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Survive as existing? They will. But this is a disaster that can't be sugarcoated. Working in an AI company with a doomer as head is ridiculous. It will be like

Survive as existing? They will. But this is a disaster that can't be sugarcoated. Working in an AI company with a doomer as head is ridiculous. It will be like working in a tobacco company advocating for lung cancer awareness. I don't think the new CEO can do anything to get back trust in record short amount of time. The sam loyalists will leave. The question remain, how is the new CEO going to hire new people, and will he be able to do so fast enough, and the ones who remain will accept the company that is a drastically different.

bottlepalm 3y ago
Ah yes you're either a doomer or e/acc. Pick an extreme. Everything must be polarized.
- astrange 3y ago
  There's a character in HPMOR named after the new CEO. (That's the religious text of the anti-AI cult that founded OpenAI. It's in the form of a very long Harry Potter fanfic.)
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Is Chat GPT writing this whole dialogue?
  - FeepingCreature 3y ago
    Sorry, which character are you talking about? (Also lol "religious text", how dare people have didactic opinions.)
    - astrange 3y ago
      The one with the same name as the new CEO. Pretty straightforward. > Also lol "religious text", how dare people have didactic opinions. That's not what a religious text is, that'd just be a blog post. It's the part where reading it causes you to join a cult group house polycule and donate all your money to stopping computers from becoming alive.
      - FeepingCreature 3y ago
        Oh hey there he is, cool. I had a typo in my search, I think. > That's not what a religious text is, that'd just be a blog post. Yes, almost as if "Lesswrong is a community blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality." > It's the part where reading it causes you to join a cult group house polycule and donate all your money to stopping computers from becoming alive. I don't think anybody either asked somebody to, or actually did, donate all their money. As to "joining a cult group house polycule", to my knowledge that's just SF. There's certainly nothing in the Sequences about how you have to join a cult group house polycule. To be honest, I consider all the people who joined cult group house polycules, whose existence I don't deny, to have a preexisting cult group house polycule situational condition. (Living in San Francisco, that is.)
        avalys 3y ago
        “The Sequences”? Yes, this doesn’t sound like a quasi-religious cult at all…
        astrange 3y ago
        The message is that if you do math in your head in a specific way involving Bayes' theorem, it will make you always right about everything. So it's not even quasi-religious, the good deity is probability theory and the bad one is evil computer gods. This then causes young men to decide they should be in open relationships because it's "more logical", and then decide they need to spend their life fighting evil computer gods because the Bayes' theorem thing is weak to an attack called "Pascal's mugging" where you tell them an infinitely bad thing has a finite chance of happening if they don't stop it. Also they invent effective altruism, which works until the math tells them it's ethical to steal a bunch of investor money as long as you use it on charity. https://metarationality.com/bayesianism-updating https://metarationality.com/bayesianism-updating Bit old but still relevant.
        FeepingCreature 3y ago
        > This then causes young men to decide they should be in open relationships because it's "more logical" Yes, which is 100% because of "LessWrong" and 0% because groups of young nerds do that every time, so much so that there's actually an XKCD about it (https://xkcd.com/592/ https://xkcd.com/592/). The actual message regarding Bayes' Theorem is that there is a correct way to respond to evidence in the first place. LessWrong does not mandate, nor would that be a good idea, that you manually calculate these updates: humans are very bad at it. > Also they invent effective altruism, which works until the math tells them it's ethical to steal a bunch of investor money as long as you use it on charity. Given that this didn't happen with anyone else, and most other EAs will tell you that it's morally correct to uphold the law, and in any case nearly all EAs will act like it's morally correct, I'm inclined to think this was an SBF thing, not an EA thing. Every belief system will have antisocial adherents.
  - tempusalaria 3y ago
    Imagine how bad a reputation EA would have if the general public knew about HPMOR
    - xvector 3y ago
      Even HP fanfiction lovers HATED HPMOR. It had a clowny reputation It is wild to see how closely connected the web is though. Yudkowsky, Shear, and Sutskever. The EA movement today controls a staggering amount of power.
      - astrange 3y ago
        Here's the new CEO expressing the common EA belief that (theoretical world ending) AI is worse than the Nazis, because once you show them a thought experiment that might possibly true they're completely incapable of not believing in it. https://x.com/eshear/status/1664375903223427072?s=46 https://x.com/eshear/status/1664375903223427072?s=46
peanuty1 3y ago
Surely the employees knew before joining that OpenAI is a non-profit aiming to develop safe AGI?
- alexgartrell 3y ago
  OpenAI's recruiting pitch was 5-10+ million/year in the form of equity. The structure of the grants is super weird by traditional big-company standards, but it was plausible enough that you could squint and call it the same. I'd posit that many of the people jumping to OpenAI are doing it for the cash and not the mission. https://the-decoder.com/openai-lures-googles-top-ai-researchers-with-multimillion-dollar-offers/#:~:text=OpenAI's%20recruiters%20are%20targeting%20senior,Information%20reported%2C%20citing%20insider%20sources https://the-decoder.com/openai-lures-googles-top-ai-research....
- sgift 3y ago
  They thought so. Now, they know that instead they work for one aiming to satisfy the ego of a specific group of people - same as everywhere else.

bottlepalm 3y ago

Ah yes you're either a doomer or e/acc. Pick an extreme. Everything must be polarized.

astrange 3y ago
There's a character in HPMOR named after the new CEO. (That's the religious text of the anti-AI cult that founded OpenAI. It's in the form of a very long Harry Potter fanfic.)
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Is Chat GPT writing this whole dialogue?
- FeepingCreature 3y ago
  Sorry, which character are you talking about? (Also lol "religious text", how dare people have didactic opinions.)
  - astrange 3y ago
    The one with the same name as the new CEO. Pretty straightforward. > Also lol "religious text", how dare people have didactic opinions. That's not what a religious text is, that'd just be a blog post. It's the part where reading it causes you to join a cult group house polycule and donate all your money to stopping computers from becoming alive.
    - FeepingCreature 3y ago
      Oh hey there he is, cool. I had a typo in my search, I think. > That's not what a religious text is, that'd just be a blog post. Yes, almost as if "Lesswrong is a community blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality." > It's the part where reading it causes you to join a cult group house polycule and donate all your money to stopping computers from becoming alive. I don't think anybody either asked somebody to, or actually did, donate all their money. As to "joining a cult group house polycule", to my knowledge that's just SF. There's certainly nothing in the Sequences about how you have to join a cult group house polycule. To be honest, I consider all the people who joined cult group house polycules, whose existence I don't deny, to have a preexisting cult group house polycule situational condition. (Living in San Francisco, that is.)
      - avalys 3y ago
        “The Sequences”? Yes, this doesn’t sound like a quasi-religious cult at all…
        astrange 3y ago
        The message is that if you do math in your head in a specific way involving Bayes' theorem, it will make you always right about everything. So it's not even quasi-religious, the good deity is probability theory and the bad one is evil computer gods. This then causes young men to decide they should be in open relationships because it's "more logical", and then decide they need to spend their life fighting evil computer gods because the Bayes' theorem thing is weak to an attack called "Pascal's mugging" where you tell them an infinitely bad thing has a finite chance of happening if they don't stop it. Also they invent effective altruism, which works until the math tells them it's ethical to steal a bunch of investor money as long as you use it on charity. https://metarationality.com/bayesianism-updating https://metarationality.com/bayesianism-updating Bit old but still relevant.
        FeepingCreature 3y ago
        > This then causes young men to decide they should be in open relationships because it's "more logical" Yes, which is 100% because of "LessWrong" and 0% because groups of young nerds do that every time, so much so that there's actually an XKCD about it (https://xkcd.com/592/ https://xkcd.com/592/). The actual message regarding Bayes' Theorem is that there is a correct way to respond to evidence in the first place. LessWrong does not mandate, nor would that be a good idea, that you manually calculate these updates: humans are very bad at it. > Also they invent effective altruism, which works until the math tells them it's ethical to steal a bunch of investor money as long as you use it on charity. Given that this didn't happen with anyone else, and most other EAs will tell you that it's morally correct to uphold the law, and in any case nearly all EAs will act like it's morally correct, I'm inclined to think this was an SBF thing, not an EA thing. Every belief system will have antisocial adherents.
- tempusalaria 3y ago
  Imagine how bad a reputation EA would have if the general public knew about HPMOR
  - xvector 3y ago
    Even HP fanfiction lovers HATED HPMOR. It had a clowny reputation It is wild to see how closely connected the web is though. Yudkowsky, Shear, and Sutskever. The EA movement today controls a staggering amount of power.
    - astrange 3y ago
      Here's the new CEO expressing the common EA belief that (theoretical world ending) AI is worse than the Nazis, because once you show them a thought experiment that might possibly true they're completely incapable of not believing in it. https://x.com/eshear/status/1664375903223427072?s=46 https://x.com/eshear/status/1664375903223427072?s=46

peanuty1 3y ago

Surely the employees knew before joining that OpenAI is a non-profit aiming to develop safe AGI?

alexgartrell 3y ago
OpenAI's recruiting pitch was 5-10+ million/year in the form of equity. The structure of the grants is super weird by traditional big-company standards, but it was plausible enough that you could squint and call it the same. I'd posit that many of the people jumping to OpenAI are doing it for the cash and not the mission. https://the-decoder.com/openai-lures-googles-top-ai-researchers-with-multimillion-dollar-offers/#:~:text=OpenAI's%20recruiters%20are%20targeting%20senior,Information%20reported%2C%20citing%20insider%20sources https://the-decoder.com/openai-lures-googles-top-ai-research....
sgift 3y ago
They thought so. Now, they know that instead they work for one aiming to satisfy the ego of a specific group of people - same as everywhere else.