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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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you are upset that Rationalists regard high-IQ Jews as superior to Kurt

...do they?

Obviously intelligence is important, but it's not the only thing that matters. I don't think Rationalists would be worried about AI alignment if they thought that more intelligent = more better in every relevant way.

(I'm sure there are a lot of high IQ individuals who they think are in fact superior to Kurt, but the justification they would cite would be that those high IQ individuals are involved in frontier AI research or they're earning-to-give or something else, it wouldn't just be because of their IQ.)

I see this accusation thrown at rationalists a lot, and I'm honestly not sure what to think about it. As someone who's mostly ambivalent to the whole rationalist movement/identity but one who spend a lot of time interacting with them on Scott Alexander-related forums, I've rarely seen rationalists imply any sort of greater value on individuals for their IQ. They're often accused of being high IQ people bitter at not being worshiped like the gods they deserve to be merely for their high IQ, but, again, I've rarely ever seen them do or state anything that even remotely implies this sort of belief. I feel like this most likely reflects a sort of intelligence fetishism on the part of the critic, who sees rationalists talk about IQ and intelligence and how useful they are in certain (well, to be fair, many, MANY) contexts and can't separate that idea of usefulness from some sort of inherent superiority.

I don't think Rationalists would be worried about AI alignment if they thought that more intelligent = more better in every relevant way.

Isn't that exactly why they are worried about AI alignment? They don't necessarily consider intelligence to confer moral superiority, but many do consider it to be among the most important qualities in determining how competent/powerful an agent is. That's exactly why it's scary to think of what would happen if an extremely intelligent, hence powerful, agent that didn't share any of humanity's core values were to emerge.