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The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

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Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#111

Post by metabagel »

Aurornis wrote: post #85
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The older I get, the more I get the sneaking suspicion that statements like "the ends don't justify the means" and "violence is always the wrong answer" are, at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any time, and at worst, designed to ensure only a very few people in power can commit violence. An ongoing conflict has resulted in the violent deaths of literally many thousands of children. The people wh…

> The older I get, the more I get the sneaking suspicion that statements like "the ends don't justify the means" and "violence is always the wrong answer" are, at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any time, and at worst, designed to ensure only a very few people in power can commit violence. My experience has been the polar opposite: The older I get, the more I've seen people come to completely in…

The point of the comment you are replying to is that it's often logically inconsistent for people to say that violence is never the answer, given the amount of violence committed by our military, law enforcement, immigration enforcement, etc. - much of which is deemed acceptable.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#112

Post by pembrook »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #53
MostlyStable wrote: post #8

It is completely coherent to both think that an extremely bad thing is coming, and yet that does not justify any particular action. "The ends don't justify the means" and literal entire religions have been built on this concept. It is not irrational or incoherent to believe that even something as serious as extinction does not justify arbitrary action. Someone _may_ decide that it does, but it is not a necessary conc…

The older I get, the more I get the sneaking suspicion that statements like "the ends don't justify the means" and "violence is always the wrong answer" are, at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any time, and at worst, designed to ensure only a very few people in power can commit violence. An ongoing conflict has resulted in the violent deaths of literally many thousands of children. The people wh…

> "Political Violence is Never The Answer". But our country (and a lot of them) were literally founded on political violence. How do people square those 2 ideas?

The is just survivorship bias. Violence sits at the root of ALL human societies. The vast majority throughout history have failed or are currently failing.

If you're on HN you're probably sitting in one of the lucky, relatively prosperous ones. Violence didn't create the prosperity, otherwise Sudan and Liberia should be the richest countries in the world.

Your relative prosperity came from your ancestors being smart enough to build frameworks to allow a society to mediate scarcity without the need for violence (common law, markets and trade, property rights, etc all enforced via a government monopoly on violence). In fact, any rich country is the result of systems of decentralized scarcity mediation without decentralized violence.

It's the lack of violence which built the relative prosperity you enjoy today. Not the other way around.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#113

Post by lazyasciiart »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #54
morningsam wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yudkowsky himself also posted a rebuttal today: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/article/2043601524815716866

I find all of this stuff very interesting but nonetheless these two voices sound like they could never win an election and aspire not to. That is the ultimate test of the worthlessness of a policy - it's all equally worthless until it wins an election, and that's what makes it reality. AI Doomerism versus Accelerationism are both playful fantasies, it doesn't really matter what measurements or probabilities or observ…

Iran's leadership seems to be a solid rebuttal of that argument.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#114

Post by handoflixue »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #91
handoflixue wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the point every prominent member of the "Doomer" community is making: Violence isn't an effective action; it is a counterproductive action. It is actively destructive.

Well what other tools do we have? Waiting for the market to fix things is also destructive and harms orders of magnitude more people than violent direct action does; democracy is wildly ineffective compared to violence even at its most optimistic; what else remains? Fleeing the planet?

> Well what other tools do we have?

I'll answer with a quote from the founder of the Rationalist movement, Eliezer:

"How certain do you have to be that your child has terminal cancer, before you start killing puppies? 10% sure? 50% sure? 99.9%? The answer is that it doesn't matter how certain you are, killing puppies doesn't cure cancer."

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#115

Post by thegrim33 »

The LLM doomerism is just one arm of the general "us vs them" strategy - defining a group of people as the others who are the bad guys, defining yourself as the good guys, constantly fostering hate against the others, finding ways to give your group rationale for why they have the moral high ground, all of it in the end an act to gain power/influence/money for the people orchestrating it.

The anti-AI angle is just the latest flavor of it, replacing previous ones (I'm sure you can think of some) and eventually being replaced by the next new thing/person that they'll try to direct us to hate.

I'm willing to bet any amount of money that 99.99% of AI doomers identify with the same extreme end of the political spectrum. That should be a very big red flag and highly indicative of the real motive behind the movement.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#116

Post by kansface »

Aurornis wrote: post #99
hax0ron3 wrote: post #7

I don't agree with Yudkowsky, but I think there's certainly a chance that he's right about AI destroying humanity. I just don't think the likelihood of that happening is as high as he thinks it is. But there certainly is a chance. The problem with trying to stop it is, how? Even if you killed every single AI company leader and every single top AI engineer, it would almost certainly just slow down the rate of progress…

> I don't agree with Yudkowsky, but I think there's certainly a chance that he's right about AI destroying humanity. I just don't think the likelihood of that happening is as high as he thinks it is. But there certainly is a chance. This is the rhetorical trick that LessWrongers (Yudkowsky's site) have settled on for decades: They have justified everything around the premise that there's a chance, however small, that…

It is a reimagining of Pascal’s Wager. On the original front, I don’t see the neo-Rationalists converting to Christianity en masse.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#117

Post by hollerith »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #90
janalsncm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reasoning makes sense under a regime of infinite games . In other words, the goal is to continue playing the game rather than win once. These people do not believe we are in an infinite game. They believe they have a narrow set of moves to avoid checkmate, and apparently getting rid of Sam Altman is one of them. I will suggest another reason though: we are likely already in the light cone of continued AI develop…

Eliezer Yudkowsky has gone so far as to say that it might be ok to kill most of humanity (excepting a "viable reproduction population") to stop AI. If that's not just talk, then this line reasoning only gives you a few possible modes of action. I would not be worried about the people with Molotov cocktails, but I'd be very worried about bio terrorism.

>Eliezer Yudkowsky has gone so far as to say that it might be ok to kill most of humanity (excepting a "viable reproduction population") to stop AI

That doesn't sound like a non-misleading summary of anything he would say. Do you have a quote or a link?

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#118

Post by mrguyorama »

vrganj wrote: post #41

[flagged]

The founders of the US started a war that killed tens of thousands of colonists over small taxes and a desire to eventually end slavery, which was basically unprofitable at that point in America. The local connected and rich people thought those were valid reasons for political violence.

The "Boston Massacre" involved a crowd of people throwing rocks and balls of ice at soldiers and getting shot at.

But now it's all "Oh political violence must be avoided at all costs". Now it's "Political violence doesn't work, now lets set off fireworks on July 4th to celebrate the birth of our nation through violence"

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#119

Post by hollerith »

Aurornis wrote: post #94
morningsam wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yudkowsky himself also posted a rebuttal today: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/article/2043601524815716866

Anyone willing to read that wall of text should also read Yudkowsky's original piece on the topic: https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no... The inflammatory conclusion of his 2023 writing was that we need to "shut it all down", escalating to bombing datacenters: > be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike. Now that someone who was an open follower of his words tried to bomb Sam Altm…

You doubt that Yudkowsky "was only advocating for state-sponsored airstrikes, not civilian airstrikes, bombs, or attacks." Let's let the reader decide.

In the article, the string "kill" occurs twice, both times describing what some future AI would do if the AI labs remain free to keep on their present course. The strings "bomb" and "attack" never occur. The strings "strike" and "destroy" occurs once each, and this quote contains both occurrences:

>Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

>Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool. That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature. Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.

>That’s the kind of policy change that would cause my partner and I to hold each other, and say to each other that a miracle happened, and now there’s a chance that maybe Nina will live. The sane people hearing about this for the first time and sensibly saying “maybe we should not” deserve to hear, honestly, what it would take to have that happen. And when your policy ask is that large, the only way it goes through is if policymakers realize that if they conduct business as usual, and do what’s politically easy, that means their own kids are going to die too.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#120

Post by Synaesthesia »

nradov wrote: post #77
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The older I get, the more I get the sneaking suspicion that statements like "the ends don't justify the means" and "violence is always the wrong answer" are, at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any time, and at worst, designed to ensure only a very few people in power can commit violence. An ongoing conflict has resulted in the violent deaths of literally many thousands of children. The people wh…

During WWII, the entire Allied leadership was willing to kill millions of Axis children if that's what it took to win the war and force the enemy to surrender unconditionally. There was at least some genocidal intent. Population centers were intentionally bombed to wipe out civilian factory workers. We can argue about whether that was right or wrong but the reality is that it's probably inevitable once armed conflict…

It was wrong, and yes would likely be seen as genocidal in the current day, rightly so. You can't just randomly kill innocent civilians, no matter what. It didn't even meaningfully accelerate the end of the war.
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