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The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

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Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#91

Post by throwaway27448 »

handoflixue wrote: post #80
throwaway27448 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, ineffective action will be counterproductive. I recommend effective action.

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?

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#92

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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…

I think you have wildly misunderstood my point, given that your statement of "The older I get, the more I've seen people come to completely incorrect conclusions that justify their decisions to harm others" is not the polar opposite of what of I was saying - if anything, it aligns with what I was saying very well.

To rephrase, my point is that phrases like "the ends don't justify the means" and "political violence is never the answer" seem to almost always be applied in very specific contexts, completely ignoring other contexts where many people (I'd say "society at large") are completely OK with the ends justifying the means and political violence.

To use your own sentence, I've seen many people in positions of power "coming to completely incorrect conclusions that justify their decisions to harm others", e.g. why bombing children in their beds is OK.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#93

Post by Apocryphon »

eemax wrote: post #88
arduanika wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that only Yudkowsky gets to say what the rational conclusion of his ideas are. Nobody else gets to speculate. Only the pope of rationalism, because he's the rational one here. See? It's right there in the name! > this piece of slop Citation needed. Or maybe we need to update the title of that children's book for internet arguments: Everyone Who Disagrees With Me Is Slop. The Yud post you linked is not slop…

> It is true that only Yudkowsky gets to say what the rational conclusion of his ideas are. Nobody else gets to speculate. Only the pope of rationalism, because he's the rational one here. See? It's right there in the name! No, I am saying that Yudkowsky's views are straightforwardly compatible with bedrock principles of liberalism, and the author of the piece fails to acknowledge that compatibility or grapple with t…

> the hallmark of LLM style

That's just because LLMs were likely trained on a decade plus of human-generated Medium, Substack, Quora, and LinkedIn post slop.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#94

Post by Aurornis »

morningsam wrote: post #25
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…

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 Altman's house and threatened to burn down their datacenters, Yudkowsky is scrambling to backtrack. The X rant tries to argue that "bombing" and "airstrike" are different and therefore you can't say he advocated for bombing anything (a distinction any rationalist would normally pounce on for its logical inconsistency, if it wasn't coming from a famous rationalist figure). He's also trying to blame his hurried writings for TIME for not being clear enough that he was only advocating for state-sponsored airstrikes, not civilian airstrikes, bombs, or attacks. Again that distinction seems like grasping at straws now that he's face to face with the realities of his extremist rhetoric.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#95

Post by sublinear »

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…

> How do people square those 2 ideas?

If you're seriously trying to understand the nuance of the act itself, you should consider reading what is standard issue for law enforcement and military.

"On Killing" by Dave Grossman is a classic.

If you only want to understand and stay in the realm of politics, I don't think you'll ever find a good answer either way. There's hypocrisy in every argument for or against violence. None of that is on the minds of people "in the shit" at that time. All that stuff comes later. As you're well aware, PTSD is no joke.

What I would take away from this is to recognize all the other ways in which we are compelled to act against our own self interest under what are sold as higher moral purposes.

From that perspective, it's not that hard to see how people can treat violence as just another tool. Whether it works is a question of how much those people value life above all else. If you're surprised that's not always the case in every culture, you may want to study that first. Beliefs may devalue life for persistence against a long history of conflict. This is where you may start to find some glimmers of an answer why we in the west sometimes think violence works to get those people to "snap out of it", but it really is ultimately about control of those people or that land at the end of the day.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#96

Post by Aurornis »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #92
Aurornis wrote: post #85

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. My experience has been the polar opposite: The older I get, the more I've seen people come to completely in…

I think you have wildly misunderstood my point, given that your statement of "The older I get, the more I've seen people come to completely incorrect conclusions that justify their decisions to harm others" is not the polar opposite of what of I was saying - if anything, it aligns with what I was saying very well. To rephrase, my point is that phrases like "the ends don't justify the means" and "political violence is…

> To rephrase, my point is that phrases like "the ends don't justify the means" and "political violence is never the answer" seem to almost always be applied in very specific contexts

That's not what you said. You were talking about society as a whole, not narrow contexts. I'll re-quote your original comment that I was responding to:

> 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.

I was responding to your "at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any given time" claim.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#98

Post by beloch »

"There is a final irony that deserves attention. If the doomers truly hold their stated beliefs at their stated confidence levels, they should be more honest about what those beliefs imply. A few weeks before the attack, a journalist asked Yudkowsky: if AI is so dangerous, why aren't you attacking data centers? His answer, relayed by Soares: "If you saw a headline saying I'd done that, would you say, 'wow, AI has been stopped, we're safe'? If not, you already know it wouldn't be effective."

----------

There are several thousand AI data centres in the U.S. alone, and hundreds are over a thousand square meters in floor space. Think about the physical effort it would take to reliably destroy, beyond the possibility of repair, just one typical computer in your home. Now multiply that out to thousands of server racks. Even if the employees rolled out the red carpet for you and handed you a baseball bat, you wouldn't get very far. Next, consider that these data centres are popping up all over the world in the most unlikely and remote locations. They don't need workers. They just need power, water, and, preferably, lax tax and environmental standards.

Doomers are attacking billionaires because they perceive them to be the soft, meaty, weak-points of a gigantic inhuman machine. They believe that just scaring Sam Altman a little will have a huge impact compared to trying to attack a data centre. However, billionaires can afford pretty decent security. This doomer movement probably isn't going to accomplish much until they target the engineers and support staff that surround billionaires. Billionaires don't scare easily because they have so much protection, but the poorly paid and poorly secured people around them are another story.

Poorly secured means easy to coerce with a stick. Poorly paid means easy to coerce with a carrot. The threat doomers pose is relatively small until they start turning employees against their own companies. What's an activist with a baseball bat compared to an employee who knows how to disable every computer in multiple data centres simultaneously?

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#99

Post by Aurornis »

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 the world will end. You can't argue that the world ending is a bad thing, so they have their opening for the rest of their arguments, which is that we need to follow their advice to prevent the world maybe ending. They rebut any counterarguments by trying to turn it into a P(doom) debate where we're fighting over how likely this outcome is, but by the time the discussion gets there you've already been forced to accept their argument. Then they push the P(doom) argument aside and try to argue that it doesn't matter how unlikely it is, we have a morally duty to act.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#100

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Aurornis wrote: post #96
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have wildly misunderstood my point, given that your statement of "The older I get, the more I've seen people come to completely incorrect conclusions that justify their decisions to harm others" is not the polar opposite of what of I was saying - if anything, it aligns with what I was saying very well. To rephrase, my point is that phrases like "the ends don't justify the means" and "political violence is…

> To rephrase, my point is that phrases like "the ends don't justify the means" and "political violence is never the answer" seem to almost always be applied in very specific contexts That's not what you said. You were talking about society as a whole, not narrow contexts. I'll re-quote your original comment that I was responding to: > statements like "the ends don't justify the means" and "violence is always the wro…

Yes, society as a whole applies statements like "the ends justify the means" in wildly inconsistent ways, deeming it unacceptable in certain contexts and being completely fine with it in other contexts. I literally said in my original comment "To emphasize as strongly as I possibly can, I am not advocating for more violence. Quite the contrary, I'm advocating for less."

Beyond that, I can't help you with your reading comprehension.

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