site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27472 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

Why do they call it effective accelerationism? Are they deliberately making fun of effective altruism with that name, or are they using the word "effective" unironically in some way?

George Hotz talks about it here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DdZmZJHEVUc?si=g7z3yB_V_pvqc6-q

To paraphrase: no we aren’t going to give food away, there is just going to be abundant food that’s so cheap that nobody can’t afford it. No don’t start a charity to give away 100 malaria vaccines, start a company to make the malaria vaccines cost $0.01 each and make them abundant.

start a company to make the malaria vaccines cost $0.01 each and make them abundant.

That sounds great, but the problem is that you now have to invent a new economic system to replace capitalism. If every malaria vaccine costs $0.01 to make, yippee! I can sell them for $50 and make a huge return! What do you mean I can't sell them for $50, I have to sell them at a price the very poorest can afford? What's my incentive there to invest in a company where, no matter how much product they produce, no matter what volume of sales, they're just about covering their operating costs and I'm making back pennies instead of dollars on my investment?

Dismantling and replacing capitalism is going to be the way more difficult problem than finding out how to make cheap cheap goods and services.

Maybe compare it to Tylenol? I didn’t realize it before having kids, but Tylenol is a life saving medicine as a fever reducer, and costs effectively nothing.

I don’t think GeoHot is laying out a full business plan here, just speaking in broad terms, and I do generally agree with him.

If every malaria vaccine costs $0.01 to make, yippee! I can sell them for $50 and make a huge return!

And when they’re abundant and cheap like Tylenol, other people will sell them for 49.99, 49.98, 49.97, […], 0.01. Nobody will want your $50 malaria pills just like nobody wants $50 Tylenol.

Yes, but Tylenol is not being sold at $0.01 a pill. Look at the hoops pharma companies jump through in order to keep medicines under patent, instead of becoming cheap generics.

To make things work where you get investors for your "it only costs $0.01 to make it and hence we can only charge $0.02 to sell it so your dividends will be $0.005", you will need to find some refinement of free market capitalism that we don't yet have.

Yes it is.

https://www.costco.com/kirkland-signature-extra-strength-acetaminophen-500-mg.%2c-1%2c000-caplets.product.100213623.html

That's 1000 for $9.99, 999 pills for 1 cent each and then 1 extra. Now, if you buy a smaller quantity it is more expensive, since you're paying them to make and ship around a smaller bottle, and there's probably also a bit of a premium for name-brand Tylenol if you don't know about generics (some of which is you paying them to advertise the existence of Tylenol to you), but here's a smaller quantity of brand-name Tylenol for something like $0.15 each.

https://www.amazon.com/Tylenol-Acetaminophen-Extra-Strength-Count/dp/B000052WQ7/

Not exactly an onerous burden.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats