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Scott Alexander, the prominent blogger and philosopher, has many opinions that I am interested in. After encountering his participation in https://ai-2027.com/

by andrewla 11mo ago

Scott Alexander, the prominent blogger and philosopher, has many opinions that I am interested in. After encountering his participation in https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/ I am not interested in hearing his opinions about AI.

everdrive 11mo ago
>After encountering his participation in https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/ I am not interested in hearing his opinions about AI. I'm not familiar with ai-2027 -- could you elaborate about why it would be distasteful to participate in this?
- acessoproibido 11mo ago
  I'm not sure why it's so distasteful, but they basically fear monger that AI will usurp control over all governments and kill us all in the next two years
- andrewla 11mo ago
  It is an attempt to predict a possible future in the context of AI. Basically a doomer fairy tale. It is just phenomenally dumb. Way worse than the worst bad scifi about the subject. It is presented as a cautionary tale and purports to be somewhat rationally thought out. But it is just so bad. It tries to delve into foreign policy and international politics but does so in such a naive way that it is painful to read. It is not distasteful to participate in it -- it is embarrassing and, from my perspective, disqualifying for a commentator on AI.
  - reducesuffering 11mo ago
    Whole lot of "doomer", "fairy tale", "dumb", "bad scifi", "so bad", "naive", "embarassing". Not any actual refutation. Maybe this opinion is a bit tougher to stomach for some reason than the rest you agree with...
    - michaelmrose 11mo ago
      An example >The job market for junior software engineers is in turmoil: the AIs can do everything taught by a CS degree, but people who know how to manage and quality-control teams of AIs are making a killing. AI doesn't look like a competition for a junior engineer and many of the people using not "managing" AI are going to be juniors in fact increasing what a junior can do and learn more quickly looks like one of the biggest potentials if they don't use it entirely as a crunch. Meanwhile, it suggests leading-edge research into AI itself will proceed fully 50% faster than research not without AI but those using 6 months behind cutting edge. This appears hopelessly optimistic as does the idea that it will grow the US economy 30% in 2026 whereas a crash seems more likely. Also it assumes that more compute will continue to be wildly more effective in short order assuming its possible to spend the money for magnitudes more compute. Either or both could easily fail to work out to plan.
    - andrewla 11mo ago
      I reject the premise that https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/ needs "refutation". It is a story, nothing more. It does not purport to tell the future, but to enumerate a specific "plausible" future. The "refutation" in a sense will be easy -- none of its concrete predictions will come to pass. But that doesn't refute its value as a possible future or a cautionary tale. That the story it tells is completely absurd is what makes it uninteresting and disqualifying for all participants in terms of their ability to comment on the future of AI. Here is the prediction about "China Steals Agent-2". > The changes come too late. CCP leadership recognizes the importance of Agent-2 and tells their spies and cyberforce to steal the weights. Early one morning, an Agent-1 traffic monitoring agent detects an anomalous transfer. It alerts company leaders, who tell the White House. The signs of a nation-state-level operation are unmistakable, and the theft heightens the sense of an ongoing arms race. Ah, so CCP leadership tells their spies and cyberforce to steal the weights so they do. Makes sense. Totally reasonable thing to predict. This is predicting the actions of hypothetical people doing hypothetical things with hypothetical capabilities to engage in the theft of hypothetical weights. Even the description of Agent-2 is stupid. Trying to make concrete predictions about what Agent-1 (an agent trained to make better agents) will do to produce Agent-2 is just absurd. Like Yudkowsky (who is far from clear-headed on this topic but at least has not made a complete fool of himself) has often pointed out, if we could predict what a recursively self-improving system could do then why do we need the system. All of these chains of events are incredibly fragile and they all build on each other as linear consequences, which is just a naive and foolish way to look at how events occur in the real world -- things are overdetermined, things are multi-causal; narratives are ways for us to help understand things but they aren't reality.
cuckmaxxed 11mo ago
[flagged]
dang 11mo ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- andrewla 11mo ago
  Opinions vary, but I posted a link to a web page that he co-authored, which I would argue stands as a very significant and deep dismissal of his views on AI. If, after reading that essay, a person still feels that Scott Alexander has something interesting to say about AI, then I challenge them to defend that thesis. Probably better for me to have remained silent out of politeness, but if anyone follows that link to the https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/ page then I feel I have done my part to help inform that person of the lack of rigor in Scott Alexander's thinking around AI.
  - dang 11mo ago
    Ok! I take your point that your comment was more related to the topic of this thread than I assumed it was. Probably if you had phrased it in a slightly more informative way, that pattern-matched slightly less to internet-dismissal-trope, I'd have understood that better the first time. (By internet-dismissal-trope in this case I mean something of the form "After X, I am no longer interested in person Y".)

everdrive 11mo ago

>After encountering his participation in https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/ I am not interested in hearing his opinions about AI. I'm not familiar with ai-2027 -- could you elaborate about why it would be distasteful to participate in this?

acessoproibido 11mo ago
I'm not sure why it's so distasteful, but they basically fear monger that AI will usurp control over all governments and kill us all in the next two years
andrewla 11mo ago
It is an attempt to predict a possible future in the context of AI. Basically a doomer fairy tale. It is just phenomenally dumb. Way worse than the worst bad scifi about the subject. It is presented as a cautionary tale and purports to be somewhat rationally thought out. But it is just so bad. It tries to delve into foreign policy and international politics but does so in such a naive way that it is painful to read. It is not distasteful to participate in it -- it is embarrassing and, from my perspective, disqualifying for a commentator on AI.
- reducesuffering 11mo ago
  Whole lot of "doomer", "fairy tale", "dumb", "bad scifi", "so bad", "naive", "embarassing". Not any actual refutation. Maybe this opinion is a bit tougher to stomach for some reason than the rest you agree with...
  - michaelmrose 11mo ago
    An example >The job market for junior software engineers is in turmoil: the AIs can do everything taught by a CS degree, but people who know how to manage and quality-control teams of AIs are making a killing. AI doesn't look like a competition for a junior engineer and many of the people using not "managing" AI are going to be juniors in fact increasing what a junior can do and learn more quickly looks like one of the biggest potentials if they don't use it entirely as a crunch. Meanwhile, it suggests leading-edge research into AI itself will proceed fully 50% faster than research not without AI but those using 6 months behind cutting edge. This appears hopelessly optimistic as does the idea that it will grow the US economy 30% in 2026 whereas a crash seems more likely. Also it assumes that more compute will continue to be wildly more effective in short order assuming its possible to spend the money for magnitudes more compute. Either or both could easily fail to work out to plan.
  - andrewla 11mo ago
    I reject the premise that https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/ needs "refutation". It is a story, nothing more. It does not purport to tell the future, but to enumerate a specific "plausible" future. The "refutation" in a sense will be easy -- none of its concrete predictions will come to pass. But that doesn't refute its value as a possible future or a cautionary tale. That the story it tells is completely absurd is what makes it uninteresting and disqualifying for all participants in terms of their ability to comment on the future of AI. Here is the prediction about "China Steals Agent-2". > The changes come too late. CCP leadership recognizes the importance of Agent-2 and tells their spies and cyberforce to steal the weights. Early one morning, an Agent-1 traffic monitoring agent detects an anomalous transfer. It alerts company leaders, who tell the White House. The signs of a nation-state-level operation are unmistakable, and the theft heightens the sense of an ongoing arms race. Ah, so CCP leadership tells their spies and cyberforce to steal the weights so they do. Makes sense. Totally reasonable thing to predict. This is predicting the actions of hypothetical people doing hypothetical things with hypothetical capabilities to engage in the theft of hypothetical weights. Even the description of Agent-2 is stupid. Trying to make concrete predictions about what Agent-1 (an agent trained to make better agents) will do to produce Agent-2 is just absurd. Like Yudkowsky (who is far from clear-headed on this topic but at least has not made a complete fool of himself) has often pointed out, if we could predict what a recursively self-improving system could do then why do we need the system. All of these chains of events are incredibly fragile and they all build on each other as linear consequences, which is just a naive and foolish way to look at how events occur in the real world -- things are overdetermined, things are multi-causal; narratives are ways for us to help understand things but they aren't reality.

cuckmaxxed 11mo ago

[flagged]

dang 11mo ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

andrewla 11mo ago
Opinions vary, but I posted a link to a web page that he co-authored, which I would argue stands as a very significant and deep dismissal of his views on AI. If, after reading that essay, a person still feels that Scott Alexander has something interesting to say about AI, then I challenge them to defend that thesis. Probably better for me to have remained silent out of politeness, but if anyone follows that link to the https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/ page then I feel I have done my part to help inform that person of the lack of rigor in Scott Alexander's thinking around AI.
- dang 11mo ago
  Ok! I take your point that your comment was more related to the topic of this thread than I assumed it was. Probably if you had phrased it in a slightly more informative way, that pattern-matched slightly less to internet-dismissal-trope, I'd have understood that better the first time. (By internet-dismissal-trope in this case I mean something of the form "After X, I am no longer interested in person Y".)