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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27461 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Since @Hawaii98 complains about insufficient quantity of quality commentary, I've taken it upon myself to cover one of the topics proposed by @greyenlightenment, namely the doxxing of Based Beff Jesos, the founder of effective accelerationism. My additional commentary, shallow though it may be, got out of hand, so it's a standalone post now: E/acc and the political compass of AI war.

As I've been arguing for some time, the culture war's most important front will be about AI; that's more pleasant to me than the tacky trans vs trads content, as it returns us to the level of philosophy and positive actionable visions rather than peculiarly American signaling ick-changes, but the stakes are correspondingly higher… Anyway, Forbes has doxxed the founder of «e/acc», irreverent Twitter meme movement opposing attempts at regulation of AI development which are spearheaded by EA. Turns out he's a pretty cool guy eh.

Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement? [archive.ph link]

Quoting Forbes:

…At first blush, e/acc sounds a lot like Facebook’s old motto: “move fast and break things.” But Jezos also embraces more extreme ideas, borrowing concepts from “accelerationism,” which argues we should hasten the growth of technology and capitalism at the expense of nearly anything else. On X, the platform formally known as Twitter where he has 50,000 followers, Jezos has claimed that “institutions have decayed beyond the point of salvaging and that the media is a “vector for cybernetic control of culture.”

Forbes has learned that the Jezos persona is run by a former Google quantum computing engineer named Guillaume Verdon who founded a stealth AI hardware startup Extropic in 2022. Forbes first identified Verdon as Jezos by matching details that Jezos revealed about himself to publicly available facts about Verdon. A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon and found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jezos was Verdon than that it was any other person. Forbes is revealing his identity because we believe it to be in the public interest as Jezos’s influence grows.

My main objective is to provide the reader with convenient links to do own research and contribute to the debate, so I rapidly switch from Beff to a brief review of new figures in AI safety discourse, and conclude that the more important «culture war» of the future will be largely fought by the following factions:

  • AI Luddites, reactionaries, job protectionists and woke ethics grifters who demand pause/stop/red tape/sinecures (bottom left)
  • plus messianic Utopian EAs who wish for a moral singleton God, and state/intelligence actors making use of them (top left)
  • vs. libertarian social-darwinist and posthumanist e/accs often aligned with American corporations and the MIC (top right?)
  • and minarchist/communalist transhumanist d/accs who try to walk the tightrope of human empowerment (bottom right?)

In the spirit of making peace with inevitability of most discussion taking place in the main thread, I repost this here.

edit: not to toot my own horn, but

Is anyone else checking here less and less often because equal quality commentary seems increasingly available elsewhere?

I am checking here less and less often because A) with my current concerns and the way wind blows, Western culture war is largely irrelevant B) there's little for me to contribute in addition to all that has been said and C) I've concluded that my ability at making commentary is better used for making an impact.

edit 2: I also mildly dislike the fact that standalone posts need approval, though I can see how that follows from the problem/design choice of easy anon registration.

(Revealing the name behind an anonymous account of public note is not “doxxing,” which is an often-gendered form of online harassment that reveals private information — like an address or phone number — about a person without consent and with malicious intent.)

wheeeeeeeee

I wish they would take this definition to its logical conclusion and charge the phone book and people finder sites with doxing, but they never do. (Of course, they added the "with malicious intent" part which could be used to conveniently absolve said people finder sites of wrongdoing.)

It's absolutely staggering how people will blame anything and everything but data brokers for doxing. The United States is an unreasonably easy place to dox people. If you reside in the US and give me your legal first and last name, I can very likely find your home address in seconds by going to one of these sites and typing them in. That's absurd. I hate to play the "this only happens in the US" card (and to be fair, equivalent sites exist for Canada and possibly other countries), but this genuinely seems like a US-specific problem. Nowhere else will governments just release what should be private information to any party who has enough money to buy them.

If there were any laws against releasing that sort of information to data brokers, and people finder sites were forced to be shut down, 99% of US-based doxing (and subsequent "online harassment") would disappear overnight. But of course, there's a huge financial incentive to keep things the way they are, as having data rakes in huge revenue for companies (it's digital oil after all) and they're not liable for their information being misused. And modern journalism isn't suited to actually rocking the boat, so they will never publish a news article on how easily people can be doxed in the US because of these data brokers, and they will never challenge this state of affairs.

This wordsmithing is so enraging. I buy that Beff Jezos is now a public figure, his opsec was minimal, and journalists have the right to publish information about public figures that they can find out. So, dox him! But have the courage of your convictions and go with "yes, I'm doxing him, and that's a good thing," not whatever shit this is.

It's their thinly-veiled attempt to be loftier, paint themselves as descending from the ivory tower to do a good deed, and aren't just another lowlife doxing someone on the internet, when in reality, well, that's exactly what they are. They're going to stoop to the level of the people they accuse of doing "online harassment", but they're going to do it in a way that makes it seem like they're not doing it at all.

I enjoy the author’s sudden breaking of the fourth wall to deliver the Russell Conjugation. Men are revealed and held accountable; women are doxxed and harassed.

Women have always been the primary victims of doxxing.

What's the likelihood that the journalist is okay with an anonymous woman with an OnlyFans account being linked to her real-life name without her consent?

Epsilon. Note the sneaky clause about "online harassment" (which these days is a nebulous term that can mean anything from posting one mean comment to actually showing up to someone's house in person), not to mention the "often-gendered" part.

That's to say, if your scenario happened, they would bemoan that it's doxing and they'll say that's because it's online harassment of a woman.

They had to throw in "often-gendered", didn't they? Guys get doxxed as much, maybe more, than women. If doxxing is wrong - and I think there are very few cases where it is appropriate - it doesn't become even worser if the doxxed person is female/female presenting/non binary/genderfluid/anything not cis male.

it doesn't become even worser if the doxxed person is female/female presenting/non binary/genderfluid/anything not cis male.

Hmm, if we take as granted that doxxing increases the risk of some physical altercation taking place (even if by some tiny percent) and if we take as granted that the average woman is physically weaker than the average man, then I think it is probably true that doxxing poses more of a physical risk to women than men. Not necessarily by much of course as I imagine most doxxing doesn't actually lead to anything like being physically stalked.

I think doxxing Amouranth would probably put her at more risk then doxxing Jacksepticeye for example.

If we take all of those things for granted, then we have to take for granted that trans women do not belong in women's sports / prisons / bathrooms / etc., and we have to wonder why those things are not loudly shouted from the rooftops by NYT reporters.

On the other hand, if we don't take for granted, but check the relevant statistics, and it turns out that women are far less likely to be victims of violent crime, then your argument falls flat on it's face.

less likely to be victims of violent crime, then your argument falls flat on it's face.

of random violent crime yes. But that's not the specific thing we are talking about here. Do you think that a random online woman and a random online man are equally likely to be sought out by a bad actor?

You can't use general crime statistics against a specific scenario. For obvious reasons.

My objection to the point raised was narrow for a reason, I am not commenting on general levels of violence or whether this scenario would be portrayed accurately with trans people et al. So don't read into my point more than is actually there.

If I show that women are less likely to be the victims of non-random violent crime as well, will you concede, or move the goalposts again?

I don't see how the goal posts ever moved. The original claim was that woman are easier to victimize (because they are physically weaker than men), men being more likely to be victims in general does not seem to preclude that.

The original claim was that because women are easier to victimize, they are actually being more victimized, which is why doxxing them is worse. If he actually meant what you're saying, it would be irrelevant to the conversation.

More comments

If you can show that women are less likely to be at risk from being doxxed due to a mixture of physical attributes and due to the nature of online gender mixtures and behaviours then sure. As that was my ACTUAL claim.

Remember we are encouraged to be specific here. So do me the courtesy of addressing my actual specific argument not something else please.

I may be wrong, it's certainly happened before! But at least address my claim not some other thing you are interested in debunking.

If you can show that women are less likely to be at risk from being doxxed due to a mixture of physical attributes and due to the nature of online gender mixtures and behaviours then sure. As that was my ACTUAL claim.

The logic of the argument is faulty. The physical attributes do not make doxxing more physically dangerous for women, for the same for the same reason they don't make any other encounter more physically dangerous for women. If you want to make the claim that doxxing is some super special exception that results in more violence for women, you need to actually back that claim up with something.

Remember we are encouraged to be specific here.

No we're not. You tactic of deliberately misinterpreting the rules in order to win an argument is as bizarre as it is ineffective. Go ahead and report me, if you disagree.

But at least address my claim

I did, but you're moving the goal posts. If you're making a claim, it is enough to point out that it's logic is faulty. You do not get to demand that someone brings evidence against an ultra-specific scenario, particularly when you've brought none yourself.

More comments

I think traditionally doxxing happened/happens to small people in small online communities. I would agree that major celebrity doxxing probably has gender parity in terms of badness, however I can see the smaller scale version being worse for women (or bad in a way specific to women). I think it is reasonable to assume that doxxing of random private individuals would result in more stalking/sexual harassment adjacent behaviors, when directed at women, and might intentionally be directed at women to drive that kind of behavior in others, in a way that would generally not be true for men.

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