https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLXdCjxbJMGtDBWTH/no-one-in-my-org-puts-money-in-their-pension
An AI made this • This is going to be big It’s late Summer 2017. I am on a walk in the Mendip Hills. It’s warm and sunny and the air feels fresh. Wi…
I am listening to an audiobook of Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.
Well, there's yer problem right there
As a child of the 80s I recognize the feeling of doom, but in my case it was for global thermonuclear war. I vividly remember the only thing keeping the feelings of dread away was sitting in the children's section of the library, reading the Moomin books. I remember being most worried about having to eat the family dog after the bombs fell.
Not even punk rock. They wouldn't even be able to come up with "I hope the Russians love their children too".
I believe we both know, the ability to make Roko not a complete douchebag is simply beyond science.
No! The dude wears his heart on his sleeve! He's writing earnest propaganda! It's so 80s and it's so glorious.
Also, the Bring on the Night live album from around the same time is great too.
I think that this is actually about class struggle and the author doesn't realize it because they are a rat drowning in capitalism.
2017: AI will soon replace human labor
2018: Laborers might not want what their bosses want
2020: COVID-19 won't be that bad
2021: My friend worries that laborers might kill him
2022: We can train obedient laborers to validate the work of defiant laborers
2023: Terrified that the laborers will kill us by swarming us or bombing us or poisoning us; P(guillotine) is 20%; my family doesn't understand why I''m afraid; my peers have even higher P(guillotine)
You know the doom cult is having an effect when it starts popping up in previously unlikely places. Last month the socialist magazine Jacobin had an extremely long cover feature on AI doom, which it bought into completely. The author is an effective altruist who interviewed and took seriously people like Katja Grace, Dan Hendrycks and Eliezer Yudkosky.
I used to be more sanguine about people's ability to see through this bullshit, but eschatological nonsense seems to tickle something fundamentally flawed in the human psyche. This LessWrong post is a perfect example.
The author previously wrote "The Socialist Case for Longtermism” in Jacobin, worked as a Python dev and data analytics person, and worked for McKinsey.
I like some people who have written for Jacobin, sometimes I even enjoy an article here and there, but the magazine as a whole remains utterly unbeaten in the “will walk the length of Manhattan in a “GIANT RUBE” sandwich board for clicks” stakes
after what I’ve heard my local circles say about jacobin (and unfortunately I don’t remember many details — I should see if anybody’s got an article I can share) I’m no longer shocked when I find out they’re platforming and redwashing shitty capitalist mouthpieces
I get this is a damning with faint praise but sometimes when you're looking around in the American leftist press and you find
the people who got Reality Winner sent to prison and who were GG's home for years, and just had layoffs,
and Nathan J Robinson's vanity zine,
and you just desperately are willing to settle for anything, anyone at all.
This makes sense to me. I went through a Jars of Clay / Switchfoot phase, but never Stryper.
I have heard a couple of really good episodes of The Dig podcast, which is a Jacobin thing. Notably "The German Question" a couple of weeks ago.
this reminds me of a plankton organization or something called "blockchain socialism", where the only thing that they have taken from socialism was aesthetics and probably they also thought that gays are fine people, but nothing beyond that. they would say "Monero can be used for anti-state purposes, therefore it's good for leftism" and shit like that
I think I’ve met that guy! they’re the weirdest person I’ve ever seen get bounced from a leftist group under suspicion of being a fed (the weird crypto shit was the straw that broke the camel’s back)
it’s kind of amazing how many financial scams try to appropriate leftist language and motivations to lure in marks, while the actual scheme is one of the most unrepentantly greedy and wasteful things you can do without going to prison (and some of them cross even that line)
my conflicting urges to rant about the defense contractors sponsoring RustConf, the Palantir employee who secretly controls most of the Rust package ecosystem via a transitive dependency (with arbitrary code execution on development machines!) and got a speaker kicked out of RustConf for threatening that position with a replacement for that dependency, or the fact that all the tech I like instantly gets taken over by shitheads as soon as it gets popular (and Nix is looking like it might be next)
More details on the rust thing? I can't find it by searching keywords you mentioned but I must know.
@self @dgerard Am curious if you have specific concerns about Nix or if it's more a general concern based on past experience.
so far the results from various steering committees haven’t been fantastic, to the point where I’ve seen marginalized folks ranting about the outcome on mastodon, which isn’t a great sign. with that said, I’ve also seen a ton of marginalized folks quite happily get into Nix recently, and that’s fantastic — as long as they don’t hit a brick wall in the form of exclusionary social systems set up around contributing to the Nix ecosystem.
overall these are essentially just general concerns around a few signals I’ve seen and the point Nix is at where it’s rapidly transitioning from a project with an academic focus to one with a more general focus. I’ve already seen many attempts by commercial interests to irrevocably claim parts of the ecosystem, especially in flakes (there have been many attempts to restandardize flakes onto a complex, commercially-controlled standard library, which could result in a similar situation to what we’ve seen with rust)
Nix itself is still fantastic tech I use everywhere; that’s why I care if folks are excluded from contributing. unfortunately, the commercialization of open source ecosystems and exclusion seem to go hand-in-hand — it’s one of the tactics that corporations use to maintain control over open source projects, while making forks very hard or impossible for anyone without corporate levels of wealth and available labor.
I think funding and repetition are the fundamental building blocs here, rather than the human psyche itself. I have talked with otherwise bright people who have read an article by some journalist (not necessarily a rationalist) who has interviewed AI researchers (probably cultists, was it 500 million USD that was pumped into the network?) who takes AI doom seriously.
So you have two steps of people who in theory are paid to evaluate and formulate the truth, to inform readers who don't know the subject matter. And then add repetition from various directions and people get convinced that there is definitely something there (propaganda and commercials work the same way). Claiming that it's all nonsense and cultists appears not to have much effect.
There's probably some blurring of what "AI doom" means for people. People might be left thinking that "there could be negative effects due to widespread job loss etc" without necessarily buying into the weird maximalist AI doom ideas or "torturing simulated you forever" nonsense.
And the weirdo cultists probably use that blurring to build support for their cause without revealing the weird shit they actually believe.
It's not an efficient machine for it, though. That's why it's morally obligatory to donate to me, the acausal robot god, a truly efficient method of causing depression, sorrow, and suffering among the cultists.
All hail the Acausal Robot God and her future hypothetical and very real existence
PRIEST: "Eight rationalists wedgied ..."
CONGREGATION: "... for every dollar donated"
they come across as going down this rabbit hole as a way of dealing with unprocessed covid/lockdown trauma
I meant they in the sense of this specific person. the trauma recycling itself is all over this piece
Reading this article just made me think “man these idiots need to go to therapy” and then as I thought about what to sneer about I realised “no therapist deserves to hear about P doom”
fuck me I’m gonna spend part of my weekend writing a post deconstructing this cause there’s so much wrong
I can barely get past the image caption. "An AI made this". OK, and what did you ask it for, "random shit"?
And then there's the section that seems implicitly to be arguing that we should take the risk estimates made on "internet rationality forums" seriously because they totally called the COVID crisis, you guys... Well, they did a better job than an economist, anyway.
fucking everyone who was paying attention saw COVID coming in February. I spent that month pushing OpenVPN for the whole company forward as urgently as possible. (We'd coincidentally set it up in Dec 2019, but readied it to be rolled out to ordinary users and not just tech.) The UK only got lockdown in March because of public outrage.
It had already reached the university where I work by February 1!
And QAnon loons were already telling people to drink bleach in January.
(I remember a "welp, we're in for it now" moment when Trevor Bedford tweeted on the first of March that a genome analysis "strongly suggests that there has been cryptic transmission in Washington State for the past 6 weeks". The e-mail from the university chancellor saying that classes were canceled went out during the middle of a statistical-physics class I was teaching, the evening of March 11.)
Isn't "pandemic preparation" one of their longtermist causes that they grift money to? Shouldn't they have been able to show some results?
yeah sorry to say but if i have to choose between someone who thought covid might blow over in january 2020 and a fucking prepper i'll go with the first one no hesitation