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... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action agains

... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.

AndrewKemendo 7mo ago
That pesky basilisk to worry about though
kelseyfrog 7mo ago
Disagree. Just one more blog post. I swear, one more blog post will do it.
- imbus 7mo ago
  [dead]
virissimo 7mo ago
Does this apply to other domains or just AI? For example, if you think gain-of-function research accidents put millions of lives at risk, is the logical next step to quit your job and become a terrorist?
SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
They are! Yudkowsky sat down with Senator Bernie Sanders last month to explain what's at stake, successfully convinced him that it's a big deal, and Sanders has now proposed a national moratorium on AI data centers (https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-ocasio-cortez-announce-ai-data-center-moratorium-act/ https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-o...) to help slow things down. That's pretty direct, and a lot more useful than random violence by random people.
jmull 7mo ago
No you wouldn't. Look at what the molotov cocktail guy accomplished by "taking direct action against a clear and present danger": Nothing, besides casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large. It's downright dumb to attempt to impose your will via unilateral violence when you aren't in a position to actually complete the goal. Note that that goes whether you're actually right or not.
- PaulHoule 7mo ago
  I'm not advocating for that, I'm just saying the whole thing is performative and gets taken at face value in a way that it should not be. If you wanted to be a contrarian concerned about x-risks go try to find $1B to pay Embraer or another minor aviation vendor to make a plane to do stratospheric aerosol injection or something. --- If you want my diagnosis it is, in a time of lower social inequality cults frequently tried to steal labor and money from a broad base of people. For instance in the L. Ron Hubbard age Scientology would treat you as a "public" if you had money to take and if you didn't or after you'd been bled dry you would be be recruited as "staff". Hubbard thought it was immoral to take donations without giving something in return so it was centered around getting people to spend on "auditing". Between 1950 Dianetics and the current Miscavige age, income and wealth has gotten concentrated and he changed that single element of the Hubbard doctrine and now it is all about recruiting money from "whales" who donated to the International Association of Scientologists (IAS) https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientologys-ias-trophy-winners-part-5bd https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientologys-ias-trophy-wi... (A good backgrounder on pernicious cults is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic_of_Sudden_Personality_Change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic...) In the case of the Yudkowsky thing the mass just doesn't have a lot of money to steal after paying the rent and turning the labor of the unskilled and ignorant (even if they think otherwise) is a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze, so the point is to build a Potempkin village that looks like a social movement that creates a frame where you can get money from sources such as "SBF steals it and gives it to the movement" as well as "rich kids who inherited a lot of money but don't have a lot of sense"
- throwaway27448 7mo ago
  Obviously, ineffective action will be counterproductive. I recommend effective action.
  - handoflixue 7mo ago
    That's exactly the point every prominent member of the "Doomer" community is making: Violence isn't an effective action; it is a counterproductive action. It is actively destructive.
adjejmxbdjdn 7mo ago
Your statement is incorrect. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you would be taking action that maximizes the chances of reducing a clear and present danger. Between Yudkowsky and the Molotov cocktail guy, which approach do you think had and is having more of an impact? An individual can rarely, if ever, enact change through violence. The history of nearly all successful movements is violence often makes change harder. Rallying people through speech is a far more successful way for an individual to enact change through violence

... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.

AndrewKemendo 7mo ago

That pesky basilisk to worry about though

kelseyfrog 7mo ago

Disagree. Just one more blog post. I swear, one more blog post will do it.

imbus 7mo ago
[dead]

virissimo 7mo ago

Does this apply to other domains or just AI? For example, if you think gain-of-function research accidents put millions of lives at risk, is the logical next step to quit your job and become a terrorist?

SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago

They are! Yudkowsky sat down with Senator Bernie Sanders last month to explain what's at stake, successfully convinced him that it's a big deal, and Sanders has now proposed a national moratorium on AI data centers (https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-ocasio-cortez-announce-ai-data-center-moratorium-act/ https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-o...) to help slow things down. That's pretty direct, and a lot more useful than random violence by random people.

jmull 7mo ago

No you wouldn't. Look at what the molotov cocktail guy accomplished by "taking direct action against a clear and present danger": Nothing, besides casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large. It's downright dumb to attempt to impose your will via unilateral violence when you aren't in a position to actually complete the goal. Note that that goes whether you're actually right or not.

PaulHoule 7mo ago
I'm not advocating for that, I'm just saying the whole thing is performative and gets taken at face value in a way that it should not be. If you wanted to be a contrarian concerned about x-risks go try to find $1B to pay Embraer or another minor aviation vendor to make a plane to do stratospheric aerosol injection or something. --- If you want my diagnosis it is, in a time of lower social inequality cults frequently tried to steal labor and money from a broad base of people. For instance in the L. Ron Hubbard age Scientology would treat you as a "public" if you had money to take and if you didn't or after you'd been bled dry you would be be recruited as "staff". Hubbard thought it was immoral to take donations without giving something in return so it was centered around getting people to spend on "auditing". Between 1950 Dianetics and the current Miscavige age, income and wealth has gotten concentrated and he changed that single element of the Hubbard doctrine and now it is all about recruiting money from "whales" who donated to the International Association of Scientologists (IAS) https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientologys-ias-trophy-winners-part-5bd https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientologys-ias-trophy-wi... (A good backgrounder on pernicious cults is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic_of_Sudden_Personality_Change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic...) In the case of the Yudkowsky thing the mass just doesn't have a lot of money to steal after paying the rent and turning the labor of the unskilled and ignorant (even if they think otherwise) is a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze, so the point is to build a Potempkin village that looks like a social movement that creates a frame where you can get money from sources such as "SBF steals it and gives it to the movement" as well as "rich kids who inherited a lot of money but don't have a lot of sense"
throwaway27448 7mo ago
Obviously, ineffective action will be counterproductive. I recommend effective action.
- handoflixue 7mo ago
  That's exactly the point every prominent member of the "Doomer" community is making: Violence isn't an effective action; it is a counterproductive action. It is actively destructive.

adjejmxbdjdn 7mo ago

Your statement is incorrect. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you would be taking action that maximizes the chances of reducing a clear and present danger. Between Yudkowsky and the Molotov cocktail guy, which approach do you think had and is having more of an impact? An individual can rarely, if ever, enact change through violence. The history of nearly all successful movements is violence often makes change harder. Rallying people through speech is a far more successful way for an individual to enact change through violence