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String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

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Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#761

Post by [deleted] »

01100011 wrote: post #639
rachofsunshine wrote: post #149

[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.] The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community. As relevant here: 1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some…

Another thing I'll add after having spent a few years in a religious cult: It's all about the axioms. If you tweak the axioms you can use impeccable logic to build a completely incorrect framework that will appeal to otherwise intelligent(and often highly intelligent) people. Also, people are always less rational than they are able to admit. The force of things like social connection can very easily warp the reasonin…

[deleted]

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#762

Post by squigz »

smeeger wrote: post #432
hollerith wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My explanation for why Eliezer went from vocal AI optimist to AI pessimist is that he became more knowledgeable about AI. What is your explanation? I've seen the explanation that AI pessimism helped Eliezer attract donations, but that does not work because his biggest donor when he started going public with his pessimism (2003 through 2006) was Peter Theil, who responded to his turn to pessimism by refusing to contin…

correct. there isnt a single well founded argument to dismiss AI alarmism. people are very attached to the idea that more technology is invariably better. and they are very reluctant to saddle themselves with the emotional burden of seeing whats right in front of them.

> there isnt a single well founded argument to dismiss AI alarmism

AI alarmism itself isn't a well founded argument.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#763

Post by kevinmchugh »

jimrandomh wrote: post #330

The HN title added the word "rationalist", which isn't in the source article. This is editorializing in a way that feels kind of slander-y. Their relationship to the bay area rationalist community is that we kicked them out long before any of this started.

Can you tell us more about how they were kicked out? Are there other groups that have been kicked out?

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#764

Post by barnabee »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #195
nullc wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rationalists, by tending to overly formalist approaches, But they don't apply formal or "formalist" approaches, they invoke the names of formal methods but then extract from them just a "vibe". Few to none in the community know squat about actually computing a posterior probability, but they'll all happily chant "shut up and multiply" as a justification for whatever nonsense they instinctively wanted to do. > Preci…

> But they don't apply formal or "formalist" approaches, they invoke the names of formal methods but then extract from them just a "vibe". I broadly agree with this criticism, but I also think it's kind of low-hanging. At least speaking for myself (a former member of those circles), I do indeed sit down and write quantitative models when I want to estimate things rigorously, and I can't be the only one who does. > In…

> A good model can tell you that a hurricane might hit Tampa but won't hit New Orleans

On the other hand we have no model to predict that hurricane a year in advance and tell us which city it’ll hit.

Yet these people believe they can rationalise about far more unpredictable events far further in the future.

That is, I agree that they completely ignore the point at which uncertainties utterly dominate any calculation you might try to do and yet continue to calculate to a point of absurdity.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#765

Post by squigz »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #187
t_mann wrote: post #144

Rationalism? The term has been used a lot of times since Pythagoras [0], but the combination of Bay Area, Oxford, existential risks, AI safety makes it sound like this particular movement could have formed in the same mold as Effective Altruism and Long-Termism (ie, the "it's objectively better for humanity if you give us money to buy a castle in France than whatever you'd do with it" crowd that SBF sprung from). Can…

That castle was found to be more cost-effective than any other space the group could have purchased, for the simple reason that almost nobody wants castles anymore. It was chosen because it was the best calculation; the optics of it were not considered. It would be less disingenuous if you were to say EA is the "it's objectively better for humanity if you give us money to buy a conference space in France than whateve…

I'd love to see the logic they used to determine the castle was the best option.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#766

Post by squigz »

guerrilla wrote: post #443
anon84873628 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what the heck does any of this mean??

Sadly, I completely understand after reading all the links in this thread tonight. The specific theory they're speaking in: https://zizians.info/ Backstory (7 chapters): https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte...

A relevant bit from zizians.info

> This jargon serves multiple purposes. An important one is that it separates Zizians from others. The cost to read and understand Sinceriously is substantial, and most people are not willing to pay it. Another is to warp the beliefs of people who use it. The connotations and affect of Ziz's jargon encode her moral beliefs about the world separated from the quality of reasoning used to produce them. By offering language that reinforces these judgments Ziz creates conditions where even engaging with the beliefs of her followers requires the repetition and reinforcement of their frame.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#767

Post by shadowgovt »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #642
shadowgovt wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of philosophy throughout history seems to operate this way. I think philosophy is a noble pursuit, but it's worth noting how often people drew very broad conclusions, and then acted on them, from not very much data. Consider the dozens of theories of the constitution of the world from the time of the Greek thinkers (even the atomic theory doesn't look very much at all like atoms as we now understand them), or th…

The idea that you need evidence to justify your beliefs is a philosophical position.

Excellent point. And it shines a light directly on what I'm saying. There's a great line from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

""""Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”"""

... and, of course, the philosopher can argue that we are all of us tumbling through a Pachinko-machine of parallel universes, and it is only our constrained perception that suggests Man is dead; in a parallel universe, Man is just fine and living their days in the grey universe that we, through some as-yet-unphilosophized-but-don't-worry-we're-thinking-hard-about-it process, cannot exist in.

... but does that matter over-much if the observable is that ignoring zebra crossings gets you crossed out of this universe?

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#768

Post by shadowgovt »

somenameforme wrote: post #706
Seattle3503 wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pretty good one.

Anything about the self bumps into an immediate problem here. For instance I cannot prove to you that I'm conscious and not simply an automaton who's not actually thinking. My evidence for such is strictly personal - I can personally testify to my own experience of consciousness, but you have no reason to believe me since that's not evidence. And in fact even for myself - perception is not necessarily valid evidence…

... so at some point, one realizes one has pondered one's way into untestables and goes back to living. Or doesn't, I guess, and then gets kept up at night anxious about the notion that in some as-yet-unrealized future, an AI is forever torturing an identical copy of oneself that one cannot possibly ever meet.

The programming analogy to this kind of philosophy is writing design docs (or building a class hierarchy of abstracts) without ever writing implementation. Lots of work, but why should anyone outside the room care?

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#770

Post by shadowgovt »

lukan wrote: post #750
yawboakye wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very few philosophers dared to live by their theories. the famous failures of aristotle (in the case of alexander) and plato in syracuse (where he saw firsthand that the philosopher-king is at best a book character) are good examples. seneca didn’t live stoically: he was avaricious and didn’t bother to incite civil war over unpaid debt, if ancient sources are to be believed. he failed horribly with nero, who later in…

And then there is Rousseau, who wrote books about raising children. But raising his own was too much.

I actually have on my desk, right now, Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman."

To summarize one of her points from memory, she basically lays into Rousseau about having a lot of opinions on domestic life for someone who clearly doesn't even know how to set foot in a kitchen.

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