that. Maybe if the biological samples were meant as literal chaff and contained entirely different materials, in the sense that no sane person would test them for 'normal' corporate espionage?

That's further complicated by the federal investigation's general unwillingness to conduct the sort of testing or investigation necessary to assuage concerns; even were this particular case fully in the 'scuzzy Enrish dropshipper' category, the feds don't seem to have or be interested in getting the information necessary to demonstrate that. The charitable view, I suppose, is that the CDC runs into variations of this problem a lot (!) and doesn't think there's much to be gained from knowing the scale of the issue (!!) rather than simply spooling up the vacuum cleaners. Which... isn't especially good.

It's insane that any GoF research is allowed in the first place. Those jokers aren't even doing it to create new vaccines?

This is the most blackpilling thing about the whole COVID incident.

Modern apocalyptic and post apocalyptic science fiction was wrong. Armageddon will not come because of power hunger of big governments or greed of mega corporations.

Old time pulp fiction was wrong too. Armageddon will not come becaue of brilliant and audacious plans of genius mad scientist, and definitely will not be averted at last minute by slack jawed Action Hero.

Apocalypse will come due to few hundred, thousand at most, rather mediocre people, people with names, faces and adresses out there who are not protected and hiding at all, playing russian roulette with all mankind, openly and brazenly.

For ultimate power? For unlimited wealth? To create paradise on earth? To have revenge on the whole world?

Nope. They do it to publish few articles no one will ever read in prestigious journals to burnish their citation metrics. Nothing personal, just scientific bureaucratic process working as intended.

And mankind as a whole is fine with it.

No big deal.

Nothing to see here.

No hard feelings.

Everything keeps going, everyone is waiting for the next oops.

Only reaction, after three years so far, is ... one country's proposal to stop public funding of this pastime. Better than nothing, but not by very much.

Conclusion: Just stop worrying. Humanity is NGMI, and fully deservedly so.

Not just GoF research. After three years of misery caused by people playing God just to publish marginally more interesting papers than their peers, we now have a bunch of people racing to create a digital God, with who-knows-what outcome.

Not just GoF research. After three years of misery caused by people playing God just to publish marginally more interesting papers than their peers, we now have a bunch of people racing to create a digital God, with who-knows-what outcome.

This is not the same thing. Artificial intelligence promises audacious scientific breakthroughs to Mad Scientist, ultimate surveillance and control to Evil Overlord, unprecedented giga-profits to Corrupt Corporate Executive. Everyone who is someone needs and wants it.

Science fiction authors of golden, silver, bronze and trash ages would understand and approve.

But GoF research, that is really about nothing than few more scientific papers for never-to-be-read pile? Any science fiction author of note would laugh at this plot, any magazine editor would reject this premise even as satire.

Well, anyone except Philip.K.Dick.

Disease won’t wipe us out. Even the Black Death only killed, what, 30% of the population? And we have much better medical technology.

You grossly underestimate the risk of intentional or accidental development of bio-weapons, of which I consider GOF research to be the latter.

We have diseases with properties, which, if combined, would likely be beyond our ability to handle even with concomitant advances in biotech.

Offense outpaces defense very hard here, and the main reason we're not dead is because nobody is trying particularly hard for it to be so. You can GOF an extremely virulent organism to be much more lethal, a lethal organism to be much more virulent, potentially with the ability to lie dormant like HIV for ages till it erupts a few months later after infecting a majority of humanity. Even if it doesn't kill literally everyone, it has the potential to throw a very real wrench in the works, look at what Baby's First Pandemic, Covid, with a CFR of 0.1% before vaccines, managed to cause.

We didn’t have to notice Covid happened, let alone react the way we did, it was a media panic. The Black Death is probably an upper limit as far as plague; myxomatosis in rabbits maxed out at around that threshold IIRC.

Covid certainly was an over-reaction, but trust me doctors would have noticed an OOM or two surge in hospitalizations for respiratory issues regardless of public awareness. A more deadly by an OOM or two disease would cause far more economic damage.

Death usually occurs between days 10 and 12. Highly virulent strains, such as those present in North and South America, have essentially 100% case fatality rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxomatosis

You're relying on the observed lethality of natural epidemics to decide on the risks of engineered ones, which is a very bad idea for something that is presumably being aggressively optimized to kill you. Look at the number of eggs laid by a wild junglefowl versus a breed optimized to churn them out for an illustration of what selective pressures can achieve.

And we have much better medical technology.

When the next oops comes, at least half of the population will refuse to follow the expert's orders and use the newly advanced technology (which half will depend whether the new treaments are coded blue or red this time).

This effect will be canceled by the experts' orders being anywhere from useless to counterproductive. (As it was with COVID and the Black Death)

I'm not entirely sure that biotech can be done safely anywhere in the world. Except maybe in a remote research station in Antarctica, where all the scientists are screened by personality before being allowed on base.

Securing complex and dangerous systems can be a hard problem to solve. I'm more familiar with computer security, since it is closer to my area of expertise.

Usually the first, most important, and sometimes only security measure is to just prevent people from having access to the thing you want safe. Passwords, secret access points, encryption, etc.

You can't really do that in biology. The biosphere is too leaky. Things get out. And often you have to give low level employees like Janitors access to areas for cleaning and routine maintenance. This would be like google basically giving access to interns to their most valued databased, just so the interns could do some data entry.

Unless you have a pathogen that is ridiculously virulent, such that it can survive indefinitely in the atmosphere and get to a human, you can mitigate most of the risk by having lengthy quarantine periods for workers with repeated screening.

Unfortunate that's not very tenable, since hardly anyone would agree to work shifts closer to that of a nuclear submarine, but if they're not dead in a few months, and they swab negative, they're probably fine, assuming you know which diseases you're working on. Antarctica might work too, but largely for the reason that you're accidentally isolating people for lengthy periods of time.

The workers themselves are the main problem. They constantly violate the bio sphere containment area, and they themselves are a biological entity.

I think it is difficult sticking to lengthy isolation periods and being good about cleanliness on a long term consistent basis. Hospitals do their best to accomplish this, but I don't think any hospital would ever claim 100% effectiveness. And that is the real problem. A bio testing location working on dangerous pathogens needs to be 100% effective at preventing bio sample escape. A single escape and its all over. All of the "value" of that lab is gone and far into the negative if they cause a Covid level problem. Covid caused trillions in damage, so just for any of these labs to be worth it they need to be safe 99.9999% of the time (expected damage multiplied by likelihood of causing the damage), which measured in days means about a million days without incident, and that is basically 100%.

It's insane that any GoF research is allowed in the first place. Those jokers aren't even doing it to create new vaccines? There's plenty of already extant dangerous pathogens they could be working on creating vaccines against, yet they'd rather have the thrill of creating "the most dangerous virus ever, bro!" There have been leaked emails to that effect. From the group of people who, when COVID started, agreed it very likely came from a lab, and then agreed to state the exact opposite, that it didn't come from the lab, to the public.

I certainly agree, anyone involved in GOF research deserves to catch Ebola in the first place, the risk to reward ratio could serve as a space elevator!

Leaving aside literally everything else, I suspect that the fridge labeled "Ebola" didn't actually contain Ebola (anymore) for the simple reason that given their laissez-faire attitude towards handling samples, they'd all be dead and we'd have the CDC and FEMA locking down the entire state. Outbreaks happen even in legitimate BSL-3+ labs semi-regularly.

I bet they got them on the cheap in a yard sale.

That's true, though not the most cheerful a thought. There's a possibility that they were marked this way as 'chaff' -- no sane person is going to sniff these things, or check if they contain some rando more prosaic biomedical IP -- which seems the most plausible answer.

But then you'd hope that the CDC would be willing to prove it, in either case, even as disillusioned as COVID has made me for them.

The report [1] makes it clear that CDC didn't want to test anything. Their official position is that a fridge with an "Ebola" label isn't worth testing for ebola unless the vials in the fridge are themselves labelled "Ebola", and "there is no evidence" [2,3] that this company imported any pathogens. I mean, CDC "[i]ssu[ed] an Import Permit advisement letter to Prestige Biotech to ensure they know the Import Permit Regulations for importing infectious substances into the U.S.” and “[i]ssu[ed] a Federal Select Agent Program advisement letter to Prestige Biotech informing them of the requirements for possession, use, and transfer of select agents and toxins if the entity decides to possess them.” No response, so obviously Prestige Biotech has not imported any infectious substances (/s) [4].

You can't make this shit up. The only reason we are still alive is because nobody has tried any serious bioterrorism, not because the CDC would be able to thwart a motivated and intelligent bioterrorist.

[1] https://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/Reedley-Bio-Lab-Report.pdf [2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag [3] https://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/Reedley-Bio-Lab-Report.pdf, p. 14 and p. 40. [4] ibid, p. 40.

I guess I could imagine a certain kind of workplace clown writing "Ebola" on the SARS-Cov-II fridge in Magic Marker...

The CDC probably has a rule about commenting on ongoing investigations.

One would think, but there's a lot of public comments going around, either through things like the AP news report I linked above, or the lengthy messages sent to the town or to its police. Perhaps more seriously, whether for good or ill local officials had applied in early June for destruction of all biological materials on-site, and had completed that destruction by mid-August. While the CDC did show up for two days in the initial search in May, while accompanied by state officials, none of the court documents discuss the CDC even taking samples to test, nevermind actually returning the results of those tests. The congressional investigation summarizes this as :

The CDC’s refusal to test any potential pathogens with the understanding that local officials would otherwise have to destroy the samples through an abatement process makes it impossible for the Select Committee to fully assess the potential risks that this specific facility posed to the community. It is possible that there were other highly dangerous pathogens that were in the coded vials or otherwise unlabeled. Due to government failures, we simply cannot know.

In its refusal to test, the CDC likewise did not offer to connect local officials with any other federal agency or authorized lab that may be able to test the samples. Based on statements from local officials and briefings the Select Committee received from the CDC, the CDC did not contact the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, the government biodefense laboratory located in Fort Dietrich, Maryland that could potentially have provided greater assistance.

According to local official accounts, in a subsequent conversation with the CDC in early September 2023, local officials again pressed the CDC on why they refused to test any potential pathogens. A CDC official informed the local officials that it was illegal for the CDC to test any samples that were not expressly labeled as a Select Agent. City Manager Nicole Zieba expressed shock at this fact. She asked whether, if that were the case, the CDC had any authority to stop a terrorist in the United States who simply removed the label off a vial of a deadly virus. The CDC official said that the CDC had no authority to test the deadly virus in that hypothetical and that it was a noted gap in its authority. This characterization of the CDC’s authority appears to be false.

Which doesn't prove that they're not investigating further, but it does wink and point suggestively that at least they're not investigating usefully.

I bet they got them on the cheap in a yard sale.

I would bet not, unless it was in the spirit of teens who put "biohazard" stickers around their bedrooms.

One researcher I work with has a story about moving a plate reader into a BSL3 lab to do research on Covid-19 in 2020. The research project has finished and they could use that plate reader elsewhere, but it will probably stay in the negative-pressure zone until the lab itself is decommissioned.

N=1, but this makes me extremely skeptical that one can buy a used fridge from a BSL4 lab, especially one with an "Ebola" label still on it.

Compared to what happens if you try to order the wrong chemicals from a supply shop, that'd actually be worse.

May I remind you that the state of shipping security is an absolute joke. People order clearly labeled radioactive material online. Have it shipped over a weekend through USPS and no one even bats an eye, EVEN WHEN IT'S not packaged safely.

So I'm actually not surprised you can just order some bioweapons online and some clueless numbskull with ship them to you and you'd get your package left at the curb.

I'm honestly shocked we haven't had a tragedy related to shipping iffy stuff and those delivery truck thieves.

This here. I once ordered some (depleted) uranium for shits and giggles; imagine my surprise when it actually turned up and then I had to dispose of it...

Depleted uranium is barely radioactive - to the point where it is used in preference to lead for radiation shielding because of the higher density.

Like almost all heavy metals, uranium is a dangerous chemical poison, but you can order lead in the mail and expect it to arrive with no issues, and nobody has a problem with this.

Yeah, the limited quantity and type A rules seem a little awkwardly designed, either to prevent shipping accidents, shipping theft, or radioactive boyscout incidents. At the same time, the thresholds for serious levels of radioactive material seem more sufficient... if they're obeyed religiously by people who often have little or no ability to verify or validate them. And while most orphan source incidents have occurred outside of the United States, there have been incidents within the US, including relatively recent ones.

That said, the concern here is less someone porch-pirating vials of virulent disease shipped to a legitimate user, and more someone that (given the variety of materials!) probably didn't steal them from a nearby lab. If you go to Sigma-Aldrich as a rando and try to over a ton of uranium, they'll not only say no, they might send your info to the feds. Same for even small amounts of red phosphorus, which was actually a nontrivial problem for the LK99 replication crews.

I'd assumed that was the case for a lot of biologicals, but perhaps not. Unreported mass thefts of infectious agents would be bad, but even if Zhu had ordered them through a cooperative mainstream lab which did have conventional uses and then passed it on to Prestige, it seems like the sort of thing that the feds should be kinda interested in at least tracking down.

Oh I see what happened - Mandarin doesn't use definite and indefinite articles. It's not supposed to be Prestige Biotech, as in high class, top quality biotech, it's supposed to be The Prestige Biotech, as in the biotech is just an illusion.

I agree that it seems very unlikely it was the CCP. After all, if they wanted to ‘leak’ a bioweapon in the US they could just put it in a shipping container or hide it on a private jet or slip it into a diplomatic pouch and send it in no problem, they don’t need some ghetto effort like this.

The biggest risk with bioweapons is Islamist terrorism or, perhaps, some other millenarian movement not yet prominent.

The biggest risk with bioweapons is Islamist terrorism or, perhaps, some other millenarian movement not yet prominent.

I think the question becomes ‘why don’t terrorists try bio weapons more often’- IIRC the biggest bio terror attack ever was still Aum Shinrikyo?

For some reason terrorists seem to go for big flashy displays instead of getting the highest body counts or damaging society the most. They wouldn't even need something as elaborate as a bio-weapon, if an actually competent group decided to copy the D.C. sniper attacks we'd be in big trouble.

Obligatory classic links:

Terrorism Is Not About Terror

Terrorism Is Not Effective

Perhaps the real Jihad was the friends we made along the way?

Aum Shinrikyo used chemical weapons, not bio. Wikipedia says initial reports that they had bio weapons were "greatly exaggerated", whatever that means.

Well, I'm more convinced that it's probably not a CCP bioweapons lab, to be specific, given the weird combination of weirdly ineffective and highly visible. Playing games with FDA authorization isn't the single fastest way to get annoying investigators, but short of flipping the EPA and the DEA and a local zoning board the finger at the same time, it's pretty close.

Whether Zhu is CCP is... complicated, and not exactly a yes-no question. The congressional investigation claims that :

While living in the PRC in the early 2000s, Zhu served as the Vice Chairman of a PRC state-controlled enterprise based in Xinjiang, Henan Pioneer Aide Biological Engineering Company Limited (“Pioneer Aide China”). PRC government entities exercised a controlling interest in Pioneer Aide China as beneficial owners and shareholders through a series of passthrough joint venture companies, including Henan Investment Group Company Limited, a company involved in military-civil fusion for the PRC.

Zhu also served as Chairman of the Board and General Manager of Aide Modern Cattle Industry (China) Company Limited (“Aide Cattle China”), a company whose directors included an executive for a PRC defense firm and a company on the U.S. Entity List. Shareholders in Aide Cattle China include PRC state-controlled entities and individuals who have invested in other PRC state-controlled entities. Through Aide Cattle China, Zhu was the primary shareholder of 11 PRC cattle companies.

Merely being an employee or upper management of a government-controlled (or military-civil fusion) company isn't the same thing as, say, directly taking orders as a soldier or direct government employee. At the same time, doing these things for a government-controlled company is... what, a deniable asset? A patriot that's just doing things that benefit his country of his own initiative? Those are different things, but they're not exactly no, either.

This is further complicated by the faked IDs, and the CCP's extraterritorial enforcement arms.

And what makes this case more disturbing is it was uncovered by random chance.

Pathogens labeled ‘HIV’ and ‘Ebola’ found inside secret, illegal Chinese-owned biolab in California

dead bird thread

The illegal lab was operated in the city of Reedley, Calif., and the potential public safety risk it posed only came to light in December 2022 when Jesalyn Harper, an observant code enforcement officer, noticed a green garden hose sticking out of a hole in the side of a warehouse that was thought to be vacant for more than a decade.

What else is out there, only completely inauspicious from the outside?

Just one more of "glitches in the matrix", random occurences when you pull up your carpet a little, take a short peek at various things scurrying under it (and then put the carpet back and quickly forget what you saw).

Things like Hunter's laptop, DNC mails (and other famous and less famous leaks) and, on much darker note, things like the Finders cult.

This afternoon, an Algerian man who'd been resident in Ireland for years approached a crèche in the Dublin city centre and stabbed a teacher and several children, all of whom have been hospitalised. A man intervened and tackled him to the ground (I've heard unconfirmed reports that he was Brazilian, making this something of a wash from an anti-immigration perspective).

In a remarkable display of striking while the iron is hot, an anti-immigrant group organised a protest outside the Dáil (lower house of parliament) later this afternoon. Protesters clashed with police officers at the scene of the crime. Before long it escalated into a full-scale riot, the likes of which I've never seen before in Dublin. A bus was set on fire, as was at least one police car and a Luas (the light rail system serving Dublin). A Holiday Inn was set on fire. Shops have been smashed up and looted. I had to get a taxi home as the public transport has been suspended. Walking through the streets is eerie, they're largely empty aside from riot cops carrying riot shields very forcefully redirecting me. Helicopters are still circling overhead.

My gut feeling is that this is primarily the work of opportunistic scumbags rioting for the fun of it, for which a fairly small protest which got out of hand was merely the catalyst. On the other hand, I have heard a lot about the alleged "rise of the far right" in Ireland over the course of the last few years, and the fact that it happened so soon after Geert Wilders' election is certainly odd timing.

EDIT: See also @Tollund_Man4's more detailed write-up in the transnational thread.

I saw some news articles online about this in Australia earlier today.

What I found really conspicious was that in virtually all the articles there was absolutely no description of the perpetrator of the stabbing other than 'man' or at best 'older man', which was the spark that cause the protest/riot (depending on your political persuasion). There was also no mention that I can recall of the perpetrator being tackled and restrained by a member of the public, and certainly not that he was Brazilian. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the crime was committed by an Irish native.

Except, of course, the second half of all these articles all quote a bunch of Irish politicians and other public figures condemning the riot as the actions of a hateful, far-right mob, or similar words to that effect. Which kind of gives the game away. Do they think by merely mentioning the background of the stabbing perpetrator they will give credance to the 'hateful far-right riot', like invoking a spirit?

It's one of many cases where the news media (at least here in Australia), technically report the story factually accurately, but but omits some details and is framed in such a way to only lead you to one conclusion. They can avoid claims of editorialising by claiming they are merely quoting and reporting on statements made by politicians, which is also true.

What I found really conspicious was that in virtually all the articles there was absolutely no description of the perpetrator of the stabbing other than 'man' or at best ' older man', which was the spark that cause the protest/riot (depending on your political persuasion). You'd be forgiven for thinking that the crime was committed by an Irish native.

The same here, only the tabloids and alternative media specified that the attacker was Algerian; "respectable" outlets like The Journal, the Times and the Independent don't consider his nationality or ethnicity worth mentioning at all. Whenever there's a horrible unprovoked crime like this, you can practically smell the "please let the assailant be Irish" energy emanating from broadsheet journalists and the PMC types on X and Reddit. I saw a comment about the stabbing on the /r/ireland subreddit, some dude said something to the effect of "Imagine hearing about a horrible crime like this and your first instinct is to wonder what colour the attacker's skin is. Despicable." You mean, exactly like you're doing right now?

Some years ago (probably on the old subreddit) I pointed out that this journalistic approach has a limited shelf life. Sooner or later, every reader will cotton on to the fact that whenever the MSM report on a violent crime committed by a white native man, his skin colour will be mentioned prominently (either in the headline or the lede); ergo, if you see an article about a violent crime which doesn't mention the assailant's skin colour or nationality, the only reasonable assumption is that he is black or Arab or Eastern European (optionally Muslim). (See also Scott's post, section IV, about how banning employers from asking interviewees about their criminal record actually decreased the rate at which employers hired black candidates.) They're going to have to come up with a different method for routing around this problem sooner or later. Perhaps five years from now, news articles will read "an assailant stabbed a victim" without mentioning any identity characteristics about either person at all.

Do they think by merely mentioning the background of the stabbing perpetrator they will give creedance to the 'hateful far-right riot', like invoking a spirit?

Well this is the thing: for modern broadsheet journalists, contempt for the common man is built into their psyche. If you've fully internalised the idea that any uneducated person can become radicalised overnight by exposure to far-right disinformation and "fake news" - well, imagine how much more potent an effect information and real news might have. The average journalist no longer sees their job as one of informing the public but educating it, and if that means selectively leaving the reader in the dark about certain pertinent facts, so be it. (Perhaps I'm being rather rose-tinted about journalistic standards in the past and this is all one big "always has been" meme.) Many journalists seem to think that even informing their readers what the Bad People believe is tantamount to signal-boosting their opinions, so they resort to this circuitous approach of informing the reader that Alice has transphobic™ opinions (or quoting a woke person who thinks Alice has transphobic opinions i.e. "delegated defamation") without actually telling the reader what those opinions are and allowing them to draw their own conclusions as to whether "transphobic" is an accurate characterisation.

(Perhaps I'm being rather rose-tinted about journalistic standards in the past and this is all one big "always has been" meme.)

This video essay makes a pretty compelling argument that, yes, in fact the news was (more) unbiased and higher quality in the past and it's not just nostalgia.

Some of the examples are mindblowing. The example of the reporting on the Soviet Union's political affairs is remarkably unbiased and uneditorialised despite it being the literal height of the Cold War.

ergo, if you see an article about a violent crime which doesn't mention the assailant's skin colour or nationality, the only reasonable assumption is that he is black or Arab or Eastern European (optionally Muslim)

Called by some "Coulter's Law":

The longer we go without being told the race of the shooters, the less likely it is to be white men.

Many journalists seem to think that even informing their readers what the Bad People believe is tantamount to signal-boosting their opinions,

To be fair Apophasis exists for a reason. Mere mention of an idea, even if surrounded by denunciation, can implant it in the minds of readers. See also: Don't stuff beans up your nose.

Mere mention of an idea, even if surrounded by denunciation, can implant it in the minds of readers.

Isn't this the whole reasoning behind "journalistic balance"? You present one side of the debate, the other side of the debate, then allow the readers/viewers to draw their own conclusions.

A healthy journalistic approach to the debate around trans women in prisons would look something like this:

Alice: Given the minimal risk that trans women pose to female inmates (as evidenced by studies A, B and C) and the elevated risk of sexual assault they face in male prisons (as evidenced by studies X, Y and Z), I believe it is appropriate to house trans women inmates in female prisons rather than male.

Bob: I disagree - I believe the risk that trans women pose to female inmates has been vastly understated (as evidenced by studies D, E and F). Furthermore...

Instead what we so often get is:

"Bob has become notorious in recent years for his outspoken views on trans issues, which have been widely criticised as transphobic and demeaning to trans people."

Me: "Wow, that sounds really bad. Shame that the article doesn't tell me what these views are." half an hour of Googling later "Oh. He thinks it's inappropriate to house trans women in female prisons if they haven't transitioned. This is a totally normal opinion that the majority of people believe, which doesn't remotely imply that you hate trans people or wish them harm."

As I said in the linked article, if a journalist tells you that Bob has Bad Opinions but refuses to tell you what those opinions are, that suggests that the journalist has remarkably little faith in their own opinions to win in the marketplace of ideas - on some level, the journalist thinks their own ideas are so weak and unintuitive that even mentioning an opposing view will make a convert of the average reader. Indeed, we already know this is the standard attitude of trans activists everywhere, given that their whole modus operandi is to smuggle in unpopular pro-trans legislation under the guise of gay rights legislation which the average voter actually does endorse.

Here in the Washington DC area, everyone's taken it for granted for decades: carjackers, robbers and other violent criminals (except the occasional domestic murderer), and professional thieves/shoplifters, are never white.

Edit: And of course, you'll never find anybody drawing attention to that fact in public, as that would be "hate speech"; the metro area is 99% blue tribe.

Are there even working class or underclass whites in DC?

Not since 1965 or so in DC itself. School desegregation in 1954 caused the trickle of white flight to turn into a torrent, making for the "Chocolate City/Vanilla Suburbs" that obtained until:

1973 in Prince Georges County, when school busing was introduced to achieve racial balance and created an even greater surge of white flight there, and

The early eighties in the rest of suburbia, when the first wave of Central American immigrants started pouring into the affordable garden apartment complexes, displacing the whites from there and pretty soon taking all the fast food, landscaping and physical labor jobs. Nowadays, on the buses and at the bus stops in Fairfax County, you will not hear one word of English (even the drivers are all foreigners now! (And most of the taxi drivers are African immigrants and Afghanis.)), nearly all small shops are owned and staffed by immigrants, and Fairfax County schools are maybe 35% white, down from ~80% in my high-school years forty years ago. Less than that in Montgomery County and in the low single digit percentages in DC and Prince Georges.

Pretty much all the whites here are white-collar PMC types, and the white working class has decamped to remote trailer parks many miles from the nearest public transit.

Not really as local residents. There are some amount of folks who commute in from VA/MD and as far as WV for service work.

every reader will cotton to the fact

They're pulling the wool over our eyes!

Sooner or later, every reader will cotton on to the fact that whenever the MSM report on a violent crime commited by a white native man, his skin colour will be mentioned prominently (either in the headline or the lede); ergo, if you see an article about a violent crime which doesn't mention the assailant's skin colour or nationality, the only reasonable assumption is that he is black or Arab or Eastern European (optionally Muslim)

Sadly i don't think this will ever happen. Remember, the bottom fraction in terms of intelligence has trouble figuring out that theyv would probably be hungry right now if they hadn't eaten breakfast this morning. They certainly aren't going to intuit chains of reasoning like this.

Eh, this is pretty uncharitable towards the lower half of the population

The "Muslamic ray gun" guy sounded like a low class idiot (which egalitarians gleefully pointed out), but his "stereotypical" view of things turned out to be closer than the people mocking him for his accent gave him credit for. They already have these views. If they keep reading and don't see it, they'll notice.

You also ignore that distrust of the media will lead them to people who will point it out explicitly for anyone too dumb. "Coulter's law" is not some obscure wisdom for >100 IQ nerds. It's one Google search or rightist YouTube video away, for those without the IQ or patience to read it's a real golden age.

(This is the same logic behind "low class conservatives are too dumb to use their smartphone to find out Bud Lights parent company and it's subsidiaries. ". Well, if you went on /r/conservatives there was a copypasta in every thread listing them. Even if they were that dumb -and they aren't- only one person needs to be smart.)

I've found that it's the fully bought in progressive, "right side of history" middle class - who should be higher IQ - who're really hard to convince if they can't find an NYT article stating something. It's them this omission works best on. If they say "X never happens" (about something contentious like say...race or gender) you can have a billion NYPost/whoever articles with proof they will simply shut down the minute they see the URL unless you can show a paper of record also touching the problem. This is why activists hate Jesse Singal so much for that Atlantic article.

A lot of the time the news isn't obscuring knowledge so much as denying it legitimacy. People know the Muslamic ray gun theory. It's just that educated people all just know it's merely another instance of justifying racism by appeal to protecting white women from dehumanized people of color.

But this only lasts so long as the system as a whole is legitimate and isn't under too much strain.

Which Jesse Singal article, the trans kids one?

Yes, he had an article where he touched on trans kids and the detransitioning issue.

Note that I said "every reader", not "every person". The people who read broadsheet newspapers are a selected group already.

Remember, the bottom half in teems of intelligence has trouble figuring out that theyv would probably be hungry right now if they hadn't eaten breakfast this morning.

This isn't true. Even if the original study didn't have measurement errors(and my two cents is that the study you're referring to almost certainly added points to the prisoner's IQ scores- I can say from personal experience that there is an IQ cutoff for the question but it's a lot lower than 90. Maybe a high seventies or something) it showed the IQ threshold for simple conditional hypotheticals to be 90, which you'll notice is noticeably below average. The US average IQ is 98 IIRC with a standard of deviation of 15, so like 67% is above.

You're right. Bottom half was too aggressive. I'll edit it to say bottom fraction.

Remember, the bottom half in teems of intelligence has trouble figuring out that theyv would probably be hungry right now if they hadn't eaten breakfast this morning.

I don't eat breakfast, and I often am not hungry by lunchtime. So "you will be hungry at Y o'clock if you don't eat breakfast at X o'clock" isn't always true. What you are trying to say is that there are some people who don't know how to play the game of answering problems like that, that the 'right' answer is 'supposed' to be "if I didn't eat breakfast, I would be hungry now" even if you are one of those people who skip breakfast and don't get hungry until later than you are 'supposed' to get hungry.

No. I was just speaking in shorthand. You don't have to say you would be hungry. "I probably still wouldn't be hungry even if i skipped breakfast because i often don't eat breakfast" is a perfectly fine answer as well. "Bad" answers are those that reveal that the person is incapable of embracing hypotheticals. Ie people who say things like "what are you talking about, i did eat breakfast"

He's referring to a psychological experiment on inmates which showed prisoners with IQ's below 90 can't understand hypotheticals no matter how dumbed down eg "how would you feel if you didn't eat breakfast". I suspect that prisoners were either systematically less cooperative than average(likely) or their IQ tests were graded on a curve(also not implausible).

Was it even a real experiment? I first saw this as a post on 4chan and when I google it it just leads me back to that.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-breakfast-question

I don’t actually know, but that’s the context.

Yeah, I think it's likely both that (1) some prisoners were too dumb and (2) some prisoners were messing with the interviewers. Besides, I don't think that question is such a great test: it's just testing "do you know how to guess the teacher's password?"

Yeah, I might be hungry if I didn't eat breakfast. Or I might not. Or the question might make no sense because I always make sure to eat breakfast, so why are you asking me if I don't? Or I might be someone who always skips breakfast, so replying "I feel fine" is the true answer. The only 'correct' answer for the test-takers is "I would feel hungry" but that's not 'considering a hypothetical', that's 'can you guess what answer you are supposed to give?'.

I agree that if you're smart enough to be able to guess the 'correct' answers then you're not likely to be in prison, but then again you don't need to be too smart to figure out "what does this guy want me to say?", either.

As an experienced pedatn, I enjoyed the fact that the line morphed from the grammatically correct "How would you feel now if you hadn't eaten breakfast?" to the strictly incorrect "How would you feel if you didn't eat breakfast?"

Obviously look it's variation in dialect, blah blah prescriptivism, but I still found it funny

It's one of many cases where the news media (at least here in Australia), technically report the story factually accurately, but but omits some details and is framed in such a way to only lead you to one conclusion. They can avoid claims of editorialising by claiming they are merely quoting and reporting on statements made by politicians, which is also true.

I would like to hear a journalist's perspective on this some day. Is it taught? Is the intuitive grokking of those rules – condemn the far-right mob, but don't explicitly spell out their casus belli, so the impression is that far-righters are just spontaneously violent – a job requirement? Am I too deep in a bubble and it's just common sense already to speak this way here and the other way around about George Floyd?

I suspect the tactic actually works – remember, 50% of people are below average, and the average ain't that high, and it's white people who are the target audience, so they just trust journalists to do a honest job.

I would be shocked if Journo-list wasn't still around, and journalists almost by definition are much better educated than they are remunerated and live in urban areas, so they tilt pretty heavily left anyways.

Either chatgpt has been around for much longer or Journo-list (or equivalent) still exists. It is creepy how quickly the same terms get used, even in opinion rags, to describe something.

Schooled. Journalism schools still exist, but I hesitate to say educated because at least from my conversations with the students they were not well rounded independent thinkers. They learn good technical writing of articles, but generally don’t get enough background in other subjects to allow them to understand what is actually happening.

I mean, isn’t that kinda not their job? Journalists are biased, but they’re definitionally reporters and not supposed to be running blogs.

Pushing a narrative is a problem, but they’re actually supposed to be writing articles along the lines of ‘experts say x about y’- it’s what we pay them to do.

Pushing a narrative is a problem, but they’re actually supposed to be writing articles along the lines of ‘experts say x about y’- it’s what we pay them to do.

How do they know who is a proper expert and who is a charlatan, without knowledge? They don't, so they take the safe and logical route: the 'experts' are those who follow the narrative.

I mean the problem with sending someone to report on a topic that knows little about the topic is that they don’t have any way to vet what each set of experts is telling them.

A scientifically literate reporter is probably going to have some insights into how diseases work and how germs spread and so on. Maybe not perfect but enough to know where the expert’s story might not add up, or what questions need to be answered or even whether the research referenced says what the expert claims it says.

A political science literate person who knows the history and main actors in Israel and Gaza is not simply going to uncritically report the two competing narratives and call it good. They’re in some sense going to examine the evidence in light of what is known about the parties and give as accurate of a picture of what’s actually true.

What I found really conspicious was that in virtually all the articles there was absolutely no description of the perpetrator of the stabbing other than 'man' or at best ' older man', which was the spark that cause the protest/riot (depending on your political persuasion).

The most I saw was national broadcaster, RTé, mentioning that he was an Irish citizen who “came to this country 20 years ago”. The exception is GRIPT, a small but quickly growing media company that mentioned that he was Algerian in the headline.

I really think the Aisling Murphy case is worth looking into, the media is making the exact same mistake as before by obfuscating the nature of the attack (it will be a true repeat if they’re brave enough to scold Irish men for toxic attitudes that lead to random attacks against teachers).

It was crazy how up in arms all of the women on my Instagram were about Aisling Murphy and how her murder was a huge indictment of Irish culture and how Irish men are socialised and how we need to #stopblamingwomen - up until the exact moment it turned out the killer was Slovak, and then they immediately shut up about it.

This 'lying through omission' also becomes evident in the meta narrative where left leaning journalists from the ABC and SBS choose which stories they cover and which they do not.

On the other hand, I have heard a lot about the alleged "rise of the far right" in Ireland over the course of the last few years, and the fact that it happened so soon after Geert Wilders' election is certainly odd timing.

I think there are a few factors.

A big one is the CIA and State Department. They've traditionally viewed right wing parties in Europe as the enemy, and made efforts to keep them from winning. However they've been incredibly distracted the last few years by the Afghanistan withdrawal, China, and focussing on Ukraine / Russia as well as neighbouring countries in Eastern Europe. Note that the right wing party in Poland just lost.

Pro-Hamas protests have brought longstanding issues with integration of people from poor Muslim countries to the forefront. The excuse from the internationalist types has always been that they just need time, but after 20 years of hearing that people can see the situation has gotten worse, not better.

Another issue is a general economic decline in Europe. Things aren't awful, but they aren't great and there's less faith in the long term outlook. So people aren't feeling as generous as they used to.

"A big one is the CIA and State Department. They've traditionally viewed right wing parties in Europe as the enemy, and made efforts to keep them from winning."

Could I have a source? Even if nothing concrete?

Yeah the State Department and CIA spent decades funding the European far right as part of Operation Gladio and similar stay-behind operations.

We're no longer in those days, since the fall of the Soviet Union, keeping the EU from competing economically and militarily has been a constant goal of US foreign policy. Need I remind anyone what happened to Nordstream. And this arguably started much earlier with Suez and the liquidation of colonial empires in cooperation with the Soviets.

The West may be allies on paper but the relationship is more that of a client, and the then pro-capitalist far right of the cold war has become more nationalist and against external influences and fealty, which makes them incompatible with US goals for Europe. Which is why they're now funded by the no longer communist Russians instead of the Americans.

Aside from Nordstream, what does the United States do to depress Europe's economies? Nothing really comes to mind, apart from tariffs and stuff.

Destroy colonial Empires (they are still at it in Africa against France to this day), sabotage all attempts at military cooperation not under the aegis of NATO (countless examples), industrial and economic espionnage of all kinds, manipulations of all kinds to prevent and destroy competition with their industries, and most recently prevent a negotiated peace in Ukraine to manifest a ruinous war by means of Boris Johnson.

All fair play in the great game of course, but let us not pretend the US and Europe have converging interests.

Nordstream was a Ukrainian op

Says the American press after trying to pin it on Russia. And in a context of divided Ukrainian leadership.

I'm personally convinced it was the Brits, but who it exactly was that pressed the button matters little given they were most likely acting under American orders or with assent from them.

It benefits them tremendously, they have the capability and they specifically threatened to do it before the fact. You need a lot less to convict someone.

I'm personally convinced it was the Brits

Can you expand on this? I haven’t heard this theory before and I don’t see what we’d have to gain. Unless purely sucking up to the US? Even we aren’t that self-sabotaging, although I can’t say that as strongly as I once might have.

Personally I would give 80% odds it’s some combo of Ukrainian and American op, on the basis of opportunity plus cui bono.

It's funny you haven't heard of the Brit theory because it's the one claimed by the Russians: that the same navy advisors helping the ukies in the black sea did it.

There's some circumstantial evidence that Lizz Truss sent confirmation to Blinken right after the event.

I'll readily admit this is mostly a hunch because the evidence of any party being the actual operator of the sabotage is scant. It's all hearsay even for the Ukrainian theory. We know the Brits have been doing a lot of other US dirty work-related to this war, so it fits into a larger picture.

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they specifically threatened to do it before the fact.

This is flatly incorrect. The US threatened to "shut it down" if Russia invaded, which was in reference to a secret agreement with Germany that the US would end sanctions on the pipeline if they promised to end it if an invasion happened. That agreement got invoked. The pipeline got bombed afterwards.

You're quoting Biden wrong. Here's what he said:

If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again, there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2, We will put an end to it.

Now sure, a good defense attorney would argue this refered only to peaceful sanctions, my client meant that he would economically ruin the man, not shoot him dead. But then the prosecution would follow with the countless previous times where the US didn't get their way and used force and covert operations to make their promises happen, including on allies, including acts of war.

Maybe Biden did mean it in the purely economic sense. But it's still conspicuous.

And if you add this to the fact it tremendously helps the US economically that this pipeline no longer exists and Russia and Germany are economically severed, and the fact they are currently in a proxy war with Russia, the circumstances don't look good for the defense.

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Downvoted while correct. This forum should really take out the downvote button entirely since it's just a "boo outgroup" button.

A big one is the CIA and State Department. They've traditionally viewed right wing parties in Europe as the enemy, and made efforts to keep them from winning.

how long is this tradition? Are you counting communists as right wing?

Note that the right wing party in Poland just lost.

With no trace of CIA/State Department meddling, unless you assume that EU is CIA plant.

unless you assume that EU is CIA plant.

I mean... isn't it a bit weird how European political junkies have been swearing up and down, for years on end, that the Culture War spats we discuss here are strictly an American thing, and anyone serious finds them absurd here, only for European town halls to start raising the trans flag for the #TransDayOfRemembrance?

To be fair, it doesn't mean the CIA is behind it. My bets are on the UN and WEF.

UN

UN actually succeeding at something would be the most surprising part here.

I would rather blame Facebook and Twitter and Tik Tok.

UN actually succeeding at something would be the most surprising part here.

Again, it's a place where the elites mingle, and the power of these places is grossly underappreciated.

I would rather blame Facebook and Twitter and Tik Tok.

I invite you to check out my responses to SouthKraut. There's several things about how these issues developed that just do not fit into a bottom-up spread via social media.

I wouldn't let intelligence agencies take credit for that.

It's simply the internet, social media, smartphones, the globalization of the English language and the prevalence of American memes. People soak up all kinds of stupidity so long as it's in the water for them, and now that many people have a permanent window upon woke rot open in their palms, they'll naturally absorb it.

It's simply the internet, social media, smartphones, the globalization of the English language and the prevalence of American memes.

The problem I have with this explanation is that I'm yet to see any of this stuff get implemented bottom-up. Compare what's happening to how long it took mainstream parties to kind-of-sort-of start doing something about immigration for fear of giving more votes to populists. I stopped paying attention to electoral politics, but I don't remember any political upset, where some woke youth-oriented party got way more votes than expected, and forced the mainstream to adapt to the new zeitgeist. In fact, this is the very reason why I can understand European normies pooh-poohing concerns about the Culture War, this stuff basically came out of nowhere if you're following a bottom-up model.

That said, I wouldn't put (too much of) it on intelligence agencies either. I agree it's through soaking up culture, but it's not through Tumblr and memes, it's through elite universities, and various get-togethers where the elites mingle.

IMO it doesn't take much bottom-up for these things to happen. It's not just the youth, after all. Everyone has a smartphone, most people and almost all women are consuming social media, and this includes older people well into working age and also those who have great influence over or are decision-makers in organizations that now openly display the symbols of some woke agenda. The youth may be faster to get on board, but not by much - most want to be on the right side of history, and even middle-aged administrators will pick up on which is the right side in CURRENT_YEAR.

administrators will pick up on which is the right side in CURRENT_YEAR.

In my opinion this would, again, indicate this stuff is not bottom up at all. The bottom has no power to dictate which side is the right one, without overwhelming numbers.

I'd say the Bottom is in agreement with what middle management is doing here. My point is that everyone is more-or-less equally swayed, and that it's not a handful of key players pushing their agenda. There's simply no need for a conspiracy - when many push and nobody openly resists and the masses cheer because all groups consume the same media and absorb the same memes and know what the right thing to do is, then of course town halls are going to fly rainbow flags and whatever else, entirely without a shadowy organization needing to manipulate anyone.

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A man intervened and tackled him to the ground (I've heard unconfirmed reports that he was Brazilian, making this something of a wash from an anti-immigration perspective).

Although they can't say it out loud of course, I'm sure that most anti-immigration Irish are probably not at all concerned about immigration from Brazil.

You'd be wrong actually - Brazilians have congregated heavily in certain areas of Dublin and are widely viewed as a scourge there (eg, the area I live in, where this attack and subsequent riot took place - literally 100m from my flat).

True, they are more economically productive than the median African or Arab, but have some cultural traits that make them rub Irish people the wrong way. For one, they are more crassly materialistic than even Nigerians, and are heavily involved in every sort of vice trade.

Second, their sexual mores are extraordinarily lax in comparison to the Irish, who would be one of the more chaste European nations - prostitution in Dublin is dominated by Brazilians, and a "Brazilian wife" gives rise to the same sort of sniggering that a "Thai wife" might elicit elsewhere. Brazilians have a reputation as being ruthlessly mercenary in matters romantic, and the visa-marraige-to-ugly-man-until-passport-divorce is a very true pattern I've seen in a mate myself.

Third, they are facilely _un_cynical in a way that grates on Irish people - I have yet to get through a conversation with a Brazilian without them telling me about their "dream of Europe" in such a gormless way as would make a beauty pageant contestant squirm.

What's interesting is that Brazilians actually embody many of the traits that Irish people claim to dislike in Americans, with none of the redeeming characteristics whatsoever.

Third, they are facilely _un_cynical in a way that grates on Irish people - I have yet to get through a conversation with a Brazilian without them telling me about their "dream of Europe" in such a gormless way as would make a beauty pageant contestant squirm.

Do Irish people object to the this because they think the Brazillian is bullshitting, or do they object because they suspect the Brazillian is being honest?

Very interesting way to pose the question.

I can't speak for the entire nation, but I would think it's a saccharine and narcissistic sentiment and stop consideration there - I wouldn't consider how deeply believed it might be by the speaker.

I'm surprised at this. I haven't heard much bad said about the Brazilians myself but I'm not from Dublin so maybe it's different there. It's a different demographic than the average Brazilian in Ireland but the high population of Brazilians in Gort is considered more of a curiosity than a reason to avoid it.

It does seem we prefer our own tribal groups and immigration seems to stand as an exemplar of the power of elites to override the common will. I suppose Dublin should celebrate being a modern economy? But to be fair to the obnoxious Brazilians, pejorative things are said about immigrants of any stripe in the early days, but differences tend to become less salient with subsequent generations. The other things you talk about could be more related to a marginal economic existence, rather than hard-grained cultural/ethnic? I'm presuming the average Brazilian family doesn't have mum popping out for nightwork?

Ah look, I'm sure they're fine on their own terms - this isn't a critique any Brazilian should take seriously. I'm describing a mob of Brazilians versus any individual, etc.

Behold: classic Irish obsequiousness and indirectness and backpedalling coming out even on an anonymous board. I'm sure a Brazilian could take an equally good potshot at us - I've heard they find our lack of cosmetic surgery troubling and wrongheaded, for example.

As for poverty explaining vice - I don't think that's the case in an interesting way. Sure, poverty drives people to vice - but which vices, and which first, are culture. Brazilians in Ireland are generally here on bad-faith student visas (they must get a stamp from an "english language school" as a visa condition, making these schools de facto a private arm of Irish migration control - this incentive structure leads to exactly the outcome you'd predict) and I don't see, say, Indian students that dool the same visa scam turning en masse to dealing or prostitution.

Fair play, well I'm certainly not immune to arguments about different cultures having different features and I also believe you can privilege some as being more beneficial in some context.

I'm quite a fan of Fukuyama style political philosophy that looks at things like why India failed to have an imperial/hegemonic national system for very long prior to the English. There are many factors... or, why do English colonies seem to maintain institutional elements of governance better than Spanish ones.

And, purely from hearsay, Brazilians have more fun because they are sexually liberated and more fun-loving...

"You Irish sure are a contentious lot."

That's interesting, though. I wasn't aware of the Brazilian presence in Ireland at all.

True, though some of the ones brave enough to set fire to buses might be.

There’s been a lot of tension between Brazilian couriers and Dublin’s feral youth these last few years. A lot of Brazilians work courier and food delivery jobs and a certain section of young Dubliners like stealing their motorbikes. I don’t know the number but a few Brazilians have been severely injured or killed by joyriders and thieves (or in one case by the police trying to stop the thieves).

It is interesting that in a lot of the videos about youths attacking people in gangs etc coming from Dublin in recent years the perpetrators were white, presumably natives (as first-generation white immigrants would mostly be older than 15/16/17 I imagine). Are these the same types that were rioting against the migrants yesterday?

In much of Western Europe the poor white peripheral underclass is somewhat geographically separated from the largely immigrant underclass in the capital (London, Paris and Berlin all have this dynamic to some extent, e.g. working class white English tend to be rare in Inner London). Is this less the case in Ireland?

I’m not a Dublin native but I think it would be very strange if turned out that the rioters weren’t mostly Irish.

There are lots of videos and newspaper articles about the absolutely wild behaviour of Dublin youth over the years, they’re definitely capable of burning down trams and stealing buses (not so different from Belfast youth in that regard though riots are still very rare in Dublin).

I’m not a Dublin native but I think it would be very strange if turned out that the rioters weren’t mostly Irish.

Ah, I meant to ask whether those who rioted yesterday were likely youths otherwise involved in organized crime (like that you discuss).

Yes, the same class of youth is given to trangress in both cases.

Amusingly, there actually was quite a bit of looting by Africans of sports goods stores - presumably caught up in the far-right spirit and violently enthused by the prospect of their own deportation.

This all took place extremely close to my flat (I live in a rough but very convenient/central part of Dublin), and I can attest the escalation was : angry protests by a cross-section of Irish working class (mammies with prams, old people, the youth, etc), followed by garda over-reaction, which tipped the crowd into a fury and attracted red-blooded young proletarians mainly interested in trouble. What's underexplored is that the police were on edge because there had just been a potential terrorist attack, and they were greatly concerned by the prospect of additional attacks.

Are these the same types that were rioting against the migrants yesterday?

I would say most of the people involved in the riot were young Irish men, aged from 14-22. Even saying they were "rioting against the migrants" is giving them too much credit: it mostly seemed like opportunistic destruction and looting for destruction and looting's sake.

Is this less the case in Ireland?

It's an interesting question. The suburb Blanchardstown is known for its large black migrant population, and there are many suburbs which have largely retained their white native working-class population (Inchicore, Drimnagh, Ballymun, Whitehall). As far as the city core goes, if you knocked on a random low-income apartment I'd say you'd have about even odds of finding a native working-class family or six Brazilian migrants sharing a bedroom. Dublin is radically different from, say, Paris: there's no equivalent of the banlieues in which a large community of second-generation migrants are geographically isolated from the city centre.

the holiday inn apparently housed immigrants?

seems interesting what Irish people are saying. for example UFC Champ Conor McGregor tweeting to the effect of “do something immediately”, and more PC ones saying this is alt-right

Is there a reason we haven’t seen this kind of reaction in UK or France?

Is there a reason we haven’t seen this kind of reaction in UK or France?

You might differentiate between reactions to governments gleefully and joyously importing millions of migrants (Canada, Ireland) and governments that claim multiculturalism is flawed and borders need to be Under Control and numbers Will Come Down but then do nothing to make it so (UK, France).

One big distinguishing factor is that Ireland’s immigration experience is much more recent.

It’s hard to find a red line to rally around when your country’s first experience of mass Muslim migration happened in your grandparents’ days and when you’ve already learned to avoid the ghettos. Anything short of a drastic acceleration is just boiling the frog.

Ireland has never had ethnic ghettos, Dublin youth excepted we’re not used to the violence that’s accepted as part and parcel of normal city life, a ratio of 1800 Irish to 700 MENA males isn’t something Irish towns are used to.

I’m doubtful that this was a terrorist attack, but yesterday it was unclear whether Ireland had just experienced it’s first ever Islamic terrorist attack. Even though Ireland does have a high proportion of foreign nationals it’s nearly all working class Eastern Europeans or middle class Western Europeans who don’t cause much trouble, having areas suddenly gain a large population of young African and Muslim males is jarring and easy to rally around (I know this guy is much older but tension has been building for a while). All this when house and rental prices are through the roof.

There's a recent history of grassroots anti-government organization in Ireland, what with "The Troubles" and all. Also a stronger sense of tribe. That was the whole point of the Irish independence movement after all.

The UK is much more authoritarian and has a long history of sicking the police on people who oppose immigration from it's colonies, that's been expanded to broader immigration.

France likes to protest against it's government, but it's more formally organized with a lot of union involvement. There isn't any blue collar community organizing that can lead to a rapid response like this.

Macron isn't shy about cracking down on protesters in a hard violent fashion. As seen in the yellow vest protests a few years ago.

Is there a reason we haven’t seen this kind of reaction in UK or France?

Never underestimate a Celt.

France and UK have lots of Celts...

Not the first migrant accommodation to burn in Ireland. Seems to be a safety hazard to house refugees in such flammable accommodation.

Is there a reason we haven’t seen this kind of reaction in UK or France?

Median age in France is 42, median age in Ireland is 38.

That’s not that big of a difference, certainly not enough to explain the difference in reactions.

riots are just a schelling point for dickheads

Surely they’re all loyal devotees of Keith Woods! Seriously, though, I think it’ll be interesting to see the profiles of riot participants. In the same way that most looters during BLM type riots don’t have a particularly staunch position on racial inequalities in criminal justice, so too is it possible that most of these rioters aren’t exactly devoted to the cause.

The Dublin youngfella can be very destructive when given the opportunity.

I heard about this on CBC radio, and they were far worse than what was linked downthread (also worse than their article. Unfortunately, their archives are terrible and six hours is too long for "live" repeats online, so I'll have to go from memory so it took a while to find it in The World at Six for November 24 2023, 9:30 p.m. EST, starting at 17:08 with the key quote at 19:05:

Police say false information spread quickly through Social Media that the attacker might have been a foreigner and the misinformation appeared to fuel the frenzy of destruction that followed.

I'd guess that the police did say that, and the people criticizing the baby-stabber likely don't have a flawless record for precision in their language, so CBC technically passes the "very rarely lies" test. Too bad that's worth zero points in my books.

My gut feeling is that this is primarily the work of opportunistic scumbags rioting for the fun of it, for which a fairly small protest which got out of hand was merely the catalyst

Does Ireland's history mean that there's a population of such scumbags who are unusually competent and causing trouble?

As someone else said they’re still somewhat younger than other Western Europeans as a population, so both relatively more youths and a police force that’s often taken a less-than-fully-zealous approach to organized crime.

police force that’s often taken a less-than-fully-zealous approach to organized crime.

This bit does sound like a historical holdover, since certain respectable political parties both north and south of the border have friends in interesting places.

Seeing rumours that the Algerian guy was homeless and literally brain damaged. He was also in court last year for possession of a knife and criminal damage.

Seems like a good candidate for a scissor statement (not sure how to word this, a scissor case?), is the guy the most blameless a person can be in this situation and the tragedy a result of poor homeless and healthcare services or should he have been deported the moment he ended up in court? Technically the latter couldn’t happen because he was a citizen but that just pushes back the question to whether we should be more careful in handing out citizenship.

Strangely enough the standard law & order viewpoint that would have prevented this tragedy (a mentally ill guy waving knives around should probably be in jail if no other institution is available) is being touted by the left and centre while the (far) right are the ones defending rioters. To be fair to the right wingers there are plenty of videos of people confronting non-Irish looters during the riot, but their name is going to be tarred by association with looters whether they like it or not. The Irish left’s idea of law & order isn’t great for free speech either.

Seems like a good candidate for a scissor statement

I think toxoplasmosis is the more apt scottism.

it happened so soon after Geert Wilders' election is certainly odd timing.

The stabbing or the protest?

The protest.

What association does Geert Wilders have to Ireland?

My general impression is that Holland and the anglosphere are much less separated than, say, the anglosphere and France, and that anti-immigrant groups in Europe generally root for each other's teams.

Now I've never seen right wingers engage in that kind of riot, which doesn't mean it can't happen, but does lower the likelihood relative to "some apolitical yahoos heard there was chaos and showed up to see if they could wreck stuff and maybe take some free shit".

My general impression is that Holland and the anglosphere are much less separated than, say, the anglosphere and France

Ehhhhhhhhhh...

anti-immigrant groups in Europe generally root for each other's teams

Yes, absolutely

I can’t say I’ve ever noticed any inherent concern amongst Irish people for Holland over any other European country. I think I’ve only met one Dutchman in Ireland my life, whereas I’ve talked to countless Spaniards, Baltics, Poles and Brazilians.

If there is a link it’s because the Irish right are very online. As insignificant as they are in the halls of power the far right are fairly effective at organising street protests and motivating young men (I doubt they made up the majority of this protest but I’m sure they attended and instigated as much as they could).

Creche? Are we in Baldurs Gate 3?

It's a little known fact, but France and its language does actually exist outside of the Forgotten Realms.

Yes, it appears French exists in the mythical land of Ireland.

I learned about the Children’s Creche from Alpha Centauri. Base improvement. +2 growth and +1 morale.

Proper care and education for our children remains a cornerstone of our entire colonization effort. Children not only shape our future; they determine in many ways our present. Men and women work harder knowing their children are safe and close at hand. And never forget that, with children present, parents will defend their home to the death.

~ Col. Corazon Santiago, Planet: A Survivalist's Guide

Edit: @erwgv3g34 beat me

Creche is just what they call preschool/daycare in Ireland.

Baldur's Gate 3? You filthy casual.

The Peacekeepers seem to be suffering some dreadful drone riots recently

My thoughts exactly. Creche is only a word I've ever heard from video games. First from Black and White like 20 years ago, and more recently from BG3.

What?

First and only time I ever encountered the word crèche was in the game Baldurs Gate 3, where it refers to a base for the species Githyanki. Then I saw it here.

Didn't know they used the word, a French word apparently, for daycare in Ireland.

Not just a base, a base where they raise their young, hence why it is called a crèche. Time does not pass normally in the Astral plane so Githyanki establish creches on the material plane so the children can grow to adulthood.

Its also used in the UK as well and I think Canada and South Africa and probably anywhere British English holds sway.

Canadian here, and I'd never heard it until this year when it was suddenly popping up all over, and never for a school or daycare located anywhere other than Ireland or Faerun.

In the UK I think it’s often used for daycare that isn’t entirely a traditional paid nursery. Like a corporate daycare for employees’ children, or something during a multi-day event to drop off kids.

I’ve never heard of it in the UK, it was always nursery or nursery school.

Interesting, we have a corporate creche so maybe I heard it there.

It's also a term used in BattleTech by the Clans, where the young are raised and trained.

NYT: Before Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding

The NYT scooped everybody. We finally know why Sam Altman was fired:

A few weeks before Mr. Altman’s ouster, he met with [OpenAI board member Helen Toner] to discuss a paper she had recently co-written for Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Mr. Altman complained that the research paper seemed to criticize OpenAI’s efforts to keep its A.I. technologies safe while praising the approach taken by Anthropic, according to an email that Mr. Altman wrote to colleagues and that was viewed by The New York Times.

In the email, Mr. Altman said that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to the company, particularly at a time, he added, when the Federal Trade Commission was investigating OpenAI over the data used to build its technology.

Ms. Toner defended it as an academic paper that analyzed the challenges that the public faces when trying to understand the intentions of the countries and companies developing A.I. But Mr. Altman disagreed.

“I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this,” he wrote in the email. “Any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight.”

Senior OpenAI leaders, including Mr. Sutskever, who is deeply concerned that A.I. could one day destroy humanity, later discussed whether Ms. Toner should be removed, a person involved in the conversations said.

There are a few other minor issues mentioned in the article, but this sounds like the big one. Rationalist/EA types take being told that they can't criticize "allies" in public very negatively, a position I am quite sympathetic to. Helen Toner works at an Open Philanthropy-funded think tank, so she's as blue blood an effective altruist as they get. My guess is that this was the moment that she decided that Sam had to be eliminated before he took control of the board and jeopardized OpenAI's mission.

What gets me is how disingenuous this makes the original firing announcement: "Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." It sounds like he was perfectly candid. They just didn't like what he was about.

In completely unrelated news, ChatGPT has been down for the last three hours.

Aaand he's back: https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1727205556136579362

What a shitshow it has been.

Either something really strange is going on behind the scenes (like a pseudo government take over) or the board are complete clowns.

My bet is on them being clowns. Or, more charitably, out of their league. How many of them actually have any experience in boardroom intrigue? To loosely quote one journalist about a similar experience:

My first intimate encounters with the police were quite sobering. Here you are, a relatively famous journalist being questioned by a dull-looking criminal investigator. You are the master of the written and spoken word, you are, if not very smart, then definitely smarter that this uniformed oaf in front of you that can't use more than one finger to type your answers. You know what you should never say to the police, so you carefully choose every word of your replies, which the investigator dutifully records. And yet he then glances at the screen, looks at you and asks you a question that leaves you dumbfounded. How could you let yourself be led into this trap when you were his intellectual superior? And yet you yourself answered A to the first question, B to the second question, so C and D, which both prove your culpability, are the only possible answers to the third one.

"Obviously I'm smarter than this guy, therefore there's zero danger when I play his game, on his turf"

Where did you get that story from? I’d love to read the rest of it.

It's from Arkady Babchenko, https://pastebin.com/9xw4R2PW

English, courtesy of GPT4: https://pastebin.com/UPGRajKA

Thank you. GPT4 blows DeepL out of the water, I didn't expect this level of quality.

That reiterates the 10 words everyone needs to know when dealing with the police:

"I'm not answering any questions, and I want a lawyer."

Then you shut your trap.

See also Nathan Burney's excellent Self-Incrimination Flowchart, which lays out in detail exactly how to avoid incriminating yourself in the US.

https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2897

Thanks! Now I am curious about real or fictional record of such interrogation.

I get that it can be done, now I am curious about how it works in practice. And not so curious to go to Russia (or irritate FBI) to look at it in practice.

Here you go

https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE&t=1607 - the second half of the don't talk to the police talk.

Eventually - you are in a room, nervous with persons that have all the time in the world to grill you. And they can do it until you are tired, sleepy, dizzy or whatever. All while your adrenaline is rushing and you feel helpless.

I don’t know if they were out of their leagues. And I don’t think Toner was even wrong. But our entire system is made to push things forward and one side had better cards. AI Safety died to the system.

If I were an AI researcher with 8-9 figure pay package on the line I probably would have favored the Sam/Msft deal even if I had very serious safety concerns. It too hard to turn off the human drive to move forward and achieve.

Por que no los dos?

Fair enough.

This has been the best news story since Will Smith punched Chris Rock at the Oscars.

Best since the previous Sam was deposed in the previous November

What happened then? All the news articles that come up for me are about this November.

Sam Bankman-Fried, of FTX fame.

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.

…

Larry Summers

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck.

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?

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.

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.

Senior OpenAI leaders, including Mr. Sutskever, who is deeply concerned that A.I. could one day destroy humanity

These people are so weird. They are obsessed with making something they think will destroy the world. Just build AI or don't. If AI is so dangerous, nothing you can do will really stop it in the long run. Eventually, over hundreds or even thousands of years, the inevitable will happen. I feel like this is almost a religion for them and they are the absolute worst people to be in charge or this kind of technology.

  1. They think AGI is inevitable, and if it's not made by people with safety and alignment in mind, the odds of it being misaligned skyrocket.

  2. Control of an aligned Superintelligent AGI is equivalent to having the keys to the lightcone, if you make it through the gauntlet of it not killing you and it listens to what you tell it, then you have the means to dominate everyone else, including others who make misaligned AGI, if yours is capable of squashing them at birth, or at the very least capable of panopticon surveillance to prevent anyone from building one in the first place.

  3. Even prior to that, being on the cutting edge of AI research gives you a voice, people can dismiss Eliezer Yudkowsky as a crank, far harder to do that to Geoffrey Hinton or Ilya Sutskever. You have far more power to get governments to regulate things, or develop industry best standards that reduce the risk of more laissez-faire competitors YOLOing the whole thing.

AI is dangerous, as is anything much smarter than you that potentially doesn't share your goals, but if you see it as inevitable, then your best bet is making sure it comes out with goals you share or control.

My own p(doom) from AI has dropped to about 30% from a high of 70%, when RLHF and other techniques showed that it was possible to ~mostly align the best AI today, in the form of LLMs, which are the frontrunners for the best AIs of tomorrow. Just because I currently do not think AI will probably kill us in a decade doesn't mean I don't think it's a serious risk, and there are few things on the planet more worth being passionate about.

It is not remotely as simple as build AI or don't, even if everyone associated with the AI X-risk community died overnight, the genie is out of the bottle, and others will pursue it with billions of dollars. OAI had a value, before this debacle, of about $80 billion, with operating expenses on the order of 500 million p/a.

If you can't undo that, or enforce a "pause", then you grudgingly find a way to stay ahead of the competition while doing your best not to be the reason why it all went to hell.

Control of an aligned Superintelligent AGI is equivalent to having the keys to the lightcone

I think this sort of argument consistently relies on assumptions regarding the possibilities of various highly-powerful technologies being physically possible but not yet discovered due to humans not being smart enough that I find insufficiently supported. It's always "AI will give us X" — Drexlerian nanotech, space elevators, "energy too cheap to meter," whatever — without considering the outcome where it turns out none of these is actually possible, no matter how smart you are. To quote from the Futurama episode "A Clone of My Own":

Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Nothing is impossible. Not if you can imagine it. That's what being is a scientist is all about.

Cubert J. Farnsworth: No, that's what being a magical elf is all about.

I disagree, it's largely Yudkowsky who vocally claims that a SAGI will rely on things like "diamondoid bacteria" and other nanotech to get an advantage.

For me, and many others, subversion of existing human infrastructure through social engineering to do things like launch nukes, engineering hyper-lethal and virulent pathogens and the like are all feasible for something modestly above human, without relying on anything that doesn't exist. The AI will need robust automation to replace humans, but we're already doing that ourselves, so..

We could already have had energy too cheap to meter if we went full send on nuclear, for one. It would certainly be dirt cheap compared to today's rates.

subversion of existing human infrastructure through social engineering

I think this is overrated, too — though that might be due to reading too many "unboxing" arguments predicated on the assumption that absolutely anyone can be convinced to do absolutely anything, if only you're smart enough to figure out the particular individually-tailored set of Magic Words.

I have never claimed it can convince anyone of literally anything. We've already had plenty of nuclear close-calls simply because of the fog of war or human/technical error.

Similarly, there are already >0 misanthropically omnicidal people around and kicking, and an AI could empower them to pursue their goals, or they might choose to adopt the AI for that purpose.

Mere humans, or human-run orgs like the CIA have long engineered regime change, it seems to me incredibly unlikely, to the point it can be outright dismissed from consideration, that an AGI only modestly higher in intelligence couldn't do the same, and even independently play multiple sides against each other until they all make terrible decisions.

Besides, it's clear that nobody even tries the Yudkowskian boxing approach these days. ARC evals, red-teaming and the like are nowhere close to the maximally paranoid approach, not even for SOTA models.

A group of say, 160 IQ humans with laser-focus and an elimination of many/most of the coordination and trust bottlenecks we face could well become an existential threat. Even a modestly superintelligent or merely genius level AGI can do that and more.

and an AI could empower them to pursue their goals, or they might choose to adopt the AI for that purpose.

Empower them how, exactly? What is it that they aren't able to do now only because they're not smart enough, that more intelligence alone can solve? Intelligence isn't magic.

that an AGI only modestly higher in intelligence couldn't do the same, and even independently play multiple sides against each other until they all make terrible decisions.

Perhaps, but what's your proof that it could do this so much better than the CIA or anyone else, just because it's smarter? Intelligence isn't magic.

A group of say, 160 IQ humans with laser-focus and an elimination of many/most of the coordination and trust bottlenecks we face could well become an existential threat.

Actually, as a 151 IQ human, I mostly disagree with this, so that's part of it right there.

Even a modestly superintelligent or merely genius level AGI can do that and more.

What's your proof of the part I just emphasized? You appear to simply assume it.

I think you might be a uniquely ineffective 151 IQ human if it doesn't seem plausible to you that a group of very smart humans could do extreme and perhaps existential harm. To me, the main thing preventing that seems to be not the inherent hardness or weakness of, say, COVID-Omicron-Ebola, but the resistance of an overwhelming majority of other humans (including both very smart ones and mediocre but well-organized ones).

As for what a superintelligent AI changes? Well for one thing, it eliminates the need to find a bunch of peers. And, with robots, the need for lab assistants.

And I have like 3% P(AI Doom).

This is an excellent answer. One small quibble:

Control of an aligned Superintelligent AGI is equivalent to having the keys to the lightcone, if you make it through the gauntlet of it not killing you and it listens to what you tell it, then you have the means to dominate everyone else, including others who make misaligned AGI, if yours is capable of squashing them at birth, or at the very least capable of panopticon surveillance to prevent anyone from building one in the first place.

For the record I think Yudkowsky and friends are wrong about this one. Control of the only superintelligent AGI, if that AGI is a single coherent entity, might be the keys to the lightcone, but so far it looks to me like AGI scales horizontally much better than it scales vertically.

This, if anything, makes things more dangerous rather than less, because it means there is no permanent win condition, only the deferral of the failure condition for a bit longer.

Thanks!

but so far it looks to me like AGI scales horizontally much better than it scales vertically.

This particular concern hinges on recursive self-improvement, and I agree that we haven't seen much evidence of that, yet, but it's still the early days.

I think that the intelligence of LLMs needs to at least reach that of the average ML researcher capable of producing novel research and breakthroughs before we can call it one way or another, and we're not there yet, at least in terms of released models, not that I expect Gemini or GPT-5 to be that smart yet. The closest I can think of is training LLMs on synthetic data curated by other models, or something like Nvidia using ML models to optimize their hardware, but that's still weaksauce.

If it turns out to be feasible, it still remains to be seen whether we have a hard take-off with a Singleton or a slow (yet fast on human timescales, just months or years) takeoff which might allow for multipolarity. I remain agnostic yet gravely concerned myself.

This particular concern hinges on recursive self-improvement

And most of the talk on that issue assumes that the point where said self-improvement hits steep diminishing returns must necessarily be somewhere far above human intelligence — again, apparently based on nothing beyond it being more conducive to one's preferred outcomes than the alternative.

Diminishing returns != no or negative returns. Intelligence is the closest thing we have to an unalloyed good, and the difference in capabilities between people with just 20 or 30 IQ points is staggering enough.

Nothing at all suggests that the range of IQ/intelligence seen in unmodified humans constrained by a 1.4 kg brain in a small cranium applies at all to an entity that spans data-centers, especially those that can self-modify and fork themselves on demand. You don't need a bazillion IQ points to be immensely dangerous, human scientists with maybe 160 or 170 invented nukes.

We have AI that already matches human intelligence on many or even most cognitive tasks, the scaling laws still hold, and companies and nations can easily afford to throw several OOMs more money at the problem.

Humanity itself has seen exponential or even super-exponential advancement, and we've barely gained a handful of IQ points from the Flynn effect, most of it was merely technological compounding.

Since the theoretical or practical upper limits on the size and speed of an AGI are massive, I wish to see what reason anyone has to claim they'll bottom out within spitting distance of the smartest humans. That is ludicrous prima facie, even if we don't know how fast further progression will be.

You don't need a bazillion IQ points to be immensely dangerous, human scientists with maybe 160 or 170 invented nukes.

Yes, but you're assuming there's a lot more even more dangerous things "out there" for a smarter entity to discover.

What is intelligence for? That is, what is its use? Primarily,

  1. modeling reality
  2. modeling other agents.

Our first day of Physics lab classes at Caltech, the instructor told us that it doesn't matter how many digits of pi we'd all memorized (quite a bunch), just use 3.14, or a scientific calculator's pi key, whichever was faster, because any rounding error would be swamped out by the measurement error in our instruments.

When it comes to modeling the physical world, sure, going from knowing, say, Planck's constant to two decimal places to knowing it to three decimal places will probably net you a bunch of improvements. But then going from, say, ten decimal places to eleven, or even ten decimal places to twenty, almost certainly won't net the same level of improvement.

When modeling other minds, particularly modeling other minds modeling you modeling… — the whole "I know that you know that I know…" thing — well, that sort of recursion provides great returns on added depth… in certain games, like chess. But AIUI, in most other situations, that kind of thing quickly converges to one or another game-theoretic equilibrium, and thus the further recursion allowed by greater intelligence provides little additional benefit.

I'm not saying we can't produce an intelligence "that spans data-centers" much smarter than us, and I'm not saying it's impossible that there are dangerous and powerful things such an intelligence might figure out, I'm just saying it can't just be assumed, or treated as highly likely by default. That it's unsupported extrapolation to reason 'smart=nukes, therefore super-smart=super-nukes and mega-smart=mega-nukes.' I'm not saying that machine intelligence will "bottom out within spitting distance of the smartest humans," I'm saying that it's possible that the practical benefits of such intelligence, no matter how much vaster than our own, may "bottom out" well below the dreams of techno-optimists like yourself, and you can't just rule that out a priori on an unsubstantiated faith that there's vast undiscovered realities beyond our limited comprehension just waiting for a smarter being to uncover.

I want you to at least consider, just for a moment, the idea that maybe we humans, with our "1.4 kg brain[s] in a small cranium," may have a good enough understanding of reality, and of each other, that a being with "900 more IQ points" won't find much room to improve on it.

I'm not saying "a machine can never be smarter than a man!" I'm saying "what if a machine a thousand times smarter than us says, 'yeah, you already had it mostly figured out, the rest is piddly details, no big revelations here'?"

Yes, but you're assuming there's a lot more even more dangerous things "out there" for a smarter entity to discover.

I repeat that, while I think this is true, it's still not necessary for a genius AI to be an existential risk. I've already explained why multiple times.

Nukes? They exist.

Pandemics? They exist. Can they be made more dangerous? Yes. Are humans already making them more dangerous for no good reason? Yes.

Automation? Well underway.

Our first day of Physics lab classes at Caltech, the instructor told us that it doesn't matter how many digits of pi we'd all memorized (quite a bunch), just use 3.14, or a scientific calculator's pi key, whichever was faster, because any rounding error would be swamped out by the measurement error in our instruments.

When it comes to modeling the physical world, sure, going from knowing, say, Planck's constant to two decimal places to knowing it to three decimal places will probably net you a bunch of improvements. But then going from, say, ten decimal places to eleven, or even ten decimal places to twenty, almost certainly won't net the same level of improvement.

I do not think that the benefits of additional intelligence as seen even in human physicists is well addressed by this analogy. The relevant one would be comparing Newtonian physics to GR, and then QM. In the domains where such nuance becomes relevant, the benefits are grossly superior.

For starters, while the Standard Model is great, it still isn't capable of conclusively explaining most of the mass or energy in the universe. Not to mention that even if we have equations for the fundamental processes, there are bazillions of higher-order concerns that are intractable to simulate from first-principles.

AlphaFold didn't massively outpace SOTA on protein folding by using QM on a molecule by molecule basis. It found smarter heuristics, that's also something intelligence is indispensable for. I see no reason why a human can't be perfectly modeled using QM, it is simply a computationally intractable problem even for a single cell within us.

In other words, knowing the underling rules of a complex system != knowing all the potential implications or applications. You can't just memorize the rules of Chess and then declare it's a solved problem.

That it's unsupported extrapolation to reason 'smart=nukes, therefore super-smart=super-nukes and mega-smart=mega-nukes.'

I'm sure there people who might make such a claim. I'm not one of them, and like I said, it's not load bearing. Just nukes is sufficient really. Certainly in combination with automation so the absence of those pesky humans running the machines isn't a problem.

I want you to at least consider, just for a moment, the idea that maybe we humans, with our "1.4 kg brain[s] in a small cranium," may have a good enough understanding of reality, and of each other, that a being with "900 more IQ points" won't find much room to improve on it.

I have considered it, at least to my satisfaction, and I consider it to be exceedingly unlikely. Increases in intelligence, even within the minuscule absolute variation seen within humans, is enormously powerful. There seems to be little to nothing in the way of further scaling in the context of inhuman entities that are not constrained by the same biological limitations in size, volume, speed or energy. They already match or exceed the average human in most cognitive tasks, and even if returns from further increases in intelligence diminish grossly or become asymptotic, I am the furthest from convinced that stage will be reached within spitting distance of the best of humanity, or that such an entity won't be enormously powerful and capable of exterminating us if it wishes to do so.

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The theory is that a) there's so much power and money on the table here that someone doing something world-changing is unavoidable, and b) that the early design stages of such a world-changing system will have massive impact on whether. There are ways to argue against either or both of these assumptions, or to point out separate issues.

((Some of which I agree with: even accepting those propositions, these guys are demonstrably putzes when it comes to actually persuading or planning.))

But 'it's like a religion' isn't a very meaningful claim.

Yeah other people have come to a similar conclusion: What OpenAI shares with Scientology

Also, just to point this out explicitly:

By Cade Metz, Tripp Mickle, and Mike Isaac

By Cade Metz.

This seems... weird, as an explanation, and given my expectations for the NYT may reflect more what one party has fed to the reporter than the real facts on the ground.

The Toner paper in question is here, and there's wayback machine version dating back to Oct 24th. The closest bit I can get to the description from the NYT piece is the section where :

While the system card itself has been well received among researchers interested in understanding GPT-4’s risk profile, it appears to have been less successful as a broader signal of OpenAI’s commitment to safety. The reason for this unintended outcome is that the company took other actions that overshadowed the import of the system card: most notably, the blockbuster release of ChatGPT four months earlier. Intended as a relatively inconspicuous “research preview,” the original ChatGPT was built using a less advanced LLM called GPT-3.5, which was already in widespread use by other OpenAI customers. GPT-3.5’s prior circulation is presumably why OpenAI did not feel the need to perform or publish such detailed safety testing in this instance. Nonetheless, one major effect of ChatGPT’s release was to spark a sense of urgency inside major tech companies.149 To avoid falling behind OpenAI amid the wave of customer enthusiasm about chatbots, competitors sought to accelerate or circumvent internal safety and ethics review processes, with Google creating a fast-track “green lane” to allow products to be released more quickly.

This result seems strikingly similar to the race-to-the-bottom dynamics that OpenAI and others have stated that they wish to avoid. OpenAI has also drawn criticism for many other safety and ethics issues related to the launches of ChatGPT and GPT-4, including regarding copyright issues, labor conditions for data annotators, and the susceptibility of their products to “jailbreaks” that allow users to bypass safety controls. This muddled overall picture provides an example of how the messages sent by deliberate signals can be overshadowed by actions that were not designed to reveal intent.

A different approach to signaling in the private sector comes from Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s primary competitors. Anthropic’s desire to be perceived as a company that values safety shines through across its communications, beginning from its tagline: “an AI safety and research company.” A careful look at the company’s decision-making reveals that this commitment goes beyond words. A March 2023 strategy document published on Anthropic’s website revealed that the release of Anthropic’s chatbot Claude, a competitor to ChatGPT, had been deliberately delayed in order to avoid “advanc[ing] the rate of AI capabilities progress.” The decision to begin sharing Claude with users in early 2023 was made “now that the gap between it and the public state of the art is smaller,” according to the document—a clear reference to the release of ChatGPT several weeks before Claude entered beta testing. In other words, Anthropic had deliberately decided not to productize its technology in order to avoid stoking the flames of AI hype. Once a similar product (ChatGPT) was released by another company, this reason not to release Claude was obviated, so Anthropic began offering beta access to test users before officially releasing Claude as a product in March.

Anthropic’s decision represents an alternate strategy for reducing “race-to-the-bottom” dynamics on AI safety. Where the GPT-4 system card acted as a costly signal of OpenAI’s emphasis on building safe systems, Anthropic’s decision to keep their product off the market was instead a costly signal of restraint. By delaying the release of Claude until another company put out a similarly capable product, Anthropic was showing its willingness to avoid exactly the kind of frantic corner-cutting that the release of ChatGPT appeared to spur. Anthropic achieved this goal by leveraging installment costs, or fixed costs that cannot be offset over time. In the framework of this study, Anthropic enhanced the credibility of its commitments to AI safety by holding its model back from early release and absorbing potential future revenue losses. The motivation in this case was not to recoup those losses by gaining a wider market share, but rather to promote industry norms and contribute to shared expectations around responsible AI development and deployment. Yet where OpenAI’s attempt at signaling may have been drowned out by other, even more conspicuous actions taken by the company, Anthropic’s signal may have simply failed to cut through the noise. By burying the explanation of Claude’s delayed release in the middle of a long, detailed document posted to the company’s website, Anthropic appears to have ensured that this signal of its intentions around AI safety has gone largely unnoticed. Taken together, these two case studies therefore provide further evidence that signaling around AI may be even more complex than signaling in previous eras

Yes, this is weird writing, in the sense that it's (a little) odd for someone to praise their market competitor so heavily, and it's also a trivial thing to get that bent out of shape about either way, but we're talking about a bunch of self-considered weird auteurs; it'd be less believable to not have some tyranny of trivial disagreements involved.

Is that what people think about when talking about Claude?

it's also a trivial thing to get that bent out of shape about either way

I'm going to disagree. A member of your board praising your competitor for not releasing a product and criticizing you for releasing a very popular product that is now the face of the industry. The CEO should advocate for her removal from the board at that point.

I get her focus is safety and his is releasing products, so there's an obvious tension here. But her public criticism is a knife in the back. There's a difference between being vocally self-critical and undermining your peers. I hope she has the foresight to realize that block of text would cause internal division including possibly the "release products" faction retaliating.

A member of your board praising your competitor

Yes, this would be very unusual and blameworthy when "board" means "board of directors of a traditional C Corp." But OpenAI is a nonprofit and this was a nonprofit board. It was set up that way purposefully to allow the directors to slow OpenAI down if they felt it necessary for their mission. I'm glad that Sam prevailed, and I want them to accelerate at least for the time being, but the common assumption that "the board" was supposed to act to further OpenAI's commercial interests (as opposed to its mission) is wrong.

That you disagreed highlights how Sam's position isn't so implausible that it must be dishonest on his part.

But those who are claiming it was a pretext for Sam's power play have a point imo. The paper wasn't widely read or reported on, even in AI safety nobody had heard about it until this incident. Why would Sam care then? If it was a NYT op ed sure.

he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper

Replacing the toner usually fixes any issues you're having with the paper in my experience

https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai-was-precipitated-by-letter-board-about-ai-breakthrough-2023-11-22/

Reuters says OpenAI made an AI breakthrough on the maths department, that it could reliably do some simple mathematics well. Now this is a 'people familiar with the matter' story and I'm not ruling out journalistic ineptitude (GPT-4 could already do some fairly complex maths) and fearmongering... Even so, it feels like timelines are shortening.

Nov 22 (Reuters) - Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s four days in exile, several staff researchers sent the board of directors a letter warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The sources cited the letter as one factor among a longer list of grievances by the board that led to Altman’s firing. Reuters was unable to review a copy of the letter. The researchers who wrote the letter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The maker of ChatGPT had made progress on Q* (pronounced Q-Star), which some internally believe could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as AI systems that are smarter than humans.

Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, the person said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success, the source said.

In addition to announcing a slew of new tools in a demonstration this month, Altman last week teased at a gathering of world leaders in San Francisco that he believed AGI was in sight.

"Four times now in the history of OpenAI, the most recent time was just in the last couple weeks, I've gotten to be in the room, when we sort of push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward, and getting to do that is the professional honor of a lifetime," he said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

I’ll be honest I have come down on the Toner being correct and Altman deserved to be fired side of the coin. I do think going slow with AI is in humanities best interest though I don’t know how to do it. All of humans evolutionary competitive pressures force us forward.

This feels legitimately like a tech where we aren’t sure on how it will end up. I prefer having safety people in charge (even though I think usually their probably my political enemies). I believe Oppenheimer had a fear nukes could ignite the atmosphere. But he thought it was a low probability. I agree with the people who think the AI kills us all is a plausible scenerio. I don’t know how to put odds on that.

The other thing is Hansons work. I don’t know why we haven’t met aliens. It appears to me a great filter exists and AI feels like it could be that.

It’s not going to be a Hollywood movie where somehow the human spirit wins at the end of the day. If the AI is off it will just kill us all.

If you think it might be a great filter I don’t think delaying it a 100 years is a big deal or even a thousand years. It’s a minuscule amount of time in the galaxy.

Now we have capitalism doing its thing which is usually a good thing for pushing techs forward, but it feels different if you think it could be existential. If my choice is between going slow and watching China do it then I guess a prefer Microsoft’s MBA’s.

I also predicted Sam would be back atleast the first time. The now second coming back I’m a bit surprised on.

The other thing is Hansons work. I don’t know why we haven’t met aliens. It appears to me a great filter exists and AI feels like it could be that.

AI makes no sense as a Great Filter. It just changes the question to "why haven't we met any alien robots?"

Yeah, I think people should give a lot more consideration to the Carboniferous as a great filter.

I don’t think so. If the AI is taught to maximize some stupid constraint then kills the creator it might lack the desire to do more.

Though I somewhat agree with you I do think there are paths where the AI might just die after killing its creator.

For a Great Filter to even work, it needs to eliminate ~all technological civilizations.

I don't think homicidal AI with no self-preservation or replication instincts is likely enough for that to be the case.

I’ll be honest I have come down on the Toner being correct and Altman deserved to be fired side of the coin.

I think if the board had just led with that a lot of people would have agreed. "Leader tries to dismantle the structures that hold him accountable" is a problem that people know very well, and "get rid of leader" is not a controversial solution to that problem.

But in fact the board accused Altman of being a lying liar and then refused to stand behind that accusation, even to the subsequent CEOs.

There's gotta be something else going on.

I mentioned this deep in the guts of some other thread, but everyone is modeling this race wrong and buying into the kayfabe too much. Your mental model of this race should consist of a bunch of sinister scheming wizards gazing into their scrying orbs and hissing "Ultimate power must be MINE ALONE at any cost!" Everything else is varying degrees of prevarication and misdirection.

Some of these necromancers want to crush their enemies, get rich, normal shit like that. Others want to create god, or become god, or uplift kangaroos to sentience so they can marry one, or god knows what. Point is, the safetyists never stood a chance. At best they're pawns to be swept aside when they become inconvenient. If ultimate godlike power is on the table, there was never going to be anything but a mad scramble for it.

I mean I think at least some of the people involved on the are quite clear that their goal is a "gameboard-flipping" act which results in world which is permanently safe from anyone who could destroy it. Probably by seizing ultimate power.

I don't think sufficiently godlike power for world domination (as in "gaining control of the world without destroying almost everything of value") is actually on the table though.

Point is, the safetyists never stood a chance. At best they're pawns to be swept aside when they become inconvenient.

Oh, here I was, thinking I'm agreeing with you. No, they're the necromancers hissing "ultimate power must be mine alone".

Yeah the safetyists IMO are also mostly evil sorcerers. They just have better marketing lines.

Ilya Sutskever ... thought Mr. Altman was not always being honest when talking with the board.

The lack of candour may have referred to this or to things not reported on in the article.

Luckily, a brand new article just dropped with details about that:

Some executives said they were getting questions from regulators and law-enforcement entities such as the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan over the charge of Altman’s alleged lack of candor, the people said. The truth was going to come out one way or another, they told the board.

People familiar with the board’s thinking said there wasn’t one incident that led to their decision to eject Altman, but a consistent, slow erosion of trust over time that made them increasingly uneasy. Also complicating matters were Altman’s mounting list of outside AI-related ventures, which raised questions for the board about how OpenAI’s technology or intellectual property could be used.

The board agreed to discuss the matter with their counsel. After a few hours, they returned, still unwilling to provide specifics. They said that Altman wasn’t candid, and often got his way. The board said that Altman had been so deft they couldn’t even give a specific example, according to the people familiar with the executives.

Not entirely related, but here's a particularly eye-popping quote:

OpenAI leadership and employees were growing increasingly concerned about being painted in the press as “a bunch of effective altruists,” as one of them put it.

The link doesn't work for me - maybe this is explained elsewhere in the article, but going solely on the excerpt...

The board said that Altman had been so deft they couldn’t even give a specific example, according to the people familiar with the executives.

Horseshit. "Oh he was lying but we can't give you any examples because he's that good at lying" is the kind of excuse I would expect from a four year old, not a group of supposedly intelligent and qualified professionals. At this point I think that unless they actually give us the specifics, this all boils down to the GPT marketplace blowing up Poe and making a boardmember unreasonably angry.

I took the point to be adjacent to the one Scott made - wow, is it really that long ago? - last December about how the media rarely lies. I don't agree with how Scott frames the observation, which I would have phrased in terms of how the ways they lie are relatively subtle - but the observation itself, as distinct from the debate over the best language to characterize it, is solid.

Skilled liars make as few statements that are straightforwardly false in a plain, literal way as they can and still spread whatever narrative they want to spread. One of the many advantages of this is that there's rarely a clear-cut smoking gun someone in the board's position can point to. Instead it's a matter of which facts they emphasize and which they omit, what they juxtapose with what in order to imply connections that may not actually exist, how they manipulate your emotions around aspects of their narrative, how they take advantage of people's trust in them, or at least willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, in situations that really are ambiguous.

So while I can see how the statement you quote is poor optics, I have no trouble imagining how it could be true.

I totally agree with you that it is possible for someone to be deceptive in a subtle manner like this, but that doesn't change anything about the obligation to make your accusations comprehensible. There's nothing about this type of deception that makes it impossible to describe - even something simple in the form "While the situation was actually x, Sam deceived us into believing that the situation was y" would work. If the deception is so subtle and mysterious in its effects that it had no impact whatsoever, it wasn't a good enough justification for Sam's ouster.

"Oh he was lying but we can't give you any examples because he's that good at lying" is the kind of excuse I would expect from a four year old, not a group of supposedly intelligent and qualified professionals.

Sam Altman is a real business shark whose literal job for the last twelve years has been dealing with boards of directors and VC investors. Running circles around a shape-rotator like Sutskever is child's play for him. Running circles against an ivory tower researcher like Toner is easy for him. McCauley doesn't strike me as a serious contender for someone who successfully wrestled Reddit away from Conde Nast either. And, tellingly, only D'Angelo managed to remain on the board of directors after Altman got his way. Scratch that, I have no idea how D'Angelo managed to survive the debacle.

It's not like you even have to be an experienced business shark to out-argue people who say "hey employees, you know what, I know that we can all become ridiculously rich in the next couple of years, but guys... guys... AI might destroy humanity at some point so let's not become ridiculously rich".

Trying to stop people from developing AI is like trying to stop people from developing nuclear weapons. Obviously, having nuclear weapons gives one enormous benefits. So the idea that someone could talk the whole world out of trying to get nukes by just using intellectual arguments is absolutely ludicrous.

Imagine starting a company called "OpenNuclear". "Let's develop nuclear technology in a safe way, for the benefit of all humanity". And then expecting that somehow the world's talented engineers will just go along with your goal of nuclear safety, instead of going to work building nuclear weapons for various organizations for huge salaries and/or because of powerful emotional reasons like "I don't want my country to get attacked". I can't think of any example in history of humanity as a whole refusing to develop a powerful technology. Even if somehow the world temporarily agreed to pause AI research, that agreement would probably be dropped like a hot potato the second some major war broke out and both sides realized that AI could help them.

It's not like you even have to be an experienced business shark to out-argue people who say "hey employees, you know what, I know that we can all become ridiculously rich in the next couple of years, but guys... guys... AI might destroy humanity at some point so let's not become ridiculously rich".

That's been my issue with the entire "open letter calling for a moratorium" and the rest of it. When the share price drops just because the guy who is promoting commercial use of AI gets booted, then we see how this plays out in reality. Market forces don't care about safety or alignment or paperclip maximisers or the rest of the beautiful Golden Age SF techno-optimism theories that the EA subset concerned about AI have been working on for years; they care about the magical eternal money-fountain that this technology promises to be. Microsoft and other companies are already selling their versions of AI to be integrated into your business and pump productivity and profitability up to the moon and beyond. People are already using AI for everything from "write my term paper for me" to increasing amount of articles I see online which are gibberish but do their job of "fill space, get clicks, earn ad revenue".

Nobody is going to pause for six months while their competitors get to market first. That's what the idealists seem to have their heads in the sand about: Microsoft partnered with OpenAI because (a) they were going to develop a marketable product fast and first and (b) just like Altman told Toner, it was to keep the regulators happy: "oh yeah we totally are working on security and safety, don't worry!"

But if "security and safety" stand in the way of "get our hands on the spigot of the money-fountain", guess which gets dropped? I think Sutskever and the board are learning that lesson the hard way now. Altman was telling them what they wanted to hear while making sure the funding kept flowing and the product was being developed. That's why they felt uneasy when it finally dawned on them that they weren't really in control of what was happening, and why they tried kicking him out (straight into the arms of Microsoft and now it seems returning like victorious Caesar to triumph over their corpses).

But the world did that with Atoms for Peace:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace

See also the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Countries like Japan have highly developed nuclear industry, but they don’t have nuclear weapons.

Countries like Japan have highly developed nuclear industry, but they don’t have nuclear weapons.

The question is how many hours after wanting to have they will have them.

Countries like Japan have highly developed nuclear industry, but they don’t have nuclear weapons.

Because when America occupied them after the war, it made damn sure Japan would never again get any notions about being a military power. It's why their military is known as the Japanese Self-Defense Forces:

The Occupation was commanded by American general Douglas MacArthur, whose office was designated the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP). In the initial phase of the Occupation, from 1945 to 1946, SCAP had pursued an ambitious program of social and political reform, designed to ensure that Japan would never again be a threat to world peace. Among other reforms, SCAP worked with Japanese leaders to completely disband the Japanese military. In addition, SCAP sought to unravel the wartime Japanese police state by breaking up the national police force into small American-style police forces controlled at the local level. SCAP also sought to empower previously marginalized groups that it believed would have a moderating effect on future militarism, legalizing the Communist and Socialist parties and encouraging the formation of labor unions. The crowning achievement of the first phase of the Occupation was the promulgation at SCAP's behest in 1947 of a new Constitution of Japan. Most famously Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution explicitly disavows war as an instrument of state policy and promises that Japan will never maintain a military.

Japan is often said to be a "screwdriver's turn" away from possessing nuclear weapons

Because such latent capability is not prescribed by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, this is sometimes called the "Japan Option" (as a work-around to the treaty), as Japan is considered a "paranuclear" state, being a clear case of a country with complete technical prowess to develop a nuclear weapon quickly

But do they have the willpower to do so? This is the country that has first-hand experience with what nuclear weapons can do in the middle of a war, after all.

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Running circles around a shape-rotator like Sutskever is child's play for him.

Actually, reportedly, it was Anna Brockman crying and begging Sutskever to switch his allegiance that seemed to clinch it. Ilya had officiated Greg and Anna's wedding, held at the OpenAI office. Another point for Hanania's theory that women's tears win in the marketplace of ideas.

Its implied that they are keeping quiet for legal reasons, but that seems like a cop-out to me. If getting rid of Altman is worth blowing up the most productive company on the face of the planet, then it's worth getting a defamation lawsuit over. Like really? You're letting the lawyers dictate your messaging about saving the world? Get it together.

still unwilling to provide specifics. They said that Altman wasn’t candid, and often got his way. The board said that Altman had been so deft they couldn’t even give a specific example

This is profound weakness. Completely unacceptable for any functioning adult. How a group of them with hours of legal counsel advising them could still be this incompetent is baffling.

Wait, why would being seen as EA he bad? If anything, wouldn't it be good? Or are people still kvetching over the Bankman-Fried stuff?


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