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The AI industry turns against its favorite philosophy

54 points by spopejoy 3y ago

PaulHoule 3y ago
“Isolated” is the right word for EA. Everybody else concerned about the future is concerned about climate change but EA is at first silent and then reveals itself as a climate denying movement when it does open its mouth as every other imagined threat, even ones with a 10^-50 probability seems to matter more for them. But it is not accidental because isolation is one of the most important techniques of cult mind control. The point of Sequences is the same point as Dianetics it is supposed to rewrite the way you communicate so you just can’t relate to “wogs” (the rest of us) and can only talk to true believers.
- branperr 3y ago
  Sources on it being “climate denying”?
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Talk about a pitch right across home base… https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xJhtrAxd5QpXi2CdA/the-threat-of-climate-change-is-exaggerated https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xJhtrAxd5QpXi2CdA/... Here is the Google query that came from https://www.google.com/search?q=effective+altruism+climate+change+is+not+very+dangerous&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#ip=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=effective+altruism+climate+c...
    - ironrabbit 3y ago
      This is a forum post from a student with 18 total karma
      - PaulHoule 3y ago
        so… it is typical. Find me an article on lesswrong that says climate change should be taken as seriously as AI, it might exist (probably with trigger warnings all over it) but let’s see what the comments are like.
        ToValueFunfetti 3y ago
        Here's the second result of your google search, which has 34 upvotes vs. 14: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pcDAvaXBxTjRYMdEo/climate-change-is-neglected-by-ea https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pcDAvaXBxTjRYMdEo/...
        PaulHoule 3y ago
        … which also supports my point.
        ToValueFunfetti 3y ago
        Someone arguing on the forums that EA cares too much about climate change supports your point, and someone arguing on the forums that EA doesn't care enough about climate change also supports your point? What exactly would they have to say to damage your point?
        PaulHoule 3y ago
        Leadership making climate change a priority and not making excuses for why it isn't.
  - lebean 3y ago
    Someone in the movement said "maybe we're NOT all gonna die in the next 1° C increase in average temp" = Everyone in the movement are climate change deniers
- kiba 3y ago
  I am very concerned about climate change, and I am somewhat EA adjacent. But it is not accidental because isolation is one of the most important techniques of cult mind control. The point of Sequences is the same point as Dianetics it is supposed to rewrite the way you communicate so you just can’t relate to “wogs” (the rest of us) and can only talk to true believers. Wow. This is just weird.
  - tuatoru 3y ago
    In what ways?
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      That person should find a copy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic_of_Sudden_Personality_Change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic... I read the first edition circa 1989 when people still remembered the moonies. When LSD got fashionable in the 1960s parents blamed it for what seemed like sudden personality change (Straight A student athlete now smokes dope all the time, grows their hair long, gets the crabs, etc.) but after the crackdown all the psychedelic bands either went under like the Beatles or changed the way the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd did. By the 1970s the fear was much more that your kid would get ambushed at the airport and brainwashed or maybe even kidnapped like Patty Hearst and transformed into a revolutionary. I found out about the 1995 edition circa 2005 or so and though first “gee that issue wasn’t so salient then” but no you had groups like Aum Shirikyo, Al Quadea, etc. that were not so prominent in terms of numbers but highly dangerous in behavior. The Reaganite sirge in inequality makes EA quite different from the Scientology of old (which wanted to drain people of their money and then make them work like slaves) because back then it was worth emptying the wallets of ordinary people. An EA club at a place like Stanford on the other hand is really a potemkin village that creates the appearance of a movement, what matters in a group of 30 of them is 2 rich kid whales, the other 28 are there just to make it look like there is movement. (E.g. Scientology has moved into big ticket donations because they found ‘working people like slaves’ isn’t that profitable). What happened to Patty Hearst is close to the right idea for a cult in 2023 except you don’t want to kidnap them and encircle them, you want to encircle them in their own environment.
- mrkeen 3y ago
  > In the sense that matters most for effective altruism, climate change refers to large-scale shifts in weather patterns that result from emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane largely from fossil fuel consumption. Climate change has the potential to result in—and to some extent is already resulting in—increased natural disasters, increased water and food insecurity, and widespread species extinction and habitat loss. > 80,000 Hours rates reducing extreme risks from climate change a "second-highest priority area": an unusually pressing global problem ranked slightly below their four highest priority areas. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/climate-change https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/climate-change You should point your climate denier accusations at someone, so readers can at least check that person's statements.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    That”s denial because you will be forced into denial to defend that position (e.g. you’re always going to be caught saying it is not so bad, just turn up your AC, …)
    - kaashif 3y ago
      Can you define what you mean by denial and point to a specific example? You're still being hypothetical and vague with "you will be forced into denial" - I would flat out say that's obviously false. Saying the risk of climate change wiping out humanity is less than the risk of nuclear war doing so is not climate denial. It may be wrong, but it's not climate denial.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    All discussions of EA run into the fact that EA is a diverse movement with lots of different opinions and “wings” of the movement with different priorities. So any statement like the above is going to have dissenters. At the same time (and to practice charity, as many in the movement recommend): it is also perfectly accurate to note that there is an opinionated wing of the EA movement that believes AI risk is the most important X-risk facing us, and influential members of that movement have certainly made statements downplaying the relative risk of climate change. They’ve also managed to get some agreement from portions of the broader community. (And it is also hard to deny that some of the latter elements of the movement seem to be gaining ground in ‘capturing’ the brand, at least as far as it’s known to the public.)
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  Everything I have ever learned about EA and it's followers has led me to conclude it is perhaps the largest and most complex internal belief system to justify stressful amounts of motivated reasoning, so people who have amassed unconscionable wealth can use that wealth to do basically whatever it is that they wanted to do anyway, but with an ideological overhead to shield them from inevitable criticism. It's the peak of this "good billionaire" nonsense where people can aspire to a level of wealth that is, to be clear, unable to be attained without exploitation of other people on an industrial scale, but justify it internally as "well if I do that I can do the most good." It's utter nonsense. It positions the person in question as some sort of arbiter of humanity's future, someone so intelligent and so well rounded as to see the folly of mankind itself as an obstacle to be overcome, not as a collective where we move forward together, but as a personal barrier to what you already know needs to be accomplished. It is arrogance without limit to assume that you personally know better what needs to happen than the total summed knowledge of billions of your fellow man and I cannot take anyone who self-identifies as an EA seriously as a result. You, singularly, are not qualified to "fix" the fucking world, you are not ABLE, let alone currently, to be qualified for that. To be clear: There are TONS of problems that the resources of one of these jackoffs could solve basically overnight. Flint's inability to have clean water is a great example, but just buying a shit ton of pipe and having it installed in a struggling city isn't flashy, it isn't exciting, it isn't paving the way for the future: it's just fixing a problem we know how to fix and that should be fixed, but that isn't enough. You can't put your name on it, you can't get famous off doing it (outside of Flint anyway) and therefore it doesn't get brought up.
  - vasco 3y ago
    I mean I don't really care either way, but isn't that for the government to solve? They print whatever money they want at will, sometimes I think that a policy of forcing 1% of any money printing into this type of project would fix most of the world.
    - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
      Oh totally agreed. I'm just saying, if you, as this theoretical rich or soon-to-be-rich EA believer, are committed to improving the world by attaining and using wealth, there are problems out there than can indeed be solved with just... a big ass check. Those exist. But most of them are also pretty boring. People need things, and you can provide them things. But because they're boring, they never end up on an EA's radar. No, instead let's dump shit tons of cash into a nonprofit that will create AI and also create tools to stop the AI they created from killing us all with nukes.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  >But it is not accidental because isolation is one of the most important techniques of cult mind control. The point of Sequences is the same point as Dianetics it is supposed to rewrite the way you communicate so you just can’t relate to “wogs” At the very minimum, that might have been the way it worked with previous grifter cults. You can sort of characterize those as the ones that were created for a single founder to exploit the cult for, money, sex, and adulation. But, if these others are cults, then they're a very different sort. They do seem to want to communicate to others. That tends not to happen, as the other side seems to shut down communications one way or another (something like an immune response?). > Everybody else concerned about the future is concerned about climate change but EA is at first silent and then reveals itself as a climate denying movement I'm fairly sure your species is functionally extinct already. It's unclear why you're concerned about the future farther than, I dunno, 100 years out. While there are exceptions here and there, as a civilization you seem hellbent on wrecking your fertility. Any civilization that can't be bothered or otherwise refuses to create the replacements for those that will die of old age is already gone even if it doesn't know it yet. Climate change isn't a problem, because 500 years from now there won't be anyone around to suffer it.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Cults have always had some focus on "recruiting", partially because they do recruit people that way but because it leads into despairing interactions with "wogs" that lead members to believe the outside world is corrupt. I don't know if you've had the experience of having a friend get into Amway and then giving you a long rambling nonsensical lecture about how they plan to make money at Amway that makes no sense at all... but you should because it's an education in how discourses with that structure play a role in mind control. You see them in Scientology, you see them in scam supplement ads on YouTube (it's genius that they ramble for 45 minutes before revealing what they are selling), and you see them in EA. As for risks the cultural risks you are talking about are very real and not taken seriously enough although sometimes I wonder if the largest urban areas are just full and people who are living in a place that is full have an instinct to stop reproducing. If that's the case and there is a significant population drop it may turn around.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Neglectedness is one of the three pillars that EA uses to decide how much impact you can have on a problem. EA is generally against funding climate change because it is easily the least neglected x risk, not because they’re climate change deniers. They figure the non ea community has already picked all the low hanging fruit in the climate change area.
kneel 3y ago
In much the same way that rationalists groups attract the most irrational people. We're seeing that Effective Altruism is a magnet for psychopaths. I'm not saying that all people who practice EA are psychopaths, it's just that it provides a natural habitat and cloak for dark triad types.
- meinmissoula 3y ago
  Are we seeing that? I'm certainly not? I suppose "psychopaths" will attach themselves to literally anything given the right opportunities, but EA seems like a relatively poor target all things considered. At it's core, I struggle to see how anyone can disagree with effective altruism as a basic principle. People want to do good in the world, but we're all monkey-brained and emotional, so that often manifests in ineffective use of time and resources to do things that give an immediate, visible outcome so we can feel good instead of what would actually do the most good. EA to me is basically just shifting altruistic desires from emotional-payoff (volunteering at a soup kitchen around the holidays, donating to a local animal shelter) to things that have the best outcome (volunteering at a political action group to improve laws, donating to an NGO distributing mosquito nets in malaria zones).
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > At it's core, I struggle to see how anyone can disagree with effective altruism as a basic principle I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The issue isn't the idea that we want to engage in altruism in the most effective way we can, the issue is the EA movement.
    - Applejinx 3y ago
      I don't get how effectiveness is a prerequisite. Be altruist, or not. Sounds like ass-covering from people who are like 'I am ultimately rational and therefore must act with maximum effectiveness'. Ultimately rational as a perceived state within humans is a FEELING. You can take a bunch of ketamine and conclude that you possess that quality, and many people have done just that, some of 'em very wealthy and powerful. Beats admitting the truth, I guess.
acl777 3y ago
https://archive.ph/xb0iD https://archive.ph/xb0iD
kiba 3y ago
Risk from GAI is very nebulous, even if we assume that it is a given. It's not exactly clear how you will align an AI for the benefit of humanity, let alone aligning humans with other humans in mutually beneficial arrangement. Let's not forget that benefit for humanity is also somewhat nebulous term, especially since humans can sometime have incompatible goals against each other. However, it's not impossible to have some kind of agreement, like making sure that we all have shelter, food, and water, and so forth.
- Chabsff 3y ago
  The operating key word here being "agreement", which, as far as I'm concerned, is the absolute antithesis of what EA is all about.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  EA continues to look like moral cover for good old-fashioned profit maximization. The "Effective" part is immediate and drives short-term incentives like maximizing profit. The "Altruism" part is hypothetical and delegated to a future date where the resources acquired "effectively" are deployed for the benefit of humanity. In the gap between the two are fallible human beings, not necessarily more virtuous than average, that task themselves with making decisions about what's important. The focus on hypothetical dangers like GAI is telling here. If you can invent an apocalyptic boogeyman that you're "addressing" by funding thinktanks and sitting on company boards you don't actually have to spend anything on addressing immediate issues.
  - atlasunshrugged 3y ago
    I think this is more about the longtermism branch of EA in particular. There are many EAs who are still focused on solving more concrete problems (like malaria, extreme poverty) and directing millions of dollars in charity to Against Malaria, Give Directly, lobbying for stricter lead regulations, etc.
    - AlexandrB 3y ago
      That's fair. Most of what I know of EA is the stuff that makes the "news" here on HN, which is generally not flattering.
abi 3y ago
I think more a accurate title would be "AI industry's favorite philosophy turns against the industry". My understanding is the anti-AI bent is much more recent within EA.
- RationalDino 3y ago
  No, it actually is much older. https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians/0303/4140.html https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians/0303/4140.html is Yudowsky inventing the specter of a paperclip maximizer as a potential problem about 20 years ago. He was, of course, the moving force behind both LessWrong and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Intelligence_Research_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Intelligence_Research_.... Both of which formed one of the three strands that later merged into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Yudkowsky has been warning about ai x risk for a very long time. I guess you could say the “halt all research” rhetoric from him is more recent, but I can’t say it’s surprising giving his long standing views.
Pat_Murph 3y ago
Effective altruisme is a smoke screen term to make legislators and the public believe that tech companies have humanities best imterest at heart. It's just to prevent legislators from imposing legislative controls on the industry by making them believe that they have things under control... When they obviously dont. Self regulation of industries has never worked and never will.
- BanTheBastards 3y ago
  > Effective altruisme is a smoke screen term to make legislators and the public believe that tech companies have humanities best imterest at heart. I think it's a smoke screen term to convince wealthy people they have humanity's best interest at heart—pretty trivially. I find it impossible to believe that anyone else believes this.
  - RationalDino 3y ago
    You forget people who are convinced that they are wealthy, and then are convinced that they have humanity's best interest in part. This describes many who fell for crypto Ponzi schemes. Who were convinced that buying into the Ponzi scheme made them rich, and the world a better place.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
Jeff_Brown 3y ago
Disagreements with EA seem to come in four forms. (1) Disagreements about discount rates (how to weigh harm now against harm in the future). (2) Disagreements about the probabilities of various disasters and the effectiveness of various interventions. (3) Statements of the form "this person claimed to be EA and they were bad so EA is bad" -- which please. (4) Defining the greatest good, and therefore how to maximize it, is hard. This critique, unlike the others, is fundamental, but it doesn't nullify the value of the project. Just do your best and call it a day. This article absurdly misconstrues both recent changes in the community and Talinn's comments in particular. For people o take issue with the culture that has evolved around a philosophy is not for it to reject that philosophy. And for Tallinn to say that we should not rely on [initially] EA-motivated corporate governance to be benevolent is not for him to have disavowed EA's principles.
- cactusplant7374 3y ago
  > if you want to do good, you should spend your money where it does the most good. Is there an exception for helping my in-laws that live one step above abject poverty?
  - Jeff_Brown 3y ago
    Yup, that comes in the form of a utility function that is nonhomogeneous across people. It's expected, for instance, that parents will value an increment in their childrens' well-being more than an increment in a stranger's. EA is radical in that it treats everyone's utility as equally valuable (across people, not income levels -- a dollar to a poor person is, all other things equal, more valuable than a dollar to a rich person). But you can do EA and still care more about your family than strangers.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    You can define good however you like. That’s not an exception, it’s baked right in.
- enord 3y ago
  These are technicalities IMO. There is nothing else to EA than the current institutions, people and praxis. If they become unfashionable or dishonored their moment will pass. It’s not some special new kind of cause, it’s just charity with an almost intolerably smug self-image.

54 points by spopejoy 3y ago

“Isolated” is the right word for EA. Everybody else concerned about the future is concerned about climate change but EA is at first silent and then reveals itself as a climate denying movement when it does open its mouth as every other imagined threat, even ones with a 10^-50 probability seems to matter more for them. But it is not accidental because isolation is one of the most important techniques of cult mind control. The point of Sequences is the same point as Dianetics it is supposed to rewrite the way you communicate so you just can’t relate to “wogs” (the rest of us) and can only talk to true believers.

branperr 3y ago
Sources on it being “climate denying”?
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Talk about a pitch right across home base… https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xJhtrAxd5QpXi2CdA/the-threat-of-climate-change-is-exaggerated https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xJhtrAxd5QpXi2CdA/... Here is the Google query that came from https://www.google.com/search?q=effective+altruism+climate+change+is+not+very+dangerous&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#ip=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=effective+altruism+climate+c...
  - ironrabbit 3y ago
    This is a forum post from a student with 18 total karma
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      so… it is typical. Find me an article on lesswrong that says climate change should be taken as seriously as AI, it might exist (probably with trigger warnings all over it) but let’s see what the comments are like.
      - ToValueFunfetti 3y ago
        Here's the second result of your google search, which has 34 upvotes vs. 14: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pcDAvaXBxTjRYMdEo/climate-change-is-neglected-by-ea https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pcDAvaXBxTjRYMdEo/...
        PaulHoule 3y ago
        … which also supports my point.
        ToValueFunfetti 3y ago
        Someone arguing on the forums that EA cares too much about climate change supports your point, and someone arguing on the forums that EA doesn't care enough about climate change also supports your point? What exactly would they have to say to damage your point?
        PaulHoule 3y ago
        Leadership making climate change a priority and not making excuses for why it isn't.
- lebean 3y ago
  Someone in the movement said "maybe we're NOT all gonna die in the next 1° C increase in average temp" = Everyone in the movement are climate change deniers
kiba 3y ago
I am very concerned about climate change, and I am somewhat EA adjacent. But it is not accidental because isolation is one of the most important techniques of cult mind control. The point of Sequences is the same point as Dianetics it is supposed to rewrite the way you communicate so you just can’t relate to “wogs” (the rest of us) and can only talk to true believers. Wow. This is just weird.
- tuatoru 3y ago
  In what ways?
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    That person should find a copy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic_of_Sudden_Personality_Change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic... I read the first edition circa 1989 when people still remembered the moonies. When LSD got fashionable in the 1960s parents blamed it for what seemed like sudden personality change (Straight A student athlete now smokes dope all the time, grows their hair long, gets the crabs, etc.) but after the crackdown all the psychedelic bands either went under like the Beatles or changed the way the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd did. By the 1970s the fear was much more that your kid would get ambushed at the airport and brainwashed or maybe even kidnapped like Patty Hearst and transformed into a revolutionary. I found out about the 1995 edition circa 2005 or so and though first “gee that issue wasn’t so salient then” but no you had groups like Aum Shirikyo, Al Quadea, etc. that were not so prominent in terms of numbers but highly dangerous in behavior. The Reaganite sirge in inequality makes EA quite different from the Scientology of old (which wanted to drain people of their money and then make them work like slaves) because back then it was worth emptying the wallets of ordinary people. An EA club at a place like Stanford on the other hand is really a potemkin village that creates the appearance of a movement, what matters in a group of 30 of them is 2 rich kid whales, the other 28 are there just to make it look like there is movement. (E.g. Scientology has moved into big ticket donations because they found ‘working people like slaves’ isn’t that profitable). What happened to Patty Hearst is close to the right idea for a cult in 2023 except you don’t want to kidnap them and encircle them, you want to encircle them in their own environment.
mrkeen 3y ago
> In the sense that matters most for effective altruism, climate change refers to large-scale shifts in weather patterns that result from emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane largely from fossil fuel consumption. Climate change has the potential to result in—and to some extent is already resulting in—increased natural disasters, increased water and food insecurity, and widespread species extinction and habitat loss. > 80,000 Hours rates reducing extreme risks from climate change a "second-highest priority area": an unusually pressing global problem ranked slightly below their four highest priority areas. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/climate-change https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/climate-change You should point your climate denier accusations at someone, so readers can at least check that person's statements.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  That”s denial because you will be forced into denial to defend that position (e.g. you’re always going to be caught saying it is not so bad, just turn up your AC, …)
  - kaashif 3y ago
    Can you define what you mean by denial and point to a specific example? You're still being hypothetical and vague with "you will be forced into denial" - I would flat out say that's obviously false. Saying the risk of climate change wiping out humanity is less than the risk of nuclear war doing so is not climate denial. It may be wrong, but it's not climate denial.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  All discussions of EA run into the fact that EA is a diverse movement with lots of different opinions and “wings” of the movement with different priorities. So any statement like the above is going to have dissenters. At the same time (and to practice charity, as many in the movement recommend): it is also perfectly accurate to note that there is an opinionated wing of the EA movement that believes AI risk is the most important X-risk facing us, and influential members of that movement have certainly made statements downplaying the relative risk of climate change. They’ve also managed to get some agreement from portions of the broader community. (And it is also hard to deny that some of the latter elements of the movement seem to be gaining ground in ‘capturing’ the brand, at least as far as it’s known to the public.)
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
Everything I have ever learned about EA and it's followers has led me to conclude it is perhaps the largest and most complex internal belief system to justify stressful amounts of motivated reasoning, so people who have amassed unconscionable wealth can use that wealth to do basically whatever it is that they wanted to do anyway, but with an ideological overhead to shield them from inevitable criticism. It's the peak of this "good billionaire" nonsense where people can aspire to a level of wealth that is, to be clear, unable to be attained without exploitation of other people on an industrial scale, but justify it internally as "well if I do that I can do the most good." It's utter nonsense. It positions the person in question as some sort of arbiter of humanity's future, someone so intelligent and so well rounded as to see the folly of mankind itself as an obstacle to be overcome, not as a collective where we move forward together, but as a personal barrier to what you already know needs to be accomplished. It is arrogance without limit to assume that you personally know better what needs to happen than the total summed knowledge of billions of your fellow man and I cannot take anyone who self-identifies as an EA seriously as a result. You, singularly, are not qualified to "fix" the fucking world, you are not ABLE, let alone currently, to be qualified for that. To be clear: There are TONS of problems that the resources of one of these jackoffs could solve basically overnight. Flint's inability to have clean water is a great example, but just buying a shit ton of pipe and having it installed in a struggling city isn't flashy, it isn't exciting, it isn't paving the way for the future: it's just fixing a problem we know how to fix and that should be fixed, but that isn't enough. You can't put your name on it, you can't get famous off doing it (outside of Flint anyway) and therefore it doesn't get brought up.
- vasco 3y ago
  I mean I don't really care either way, but isn't that for the government to solve? They print whatever money they want at will, sometimes I think that a policy of forcing 1% of any money printing into this type of project would fix most of the world.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    Oh totally agreed. I'm just saying, if you, as this theoretical rich or soon-to-be-rich EA believer, are committed to improving the world by attaining and using wealth, there are problems out there than can indeed be solved with just... a big ass check. Those exist. But most of them are also pretty boring. People need things, and you can provide them things. But because they're boring, they never end up on an EA's radar. No, instead let's dump shit tons of cash into a nonprofit that will create AI and also create tools to stop the AI they created from killing us all with nukes.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
>But it is not accidental because isolation is one of the most important techniques of cult mind control. The point of Sequences is the same point as Dianetics it is supposed to rewrite the way you communicate so you just can’t relate to “wogs” At the very minimum, that might have been the way it worked with previous grifter cults. You can sort of characterize those as the ones that were created for a single founder to exploit the cult for, money, sex, and adulation. But, if these others are cults, then they're a very different sort. They do seem to want to communicate to others. That tends not to happen, as the other side seems to shut down communications one way or another (something like an immune response?). > Everybody else concerned about the future is concerned about climate change but EA is at first silent and then reveals itself as a climate denying movement I'm fairly sure your species is functionally extinct already. It's unclear why you're concerned about the future farther than, I dunno, 100 years out. While there are exceptions here and there, as a civilization you seem hellbent on wrecking your fertility. Any civilization that can't be bothered or otherwise refuses to create the replacements for those that will die of old age is already gone even if it doesn't know it yet. Climate change isn't a problem, because 500 years from now there won't be anyone around to suffer it.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Cults have always had some focus on "recruiting", partially because they do recruit people that way but because it leads into despairing interactions with "wogs" that lead members to believe the outside world is corrupt. I don't know if you've had the experience of having a friend get into Amway and then giving you a long rambling nonsensical lecture about how they plan to make money at Amway that makes no sense at all... but you should because it's an education in how discourses with that structure play a role in mind control. You see them in Scientology, you see them in scam supplement ads on YouTube (it's genius that they ramble for 45 minutes before revealing what they are selling), and you see them in EA. As for risks the cultural risks you are talking about are very real and not taken seriously enough although sometimes I wonder if the largest urban areas are just full and people who are living in a place that is full have an instinct to stop reproducing. If that's the case and there is a significant population drop it may turn around.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Neglectedness is one of the three pillars that EA uses to decide how much impact you can have on a problem. EA is generally against funding climate change because it is easily the least neglected x risk, not because they’re climate change deniers. They figure the non ea community has already picked all the low hanging fruit in the climate change area.

kneel 3y ago

In much the same way that rationalists groups attract the most irrational people. We're seeing that Effective Altruism is a magnet for psychopaths. I'm not saying that all people who practice EA are psychopaths, it's just that it provides a natural habitat and cloak for dark triad types.

meinmissoula 3y ago
Are we seeing that? I'm certainly not? I suppose "psychopaths" will attach themselves to literally anything given the right opportunities, but EA seems like a relatively poor target all things considered. At it's core, I struggle to see how anyone can disagree with effective altruism as a basic principle. People want to do good in the world, but we're all monkey-brained and emotional, so that often manifests in ineffective use of time and resources to do things that give an immediate, visible outcome so we can feel good instead of what would actually do the most good. EA to me is basically just shifting altruistic desires from emotional-payoff (volunteering at a soup kitchen around the holidays, donating to a local animal shelter) to things that have the best outcome (volunteering at a political action group to improve laws, donating to an NGO distributing mosquito nets in malaria zones).
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > At it's core, I struggle to see how anyone can disagree with effective altruism as a basic principle I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The issue isn't the idea that we want to engage in altruism in the most effective way we can, the issue is the EA movement.
  - Applejinx 3y ago
    I don't get how effectiveness is a prerequisite. Be altruist, or not. Sounds like ass-covering from people who are like 'I am ultimately rational and therefore must act with maximum effectiveness'. Ultimately rational as a perceived state within humans is a FEELING. You can take a bunch of ketamine and conclude that you possess that quality, and many people have done just that, some of 'em very wealthy and powerful. Beats admitting the truth, I guess.

acl777 3y ago

https://archive.ph/xb0iD https://archive.ph/xb0iD

kiba 3y ago

Risk from GAI is very nebulous, even if we assume that it is a given. It's not exactly clear how you will align an AI for the benefit of humanity, let alone aligning humans with other humans in mutually beneficial arrangement. Let's not forget that benefit for humanity is also somewhat nebulous term, especially since humans can sometime have incompatible goals against each other. However, it's not impossible to have some kind of agreement, like making sure that we all have shelter, food, and water, and so forth.

Chabsff 3y ago
The operating key word here being "agreement", which, as far as I'm concerned, is the absolute antithesis of what EA is all about.
AlexandrB 3y ago
EA continues to look like moral cover for good old-fashioned profit maximization. The "Effective" part is immediate and drives short-term incentives like maximizing profit. The "Altruism" part is hypothetical and delegated to a future date where the resources acquired "effectively" are deployed for the benefit of humanity. In the gap between the two are fallible human beings, not necessarily more virtuous than average, that task themselves with making decisions about what's important. The focus on hypothetical dangers like GAI is telling here. If you can invent an apocalyptic boogeyman that you're "addressing" by funding thinktanks and sitting on company boards you don't actually have to spend anything on addressing immediate issues.
- atlasunshrugged 3y ago
  I think this is more about the longtermism branch of EA in particular. There are many EAs who are still focused on solving more concrete problems (like malaria, extreme poverty) and directing millions of dollars in charity to Against Malaria, Give Directly, lobbying for stricter lead regulations, etc.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    That's fair. Most of what I know of EA is the stuff that makes the "news" here on HN, which is generally not flattering.

abi 3y ago

I think more a accurate title would be "AI industry's favorite philosophy turns against the industry". My understanding is the anti-AI bent is much more recent within EA.

RationalDino 3y ago
No, it actually is much older. https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians/0303/4140.html https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians/0303/4140.html is Yudowsky inventing the specter of a paperclip maximizer as a potential problem about 20 years ago. He was, of course, the moving force behind both LessWrong and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Intelligence_Research_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Intelligence_Research_.... Both of which formed one of the three strands that later merged into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Yudkowsky has been warning about ai x risk for a very long time. I guess you could say the “halt all research” rhetoric from him is more recent, but I can’t say it’s surprising giving his long standing views.

Pat_Murph 3y ago

Effective altruisme is a smoke screen term to make legislators and the public believe that tech companies have humanities best imterest at heart. It's just to prevent legislators from imposing legislative controls on the industry by making them believe that they have things under control... When they obviously dont. Self regulation of industries has never worked and never will.

BanTheBastards 3y ago
> Effective altruisme is a smoke screen term to make legislators and the public believe that tech companies have humanities best imterest at heart. I think it's a smoke screen term to convince wealthy people they have humanity's best interest at heart—pretty trivially. I find it impossible to believe that anyone else believes this.
- RationalDino 3y ago
  You forget people who are convinced that they are wealthy, and then are convinced that they have humanity's best interest in part. This describes many who fell for crypto Ponzi schemes. Who were convinced that buying into the Ponzi scheme made them rich, and the world a better place.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

Jeff_Brown 3y ago

Disagreements with EA seem to come in four forms. (1) Disagreements about discount rates (how to weigh harm now against harm in the future). (2) Disagreements about the probabilities of various disasters and the effectiveness of various interventions. (3) Statements of the form "this person claimed to be EA and they were bad so EA is bad" -- which please. (4) Defining the greatest good, and therefore how to maximize it, is hard. This critique, unlike the others, is fundamental, but it doesn't nullify the value of the project. Just do your best and call it a day. This article absurdly misconstrues both recent changes in the community and Talinn's comments in particular. For people o take issue with the culture that has evolved around a philosophy is not for it to reject that philosophy. And for Tallinn to say that we should not rely on [initially] EA-motivated corporate governance to be benevolent is not for him to have disavowed EA's principles.

cactusplant7374 3y ago
> if you want to do good, you should spend your money where it does the most good. Is there an exception for helping my in-laws that live one step above abject poverty?
- Jeff_Brown 3y ago
  Yup, that comes in the form of a utility function that is nonhomogeneous across people. It's expected, for instance, that parents will value an increment in their childrens' well-being more than an increment in a stranger's. EA is radical in that it treats everyone's utility as equally valuable (across people, not income levels -- a dollar to a poor person is, all other things equal, more valuable than a dollar to a rich person). But you can do EA and still care more about your family than strangers.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  You can define good however you like. That’s not an exception, it’s baked right in.
enord 3y ago
These are technicalities IMO. There is nothing else to EA than the current institutions, people and praxis. If they become unfashionable or dishonored their moment will pass. It’s not some special new kind of cause, it’s just charity with an almost intolerably smug self-image.