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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27457 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.

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

And that's where you get the impact on society wrong. The OpenAI affair shows what happens when rising up to the level of "philosophy and positive actionable visions" conflicts with the grubby, dirty, filthy lucre tackiness. The tackiness wins.

So even if we get AI, we'll still be arguing over "trans versus trads". There will still be the demands that AI be purged of wrongthink, that the Science be acknowledged (but only the science that props up our side) and the rest of the messy fights that happen in the ground around "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart".

When did normies start caring, one way or the other, about trans issues? When kids got involved. When it started happening to your kids, from Drag Queen Story Hour in libraries and kindergartens, to schools promising to protect trans kids by lying to parents, to the shifting "nobody is giving puberty blockers to kids/okay yes they are but it's based on The Science, and nobody is carrying out surgery on minors/okay yes they are but...." claims of trans activism. When it was Gender and Queer Studies departments in universities, and 'just a few crazy kids on campus', nobody cared: the level of philosophy and visions could spin its wheels as much as it liked. When it came to the real world and impacts on the lives of ordinary people then it bogged down in the mud of ick-changes.

You may rise up to the lofty level of philosophy, but then it has to be applied practically in the real world, or else you are just sitting around blowing smoke rings and the world will move on past you, ick-changes and all.

And that's where you get the impact on society wrong. The OpenAI affair shows what happens when rising up to the level of "philosophy and positive actionable visions" conflicts with the grubby, dirty, filthy lucre tackiness. The tackiness wins.

I am not sure what you are talking about. The OpenAI affair was, in terms of my compass, Altman (closer to d/acc) fighting AI safetyists from EA structures. What tackiness won? Do you mean the promise of compensations to technical staff, or the struggle over the corporate board's power? This is all instrumental to much bigger objectives.

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