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I encourage people to listen to Behind the Bastards podcast on the Zizians. It provides an approachable and entertaining picture of what you get when someone ta
by api 1y ago
I encourage people to listen to Behind the Bastards podcast on the Zizians. It provides an approachable and entertaining picture of what you get when someone takes the core philosophical ideas of the Rationalists deeply seriously. Reductio ad absurdum can be a good start.
I want to write a takedown of this nonsense, but there are about a hundred things I want to do more. I suspect that is true of most people, including people much better qualified to write a takedown of this than me.
I am not just referring to extreme AI doomerism but to the entire philosophical edifice of Rationalism. The interesting parts are not original and the original parts are not interesting. We would hear nothing about it were it not subsidized by tech bucks. It’s kind of like how nobody would have heard of Scientology if it hadn’t gotten its hooks into Hollywood. Rationalism seems to be Silicon Valley's Scientology.
Maybe the superhuman AI will do this: Maybe it will decide to apply to each human being a standard based on their own chosen philosophical outlook. Since the Rationalists tend toward eugenicism and scientific racism, it will conclude that they should be exterminated according to the logic they advance. Each Rationalist will be subjected to an IQ test and compared to the AI and euthanized if lower.
I do wonder if there might be a bit of projection here. A bunch of people who believe raw scored intelligence according to metrics is the thing that determines the value of a living being would be nervous about the prospect of that metric being exceeded by a machine. What if the AI isn't "woke?"
It's such an onion of bullshit. You can keep peeling and peeling for a long time. If I sound snarky and a little rough here it's because I hate these people. They're at least partly responsible for sucking the brains out of a generation. But who knows maybe I'm just low IQ. Don't listen to me. I wasn't high-IQ enough to take Moldbug seriously either.
- Vecr 1y agoThe author says he has an about average IQ, but that's impressive considering he apparently almost entirely failed several component tests.
- api 1y agoThat reminds me of another more obvious way these folks are projecting. They place so much value on their own ability to munge words together and spew internally consistent language constructs. The existence of a technology -- a machine -- that can do this and do it better than them is a threat to them. The AIs small enough to run locally on my own GPU are better at bullshitting than these people. It's almost like sophistry isn't particularly interesting or special.
- randomcarbloke 1y agoDoomers cannot see past humanity's reflection and it's fucking embarrassing. If AGI will be as advanced and omniscient as claimed, then it is surely impossible to divine it's intent, especially here, this side of it existing and acting.
- keybored 1y agoInteresting that the Rationalists are too Rationalist for you.
- hollerith 1y agoIf we are going to judge the Berkeley rationalists and the AI doomers by the Zizians, we should also judge Harvard University to be a violent fringe organization because the Unabomber went to college there. The Berkeley rationalists essentially run a school (called the Center for Applied Rationality) that the Zizians went to. The leaders of the rationalists publicly distanced themselves from the Zizians years ago, before the Zizians started with their crimes.