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They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed

theguardian.com

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Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed

#41

Post by ziddoap »

ryao wrote: post #22
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I wanted to read a novel, I would read an actual novel." As parent mentioned. You do have a choice not to read novels, or to read novels. That doesn't make a novel bad because it is a novel.

I don’t have a choice if I want to know the 5 W’s here. If every news article was like this, nobody could know the news because they would still be reading yesterday’s news when today’s news is published. Perhaps AI could help here by rewriting the article into the format it should have used, but then you risk hallucinations.

If every article was in your preferred format, I would probably enjoy reading less.

Thankfully, there's a variety of writing styles, so that every one of us can find something we enjoy reading and skip the stuff we don't enjoy.

I don't see why you should be the sole arbiter of what writing style is allowed.

Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed

#42

Post by codewhsprr »

CaffeineLD50 wrote: post #21

The cult elements of isolation (boat/van life), alienation from self (trans, split brain), false moral superiority (vegan), demands for purity in action (vegan), sense of false higher purpose (AI basilisk), false possession of method for empowerment (rationalism) are there. The hatred of landlords et al (anarchism) and use of drugs (psychedelic, others?) seems to be my guess for the violence part. Lots of highly expl…

[dead]

Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed

#43

Post by piltdownman »

ryao wrote: post #22
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I wanted to read a novel, I would read an actual novel." As parent mentioned. You do have a choice not to read novels, or to read novels. That doesn't make a novel bad because it is a novel.

I don’t have a choice if I want to know the 5 W’s here. If every news article was like this, nobody could know the news because they would still be reading yesterday’s news when today’s news is published. Perhaps AI could help here by rewriting the article into the format it should have used, but then you risk hallucinations.

Who are you to say what format a piece of journalism 'should have used'? You could apply your misplaced outrage about the 'Five W's' to any number of Pulitzer Prize winning long-form pieces from the last century.

In short, you appear to only be familiar with the mandated style for factual news-reporting - not for other journalistic output - and seem to think all deviation is in error.

Here's an example from one of the kings of the form - Michael Lewis - and his award-winning piece of financial journalism regarding the Greek bond crisis that nearly brought down the Euro:

https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2010/10/beware-of-gre...

Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed

#44

Post by piltdownman »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #30
9283409232 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literacy rates have fallen in the past 20 years and something tells me that Dickens is not responsible.

The point is, that when Charles Dickens came out, people also blamed him on lowering the literacy rate. Called something different back then. But maybe, it's not population wide. More people were reading Dickens, so rate of reading in population was increasing. But the elites that thought everything should be in Greek/Latin, thought everyone reading Dickens was a downgrade. Every generation argument. Weren't Egyptian…

Outside of classical studies, papish notions regarding Greek and Latin were decidedly unpopular in Church of England era Britain (for obvious reasons!).

The real argument against Dickens at the time was more to do with his habit of serialising his novels in cheap newspapers. This then rendered his subject matter of choice - social commentary, fiscal egalitarianism, and empathy for the poor - a little too accessible for the comfort of the ruling classes.

He did so even in his own Newspaper 'Household Words' - which while championing the cause of the poor and working classes, did so by addressing itself almost exclusively to the middle classes!

"...We seek to bring to innumerable homes, from the stirring world around us, the knowledge of many social wonders, good and evil, that are not calculated to render any of us less ardently persevering in ourselves, less faithful in the progress of mankind, less thankful for the privilege of living in this summer-dawn of time." Charles Dickens

He started this with 'Hard Times' - a thinly veiled socialist critique against unbridled capitalism and immorality. It specifically targeted Edwin Chadwick, who helped design the Malthusian basis of the appalling Poor Law of 1834, but was more generally an attack on the Utilitarians of the time. Shaw described it as a "passionate revolt against the whole industrial order of the modern world".

Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed

#45

Post by PaulHoule »

lupusreal wrote: post #35
PaulHoule wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manson_Family but I know a lot of people use psychedelic drugs and don't resort to violence. With the hyperbolic rhetoric about false threats, I'm surprised we haven't seen more violence from "rationalists"; if they really believed we were in that imminent danger, violent attacks would have been the rational thing to do.

> if they really believed we were in that imminent danger, violent attacks would have been the rational thing to do. That's what these guys figured. But if we're being rational and realistic, all it accomplishes is getting your group killed or imprisoned.

Depend if you chose the right target, pretty clearly they didn't.

Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed

#47

Post by AnimalMuppet »

PaulHoule wrote: post #45
lupusreal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if they really believed we were in that imminent danger, violent attacks would have been the rational thing to do. That's what these guys figured. But if we're being rational and realistic, all it accomplishes is getting your group killed or imprisoned.

Depend if you chose the right target, pretty clearly they didn't.

Start further back. Depends on whether you are actually in imminent danger. Then, if you are, then you have to choose the right target.

Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed

#48

Post by balamatom »

ilikecakeandpie wrote: post #38
balamatom wrote: post #26

[flagged]

The families of those murdered probably thought so

Fair enough. Condolences to those affected.

Can't help but compare with the Mangione case, and these well-educated warriors of the sharpened keyboard don't cut it anywhere close. As expected!

Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed

#49

Post by rsynnott »

tomaytotomato wrote: post #17

For a group that applies rationalism, they appear to have ended up committing very horrible and irrational acts. The article could have done more to condemn this group and line of thinking. Also the part of the story on Curtis Lind is both sad and impressive, that old man was built of true grit: "As he bent to look, something hit him on the head and he blacked out. When he woke up, at least three of the Zizians were…

> they appear to have ended up committing very horrible and irrational acts.

See SBF. The fringes of the 'rationalism' are pretty much a series of rather nasty cults.

Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed

#50

Post by balamatom »

somenameforme wrote: post #36
fc417fc802 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if we're being rational about it - how confident are we in the accuracy of that assessment, how likely is our attack to succeed, and how likely is our attack to have a positive impact? Worse, what is the probability that our attack instead has a negative impact?

Is it even rational to assume one is rational? Of course I think I am, but I also think basically nobody else is. Yet I'm sure they think the are, and similarly doubt I am. So is the issue that I'm a snowflake and everybody else is wrong, or is the issue that rationality does not really exist (though that does not mean it's not worth striving towards)? It seems only rational to doubt ones rationality.

Well put. That realization alone makes you wiser than strictly required.
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