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They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed
- trumbitta2 2y agoChatGPT, please summarize in bullet points.
- rsynnott 2y agoUnwise. You don't want to bring it to the basilisk's attention that you know about the basilisk, just in case this lot are right ;)
- alhadrad 2y agoThis is the start of modern illiteracy.
- anonzzzies 2y agoStart... We are already very far advanced as far as I can see. You wouldn't know if you hang with university students; they seem, at least the ones I employ/talk to, far more knowledgeable than the young me was, however, when I talk to other young people, they don't want to and are not very good at processing textual information. They need to have it spoken and in a very information sparse format. It's somewhat depressing, so I hope it's just the people I meet and what I read online, but I don't think so.
- slumberlust 2y agoName a generation that didn't think the youth 'lost it.'
- anonzzzies 2y agoYep, like I said; I hope it's just me. That's fine too. It's just actively annoying that people just refuse to read stuff. It's very wasteful timewise for me.
- schmidtleonard 2y agoThis is adblock for text.
- ryao 2y agoSuch sentiments have been expressed so many times that I have lost track of all of the times variations on them have been expressed. I think it started with Socrates who claimed the written word would damage human recall. When nobody believed him and he became popular because of the written word, people inverted “literacy is bad” into “literacy is good”. In more recent times, I believe radio and TV were said to be the start of modern illiteracy. By the way, for what it is worth, only 2% of the population can read at a college level. It had been that way for so long that I heard that the category was merged into the high school level several years ago to make the literacy rate in the top bracket 4% instead of the prior 2%. i.e. “modern illiteracy” started a long time ago if we go by numbers.
- dasil003 2y agoMaybe Socrates was correct? I certainly think Google has damaged my memory, or maybe just age, hard to say.
- ryao 2y agoWho knows? The guy was not a really good teacher. His student Plato ignored the meaning of what he said about learning to write a book on it. A major point of the book was that reading the book was pointless because it was a form of sophism. Before I am downvoted into oblivion, the above text is half joking and half serious. Socrates in Plato’s Republic really does make the case that formal training via methods intended to teach is pointless by comparing education to training horses. I made that point in my college philosophy class hoping the professor would skip it on the basis that it was a bad book (my thoughts on a book that suggested you could not learn its material by being lead to it - see the cave analogy). The professor then stopped the entire class to try to make sure everyone understood the point and then continued as if the material was not criticizing him.
- lupusreal 2y agoProbably so. Socrates witnessed the end of the Athenian Golden Age during his lifetime.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
- senectus1 2y agoI mean.. yeah, but.. I just fed this into grok and it did a fair job of summarising it (I know because I've done a fair bit of reading on the zizian nutters.)
- balamatom 2y agoNo, just a way to say "tl;dr" which also somehow manages to be offensively classist.
- pevey 2y agoThis is a non-fiction piece, not really a news story. So not everyone's cup of tea. Joan Didion style. I enjoyed it. I would summarize it as not being about AI per se. It's nominally about "rationalism," or the inclination to boil everything down to mathematics to an extreme degree. The story points out a growing subculture of rationalist who have become quite radicalized. For a community like HN, which (rightly, IMO) places high value on rational and critical thought, it can seem strange that there could be a degree at which that sort of thinking is harmful. But there are a lot of examples where taken to an extreme, it can allow people to "rationalize" all sorts of actions. And the article goes into detail about some of the pitfalls this small group fell into.
- pevey 2y agoA side note about my perspective: I studied economics as an undergrad at a time when the Northwestern "pure rationalism" school of thought completely dominated. Some of the conclusions from purely mathematical models built high on dubious assumptions were ridiculous on their face. But anything outside that dogma was heresy and treated as such. Academics were shunned, careers ruined. It was a few years later that "behavioral economics" began to make inroads. The moniker of "behavioral economics" itself was to distinguish it from "real economics." Alas (for the establishment), behavioral economics proved very popular, and the genie was out of the bottle. It turns out mathematic equations are not all-powerful when it comes to describing certain phenomena, especially when it comes to individual or collective human behavior. Collective blind faith in models built on dubious assumptions is what gave us the mortgage crisis.
- ryao 2y agoThe article is drama piece that makes you go on a scavenger hunt for the Five Ws. I stopped reading as soon as I noticed the pattern. I would ask AI to summarize, but my enthusiasm for learning anything from this kind of article has waned dramatically over the years.
- regularjack 2y agoIt's a stylistic choice, many people like reading this kind of piece. You don't have to read it. There's room on the web for different kinds of writing styles.
- ryao 2y agoIf I wanted to read a novel, I would read an actual novel. I actually read foreign novels for fun, so that is not hyperbole. That said, this stylistic choice works for computer security related things (e.g. the spy genre of news). It feels like a waste of time everywhere else.
- abofh 2y agoIt was more about the, ya know, murder cult thing, than technology. It's an artifact of telling a story - which is different than relaying a 'classic' journalism piece where the 5W's are most important. "Years before she became the peculiar central thread linking a double homicide in Pennsylvania, the fatal shooting of a federal agent in Vermont and the murder of an elderly landlord in California, a computer programmer bought a sailboat." I wanted to keep reading, so I guess I was their audience - not everything has to be up to your personal standards to be worth while.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago"If I wanted to read a novel, I would read an actual novel." As parent mentioned. You do have a choice not to read novels, or to read novels. That doesn't make a novel bad because it is a novel.
- 2y ago
- tomaytotomato 2y agoFor a group that applies rationalism, they appear to have ended up committing very horrible and irrational acts. The article could have done more to condemn this group and line of thinking. Also the part of the story on Curtis Lind is both sad and impressive, that old man was built of true grit: "As he bent to look, something hit him on the head and he blacked out. When he woke up, at least three of the Zizians were allegedly standing around him with knives. “[T]he right side of my skull was shattered,” Lind later said. “And I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds … The back of my neck had some severe cuts. Like somebody was trying to cut my head off.” His torso was impaled with a samurai sword. Lind drew his gun, which was concealed in a pocket, and started shooting. He wounded Leatham and killed Borhanian. He stumbled away with the sword still in him. He survived, but lost an eye."
- CaffeineLD50 2y agoDon't mess with cowboys.
- rsynnott 2y ago> they appear to have ended up committing very horrible and irrational acts. See SBF. The fringes of the 'rationalism' are pretty much a series of rather nasty cults.
- rasz 2y agoThats some Tarantino Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood story arc right there.
- dlandis 2y ago> For a group that applies rationalism, they appear to have ended up committing very horrible and irrational acts. Yes, also ironic how they were, per the article, very intrigued by the concept that ideas themselves could be like viruses but were unaware of how they seemed to be heavily impacted by that very thing, many times over.
- CaffeineLD50 2y agoThe cult elements of isolation (boat/van life), alienation from self (trans, split brain), false moral superiority (vegan), demands for purity in action (vegan), sense of false higher purpose (AI basilisk), false possession of method for empowerment (rationalism) are there. The hatred of landlords et al (anarchism) and use of drugs (psychedelic, others?) seems to be my guess for the violence part. Lots of highly exploitative groups don't get to violent assaults. That's got me wondering why.
- PaulHoule 2y agoI think about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manson_Family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manson_Family but I know a lot of people use psychedelic drugs and don't resort to violence. With the hyperbolic rhetoric about false threats, I'm surprised we haven't seen more violence from "rationalists"; if they really believed we were in that imminent danger, violent attacks would have been the rational thing to do.
- fc417fc802 2y agoWell if we're being rational about it - how confident are we in the accuracy of that assessment, how likely is our attack to succeed, and how likely is our attack to have a positive impact? Worse, what is the probability that our attack instead has a negative impact?
- somenameforme 2y agoIs it even rational to assume one is rational? Of course I think I am, but I also think basically nobody else is. Yet I'm sure they think the are, and similarly doubt I am. So is the issue that I'm a snowflake and everybody else is wrong, or is the issue that rationality does not really exist (though that does not mean it's not worth striving towards)? It seems only rational to doubt ones rationality.
- balamatom 2y agoWell put. That realization alone makes you wiser than strictly required.
- hammock 2y agoI thought this was going to be about the Freescale Semiconductor employees who were on Malaysia Airlines flight 370. https://www.reuters.com/article/world/twenty-employees-of-us-chipmaker-among-passengers-on-malaysian-flight-idUSBREA2801L/ https://www.reuters.com/article/world/twenty-employees-of-us...
- balamatom 2y ago[flagged]
- ilikecakeandpie 2y agoThe families of those murdered probably thought so
- balamatom 2y agoFair enough. Condolences to those affected. Can't help but compare with the Mangione case, and these well-educated warriors of the sharpened keyboard don't cut it anywhere close. As expected!
- rsynnott 2y ago> They found some crew members [for a rationalist boat], including one, Dan Powell, who had nautical experience from a stint in the US navy. On 20 July, they set out from Alaska. It went mostly without incident, though one crew member who found Ziz’s assertiveness off-putting debarked early. What is it with cults and boats? L Ron Hubbard did this, too (albeit for different stated reasons). > The Coast Guard declared the ship a “threat to the public health” and demanded an improvement plan. Ah, see, they should have adopted the Hubbard approach of just completely ignoring authorities' complaints about his various dubious boats (this, somehow, tended to more or less work out for him).
- namaria 2y agoIt's because of the implication
- tristor 2y agoInteresting article. I definitely did not have "band of trans militant vegans starts a cult and commits multiple murders" on my bingo card for this century.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- colonial 2y agoBehavior like this is why I'm fairly convinced OpenAI took out a hit on Suchir. The singularity/AI doom pseudo-religion really messes some people up.
- rezendi 2y agoY'know, I'm totally happy for people to (very, very clearly) use my series "[Extropia's Children](https://aiascendant.com/p/extropias-children https://aiascendant.com/p/extropias-children)" as a basis for their own work - which has been happening a lot lately - but some kind of citation would have been nice. Sheesh.