Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

sfgate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

791–800 of 952 posts

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

#791

Post by the_af »

hollerith wrote: post #780
benreesman wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s basically a PR person for OpenAI and Anthropic, the latter of which is fucking deep in with these long-termer creeps. He was writing fan fiction and creepy torture shit one for ages until there was big money in influencing public policy on AI.

He has received a salary for working on AI since 2000 (having the title "research fellow"). In contrast, he didn't start publishing his Harry Potter fan-fiction till 2010. I seem to recall his publishing a few sci-fi short stories before then, but his non-fiction public written output has always greatly exceeded his fiction output until a few years ago after he became semi-retired due to chronic health problems. >He’…

> He has received a salary for working on AI since 2000 (having the title "research fellow")

He is a "research fellow" in an institution he created, MIRI, outside the actual AI research community (or any scientific community, for that matter). This is like creating a club and calling yourself the president. I mean, as an accomplishment it's very suspect.

As for his publications, most are self-published and very "soft" (on alignment, ethics of AI, etc). What are his bona fide AI works? What makes him a "researcher", what did he actually research, how/when was it reviewed by peers (non-MIRI adjacent peers) and how is it different to just publishing blog posts on the internet?

On what does he base his AI doomsday predictions? Which models, which assumptions? What makes him different to any scifi geek who's read and watched scifi fiction about apocalyptic scenarios?

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

#792

Post by bee_rider »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #778
close04 wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “quadrillion days of happiness” offered to a rational person gives away that such allegories are anthropomorphized just for the sake of presentation. For the sake of what the philosophers mean, you should probably imagine this as an algorithm running on a machine (no AGI). It’s a mental tease, not a manual on how to react when faced with a mugger who forgot his weapon at home but has an interesting proposition to…

> Similarly the trolley problem isn’t really about real humans in that situation, or else the correct answer would always be “do nothing”. The correct answer in case of it being about real people, of course, is to switch immediately after the front bogey makes it through. This way, the trolley will derail and make a sharp turn before it runs over anyone, and stop. The passengers will get shaken, but I don’t remember…

The scenario is set up by an evil philosopher though, so they can tie up the people arbitrarily close to the split in the rails, such that your solution doesn’t work, right?

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

#793

Post by twic »

Aurornis wrote: post #346
kiba wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The community/offshoot I am part of is mostly liberal/left. My impression that lesswrong is also liberal/left.

> The community/offshoot I am part of is mostly liberal/left There isn't an official "rationalist" community. Some consider LessWrong to be the center, but there have always been different communities and offshoots. As far as I know, a lot of the famous rationalist figures haven't participated much in LessWrong for a long time now. The far right offshoot I was referring to is known as "TheMotte" or "The Motte". It wa…

We don't have great language or models for talking about this stuff.

It's possible for there to be a person or group who are fine, but who attract or allow followers and fellow travellers who are not fine. Then it's possible for one person to look at that person or group and think they're fine, but for another person to look at them, see the followers, and think they're not fine. And sometimes it's hard to tell if the person or group is actually fine, or if they're really maybe actually not fine on the down low.

This problem is amplified when the person or group has some kind of free speech or open debate principle, and exists in a broader social space which does not. Then, all the dregs and weirdos who are excluded from other spaces end up concentrating in that bubble of freer speech. For example, there's an explicitly far left-wing message board that doesn't ban people for their politics; because all the more moderate (and moderate cosplaying as extreme) left-wing boards do, that board collects various libertarians, nationalists, groypers and whatnot who can't go anywhere else. Makes for an odd mix.

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

#794

Post by bee_rider »

tacitusarc wrote: post #777
IshKebab wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The “quadrillion days of happiness” offered to a rational person gives away that such allegories are anthropomorphized just for the sake of presentation. So what? It's still presented as if it's a interesting problem that needs to be "remedied", when in fact it's just a basic maths mistake. If I said "ooo look at this paradox: 1 + 1 = 2, but if I add another one then we get 1 + 1 + 1 = 2, which is clearly false! I…

Interestingly, the trolley problem is decided every day, and humanity does not change tracks. There are people who die waiting for organ donors, and a single donor could match multiple people. We do not find an appropriate donor and harvest them. This is the trolley problem, applied.

Yea, it doesn’t seem quite right to say that the trolley problem isn’t about really people. I mean the physical mechanical system isn’t there but it is a direct abstraction of decisions we make every day.

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

#795

Post by pessimizer »

saagarjha wrote: post #634
scarmig wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's somewhat odd to represent a community as being right wing when the worst thing to come from it was a trans vegan murder cult. Most "rationalists" vote Democrat, and if the franchise were limited to them, Harris would have won in a 50 state landslide. The complaint here seems to be that rationalists don't take progressive pieties as axiomatic.

Being a trans vegan doesn't automatically make you left wing. Nor does voting Democrat. Being progressive is a complex set of ideals, just as conservatism is a lot more than whatever the Republican party is doing today.

[flagged]

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

#796

Post by __turbobrew__ »

umeshunni wrote: post #403
CamperBob2 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of random and illogical, what prompted the Border Patrol to stop their car in the first place, I wonder? None of the news stories have elaborated on that.

The FBI report says it was a traffic stop. The milemarker 168 seems to be about 10 miles from the Canadian border. https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/albany/news/fbi... More information from the police report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wycOK3UbaQ9JWZuvo2gpZiDT-0t... On January 20, 2025, at approximately 3:00 pm, an on-duty, uniformed United States Border Patrol (USBP) Agent initiated a stop of a blue…

Sounds like police were already on to them and they just used the excuse of an immigration stop in order to run their ID and search the car. Border patrol can pull you over and search you for any reason within a certain distance from the border — even if you did not cross the border.

Reading through zizan stuff they have this idea of “collapse the timeline” which justifies extreme violence in response to subjugation. The idea is if you are being subjugated you should act with extreme violence to deter people from subjugating you, and since you will not be subjugated the path always leads to violence, hence you should “collapse the timeline” and just go straight to violence.

The thing is, the US border patrol is not going to back down from your extreme threats of violence so if you want to collapse the timeline you mine as well put a bullet in yourself because that is how things are going to end — and did end — for them.

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

#797

Post by alain94040 »

harrison_clarke wrote: post #776
saagarjha wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, humanity decided that infinity doesn't exist and anyone trying to tell you about it is selling you religion.

not exactly a rationalist thing, but a lot of bay-area people will tell you that exponential growth exists, and it's everywhere i can't think of any case where exponential growth actually happens, though. exponential decay and logistic curves are common enough, but not exponential growth

Viruses until they reach their plateau of course.

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

#798

Post by bowsamic »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #774
hackandthink wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hegel still has a really bad reputation regarding atrocities and his Philosophy of history. "History as the slaughter-bench" - and yet the aims of reason are accomplished." But there are also Hegel scholars (Walter Jaeschke for example) who simply consider these accusations to be uneducated and that he does not see the atrocities of history as reasonable, but on the contrary makes criticism possible in the first plac…

All of Hegel, and most of his descendants, are fashionable nonsense. All types of "Dialectics" are fake and don't exist. It's telling that the most common version of the term "Dialectics" that everyone thinks Hegel coined was actually coined by one of his (many butthurt) students, Fitche. Philosophy will continue to be bankrupt for as long as Hegel's stranglehold on Philosophy remains. Kill his thought, Kill "dialect…

Hegel really isn’t as difficult as you’re making out. Your inheritance of the popular idea that he is nonsense is the only thing stopping you

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

#799

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

nkrisc wrote: post #700
lostdog wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, what a perfect description of why their probability-logic leads to silly beliefs. I've been wondering how to argue within their frame for a while, and here's what I've come up with: Is the likelihood that aliens exist, are unfriendly, and AGI will help us beat them higher or lower than the likelihood that the AGI itself that we develop is unfriendly to us and wants to FOOM us? Show your work.

It’s pointless. They aren’t rational. Any argument you come up with that contradicts their personal desires will be successfully “reasoned” away by them because they want it to be. Your mistake was ever thinking they had a rational thought to begin with, they think they are infallible.

"Widespread robots that make their own decisions autonomously will probably be very bad for humans if they make decisions that aren't in our interest" isn't really that much of a stretch is it?

If we were going slower maybe it would seem more theoretical. But there are multiple Manhattan-Project-level or (often, much) larger efforts ongoing to explicitly create software and robotic hardware that makes decisions and takes actions without any human in the loop.

We don't need some kind of 10000 IQ god intelligence if a glitch token causes the majority of the labor force to suddenly and collectively engage in sabotage.

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

#800

Post by hackandthink »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #774
hackandthink wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hegel still has a really bad reputation regarding atrocities and his Philosophy of history. "History as the slaughter-bench" - and yet the aims of reason are accomplished." But there are also Hegel scholars (Walter Jaeschke for example) who simply consider these accusations to be uneducated and that he does not see the atrocities of history as reasonable, but on the contrary makes criticism possible in the first plac…

All of Hegel, and most of his descendants, are fashionable nonsense. All types of "Dialectics" are fake and don't exist. It's telling that the most common version of the term "Dialectics" that everyone thinks Hegel coined was actually coined by one of his (many butthurt) students, Fitche. Philosophy will continue to be bankrupt for as long as Hegel's stranglehold on Philosophy remains. Kill his thought, Kill "dialect…

We can discuss nonsense.

But Hegel is definitely not fashionable.

Post reply on HN