In case you're thinking you saw this before, there was similar article a month ago in Time:
Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
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Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#22If you'd like to read more about the roots of Effective Altruism, ranging from old mailing lists, LessWrong, bitcoin, cults, AI and the surprising connections to many well known figures in tech, I highly recommend the 7-part Extropia's Childen series from Jon Evans [1] 1. https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte...
Golly. I'm on part 2 and it sounds like they're about to invent Scientology.
> The full post goes into more depth and nuance, but it's worth stressing how heavily Leverage relied on “debugging,” based on Anders's “Connection Theory.” Debugging consisted of — to paraphrase and oversimplify — opening up one's psyche, history, self, and emotional core to maximum vulnerability, generally to one's hierarchical superior, and then doing all you could to follow their suggestions to “fix” your mind.
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#23I have always felt that the embrace of "AI can be dangerous" comes from an elitist fear of capitalist class that the "unwashed masses" will have too much access to technology and will make capital, as well as labor, obsolete. I mean if everybody has a super-smart personal assistant in their home, who thinks independently, why would they need or want a ruling class, when we can simply have democratic socialism?
What about a future where only energy and resources are important leads you to think we’ll have less inequality? Brains are the only thing that don’t flow to the wealthy right now
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
YMMV. I tried to finish it based on a strong trusted recommendation, but could not get past the insufferable author-inserts, and the unpleasant and unbelievable hero character.
I too didn't finish it - assuming it's "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". I got caught up by the multiple times the main character made sweeping assessments of things with insufficient information, and just happened to be right by accident (or author fiat I guess). The main characters figure things out by Thinking Really Hard, and experimentation is only ever done to prove they were right all along to oth…
It went above your head.
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#25I have always felt that the embrace of "AI can be dangerous" comes from an elitist fear of capitalist class that the "unwashed masses" will have too much access to technology and will make capital, as well as labor, obsolete. I mean if everybody has a super-smart personal assistant in their home, who thinks independently, why would they need or want a ruling class, when we can simply have democratic socialism?
The problem is not making labour or capital obsolete, it's making people obsolete.
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#26@shervin @pmarca: Utilitarianism is bad: It encourages mortal men to play God at levels of complexity that they can't possibly comprehend. It should be banned for the greater good >> “earning to give,” the idea that people like Bankman-Fried should do whatever it takes to make a lot of money so they can give it away. To amass his billions, Bankman-Fried allegedly defrauded his customers, and critics have said his dow…
Utilitarianism is false, but I think it is a very useful heuristic, where I think it being used (as a heuristic) more often would probably be beneficial at the margins.
There is no canonical way the aggregate utility between persons, and people probably don’t actually have utility functions. And, there are moral laws which should have at the least some weight when weighed against a “but this action seems to have better outcomes overall, on average”, and possibly infinite weight when weighed against such things.
Nevertheless.
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too didn't finish it - assuming it's "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". I got caught up by the multiple times the main character made sweeping assessments of things with insufficient information, and just happened to be right by accident (or author fiat I guess). The main characters figure things out by Thinking Really Hard, and experimentation is only ever done to prove they were right all along to oth…
It went above your head.
It went above their head because it was poor writing in their view? Why would you think taste in writing has anything to do with their ability to understand the points the writer was trying to make? This seems unecessary and you are probably capable of coming up with a more interesting response.
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#28What is one or two rapes or sexual assaults against trillions of future lives?
With sufficient future sight and the power of the exponent > 1, one can justify many present actions. Sadly, the EAs are small thinkers.
True grand scale actions require truly grand visions https://cosmicbraintrust.org/
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#29[flagged]
> Does this mean that Rationalists are the only people uniquely free of status concerns and therefore able to discuss important issues in intelligent ways? To a limited extent, yes.
Lol. “Only people who agree with me are capable of rational thought and discussion.” The philosophy of and for internet trolls.
Re: Effective Altruism’s obsession with AI safety helps bury bad behavior
#30[flagged]
>>Every AI safety researcher knows about the paper clip maximizer. Few seem to grasp the ways this subculture is mimicking that tunnel vision.
>Lol really?? You're comparing some bad PR incidents to the literal unintentional destruction of life on Earth
Your reply is a perfect example of the blind spot the quote from the article is referring to.
"some bad PR incidents" being sexual harassment and assault, facilitated by the in-group doctrine, and the Paperclip Optimizer being a central tenet of the in-group, while for the real world it's a quaint and somewhat interesting hypothetical about a far off future.
So we have real, actual harm hand-waved away by reference to a hypothetical.