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Interesting conclusion, since I didn't make a claim either way. Still, for the record, other independent observers have documented the practices and explained why they don't meet the definition of genocide, John Spencer and Natasha Hausdorff to name two examples. It seems by no means clear that it's valid to make a claim of genocide. I certainly wouldn't unless I was really, really certain of my claim, because to get…
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Absolutely everybody names it wrong. The movement is called rationality or "LessWrong-style rationality", explicitly to differentiate it from rationalism the philosophy; rationality is actually in the empirical tradition. But the words are too close together, so this is about as lost a battle as "hacker".
I don't think "rationality" is a good name for the movement, for the same reason as I wish "effective altruism" had picked a different name: it conflates the goal with the achievement of the goal . A rationalist (in the Yudkowsky sense) is someone who is trying to be rational , in a particular way. But "rationality" means actually being rational. I don't think it's actually true that rationalists-in-this-sense common…
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They remind me of the "Effective Altruism" crowd who get completely wound up in these hypothetical logical thought exercises and end up coming to insane conclusions that they feel trapped in because they got there using pure logic. Not realizing that their initial conditions were highly artificial so any conclusion they reach is only of academic value. There is a term for this. "Getting stuck up your own butt." It wo…
The overlap between the Effective Altruism community and the Rationalist community is extremely high. They’re largely the same people. Effective Altruism gained a lot of early attention on LessWrong, and the pessimistic focus on AI existential risk largely stems from an EA desire to avoid “temporal-discounting” bias. The reasoning is something like: if you accept that future people count just as much as current peopl…
(1) The kind of Gatesian solutions they like to fund like mosquito nets are part of the problem, not part of the solution as I see it. If things are going to get better in Africa, it will be because Africans grow their economy and pay taxes and their governments can provide the services that they want. Expecting NGOs to do everything for them is the same kind of neoliberal thinking that has rotted state capacity in the core and set us up for a political crisis.
(2) It is one thing to do something wrong, realize it was a mistake, and then make amends. It's another thing to do plan to do something wrong and to try to offset it somehow. Many of the high paying jobs that EA wants young people to enter are "part of the problem" when it comes to declining stage capacity, legitimation crisis, and not dealing with immediate problems -- like the fact that one of these days there's going to be a heat wave that is a mass causality event.
Furthermore
(3) Time discounting is a central part of economic planning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_discount_rate
It is controversial as hell, but one of the many things the Soviet Union got wrong before the 1980s was planning with a discount rate of zero, which led to many economically and ecologically harmful projects. If you seriously think it should be zero you should also be considering whether anybody should work in the finance industry at all or if we should have dropped a hydrogen bomb on Exxon's headquarters yesterday. At some point speculations about the future are just speculation. When it comes to the nuclear waste issue, for instance, I don't think we have any idea what state people are going to be in 20,000 years. They might be really pissed that buried spent nuclear fuel some place they can't get at it. Even the plan to burn plutonium completely in fast breeder reactors has an air of unreality about it, even though it happens on a relatively short 1000 year timescale we can't be sure at all that anyone will be around to finish the job.
(4) If you are looking for low-probability events to worry about I think you could find a lot of them. If it was really a movement of free thinkers they'd be concerned about 4,000 horsemen of the apocalypse, not the 4 or so that they are allowed to talk about -- but talk about a bunch of people who'll cancel you if you "think different". Somehow climate change and legitimation crisis just get... ignored.
(5) Although it is run by people who say they are militant atheists, the movement has all the trappings of a religion, not least "The Singularity" was talked about by Jesuit Priest Teilhard de Chardin long before sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge used it as the hinge of a mystery novel.
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I've always seen the breathless Singularitarian worrying about AI Alignment as a smokescreen to distract people from thinking clearly about the more pedestrian hazards of AI that isn't self-improving or superhuman, from algorithmic bias, to policy-washing, to energy costs and acceleration of wealth concentration. It also leads to so-called longtermism - discounting the benefits of solving current real problems and fo…
yep, the biggest threat posed by AI comes from the capitalists who want to own it.
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No rationalist claims that it's “_definitely_ going to be the end of the world”. In fact they estimate to less than 30% the chance that AI becomes an existential risk by the end of the century.
Who is "they" exactly, and how can they estimate the probability of a future event based on zero priors and a total lack of scientific evidence?
Rationalists, mostly self-identified.
> how can they estimate the probability of a future event based on zero priors and a total lack of scientific evidence?
As best as they can, because at the end of the day you still need to make decisions (You can of course choose to do nothing and ignore the risk, but that's not a safe, neutral option). Which means either you treat it as if it had a particular probability, or you waste money and effort doing things in a less effective way. It's like preparing for global warming or floods or hurricanes or what have you - yes, the error bars are wide, but at the end of the day you take the best estimate you can and get on with it, because anything else is worse.
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The overlap between the Effective Altruism community and the Rationalist community is extremely high. They’re largely the same people. Effective Altruism gained a lot of early attention on LessWrong, and the pessimistic focus on AI existential risk largely stems from an EA desire to avoid “temporal-discounting” bias. The reasoning is something like: if you accept that future people count just as much as current peopl…
For anyone who takes Effective Altruism or Rationalism seriously I strongly recommend reading "You Are Not a Gadget" It was written more than ten years ago and was so prescient about the issues of social media and also contained one of the most devastating problems with EA, the idea of a circle of empathy. You don't have to agree with any of this. I am not defending every idea the author has. But I recommend that boo…
This is vibe-based, but I think the Rationalists get more vitriol than they deserve. Upon reflecting, my hypothesis for this is threefold: 1. They are a community —they have an in-group, and if you are not one of them you are by-definition in the out-group. People tend not to like being in other peoples' out-groups. 2. They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opin…
Well that was a whole thing. I especially liked the existential threat of Cade Metz. But ultimately, I think the great oracle of Chicago got this whole thing right when he said: -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the w…
> I especially liked the existential threat of Cade Metz. I am perpetually fascinated by the way rationalists love to dismiss critics by pointing out that they met some people in person and they seemed nice. It's such a bizarre meme. Curtis Yarvin went to one of the "Vibecamp" rationalist gatherings, was nice to some prominent Twitter rationalists, and now they are ardent defenders of him on Twitter. Their entire arg…
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I don't read these rationalist essays either, but you don't need to be a deep thinker to understand why any rational person would be afraid of AI and the singularity. The AI will do what its programmed to do, but its programmers morality may not match my own. What more scary is that it may be developed with the morality of a corporation rather than a person. (That is to say, no morals at all.) I think its perfectly j…
Those corporations are already superhuman entities with morals that don’t match ours. They do cause a lot of problems. Maybe it’s better to figure out how to fix that real, current problem rather than hypothetical future ones.
[0]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...
Similar claims can be made about any structure of humans that exhibits gestalt intelligence, e.g. nations, stock markets, etc.