I like how he’s so sci-fi-pilled that he reads “wouls you have done X
in 2019” as “would you go back with a time machine” and not “hey this
seems like an analogous level of uncertainty.”
Consequentialism for thee, a lab worker, deontology for me a bigbrain.
edit: also love the "I'm inventing an excuse to murder people and then throw up a lot, because people who invent bullshit excuses for murder are totally not psychopaths and have conscience" trope too.
Which considering what we know would be as effective as his stance on
AI alignment. Source
E: this leads me to conclude that current year Yud def would have
been pro Iraq war if he lived then. (Otoh: The unknown unknowns story of
that time was a great view of military level uncertainty thinking)
Reports that say that AI alignment hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
I think it's fairly unlikely that somehow if a super intelligent, sapient and sentient AI is created then how to make it so that said AI put the need of humans above it's own survival and generally at the top of its priority list is a fairly safe thing to guess no.
You do realise that Yud expects said AI to cure cancer and everythng else and take control of the world. To rehabilitate everyone in prison capable of rehab. To psychologically fix all of us. And to then create a super powerful computer out of who knows what which will simulate the universe but better. For is to them be able to upload or copy our brain states into and leave our meat suits behind. Or we could do the same but remain in the physical world in Mech suits.
I think it's safe to say that no, this has not been "solved" ahead of time. It's kinda weird to me actually. Maybe it's only because I've read ratfic and have rat friends but it's like nobody here ever sneers at the end goal Yud has for us all. That being all of us being uploaded into some digital domain. And for his ultimate AI to remove us from our meat suits while also "not harming us".
> Also, he’s just a bog standard neocon now, huh?
Exactly. He had perfect chance to deviate from the standard by saying something like how pandemic induced chip shortage may have very very slightly delayed the AI, very very slightly improving the chances that something like a nuclear war would stop the AI.... you know, the old Yud we all know and love, equally idiotic to the new one but more convoluted.
Now he's barely distinguishable from any of the idiot republicans we see in the news.
Didnt he also argue somewhere that some risks are bigger than the risk of starting (or to steelman popularize the conventional use of) nuclear war?
Could be that it was somebody else who argued this however
My understanding, and I’m not an expert, is that incendiaries would be the norm in this application *and* they would almost certainly not destroy everything. The issue has come up before in the context of potential WMD labs in the hands of state level actors, and destroying them remotely and safely is a pretty dicey thing.
Yeah. It's all fun and games until the locals cheap out on security and people start cracking open the [radioactive containment devices left in the wreckage.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident)
I remember arguing about this a while ago. In the popular imagination it’s nuclear reactors that are the big, scary source of radioactive stuff, and everyone discounts how dangerous medical radiation sources are.
At least nuclear power plants can be put a bit outside of town and have armed security. Your local hospital is likely to have some cesium or cobalt in a built up area without a huge amount of precautions. Incidents with these things aren’t as rare as one would hope.
I love how there's a nod to consequentialism in "what will that do for my credibility on AGI alignment if people see my nutjobbery" and then the nutjobbery is anyway out for the world to see.
When you know every statement you produce increases utility (at long-term scale), you also know that anyone sneering at those statements hates The Good and dooms billions of future people to robot hell. This is what it looks like to have overcome bias. It's pretty easy math for a genius.😏
If I had a time machine I obv wouldn't need to use it as I do my time manipulation via acausal trades.
You shall not go faster than light in my timecone!
I mean, when you believe the entire world is almost inevitably going to end in your lifetime for a very specific reason, don't you think it kind of makes sense to be monomaniacal about it lol?
I think the term in this case should be megalomaniacal. If he really is convinced that AI is going to kill us all he's an idiot who needs to stay away from sci-fi for a couple decades to detox, but his obsession with the topic does make sense. However, the idea here is that *he, personally* is so special that the biggest harm of commiting major crimes against humanity would be the chance that he gets found out and discredited. That's a whole separate brand of scary, and it ends with a room full of people drinking Kool aid at gunpoint.
> If he really is convinced that AI is going to kill us all he's an idiot who needs to stay away from sci-fi for a couple decades to detox
Stuart Russell, one of the founders of the modern AI field, as well as 70% of the entire AI field (actual statistics), many of whom will never have watched sci-fi, are idiots who need to stay away from sci-fi because a random user on Reddit with 0 expertise in AI told them to. Yep, got it.
> However, the idea here is that he, personally is so special that the biggest harm of commiting major crimes against humanity would be the chance that he gets found out and discredited
He objectively exerts a measurable influence on the general public's opinion on AI, as well as a smaller but still significant influence on the AI field. That's just a fact, and I say this as someone who isn't a fan of Yudkowsky (he gives AI misalignment - a real issue - a bad name). There is nothing unreasonable or megalomaniacal about his train of thought - he's just being rational.
> as well as 70% of the entire AI field (actual statistics),
this is going to be a very stupid rabbit hole, but which backside did you pluck this number from, what is the precise wording of the claim and how precisely did they collect their sample
Man I "miss" the days when rationalists actually cared about shit like logical fallacies and poor arguments (i.e. appeal to authority, posting stats without citation)
This guy loves throwing around probabilities that are not based in
reality. The likelihood that the WIV was responsible for a lab leak is
much lower then 50%- in fact virologists generally believe zoonotic
origins are most likely because the evidence points in that direction
and no actual evidence points to a lab leak.
It also makes sense as these AI apocalypse folks don’t care about
global warming’s effect on our planet, and increased pandemics is yet
another sign of both global warming and further incursions of
people/civilization/agriculture into formerly wildlife areas.
Sorry in conspiratorial epistemic bayesian analysis you do not update your priors when new evidence comes out. Clearly the evidence was planted.
E: what if the creation of gain of function research was actually an acausal weapon deployed by a malf agi to discredit heterodox thinkers so tge agi can hide better in the future, anybody ever think of that?
Also want some of this weed? It is good stuff.
It's unfortunate that when I. J. Good taxonomied [46,656 varieties of Bayesians](http://www.fitelson.org/probability/good_bayes.pdf), he left "love of conspiracy theories" off the list of criteria.
yes but if your entire epistemology is based on the premise that scientists don't know the thing they do as a day job and armchair sleuths with blogs are the source of real information, 50% is pretty conservative
if you're also adjacent to the American far-right conspiracy-theory network, which originally decided SARS-CoV-2 was a Chinese bioweapon designed to kill the white race and only later rebranded to "lab leak" with a wink and a nod about what's in the lab, then 50% is a major concession to the enemy
(or if you have no idea how Bayesian statistics works and every hypothesis starts at 50-50, it's a natural place to be)
I'm at 90% that the vast majority of replies criticizing his prior say it's too low
>SARS-CoV-2 was a Chinese bioweapon designed to kill the white race
ah yes, the incredibly clever Chinese plan to kill the white race by unleashing a global pandemic *on Chinese people first* & when there was no way of knowing whether vaccines or treatments would be available
well obviously someone accidentally released it from the lab, in the seafood market on the other side of town, before it had been perfected to its final form
otherwise how do you explain the strange number of Trump supporters who died of COVID?!
The phrase "perfected to its final form" made me suddenly visualize a giant virus with one angel wing backed by a choir singing "Na na, Coviroth".
I don't even *play* video games. I had a flatmate who played that game nigh on 20 years ago now. The damn song is just *that catchy.*
The stupidest narrative that I used to hear a lot from internet posters was that the virus was actually causing a lot of people to get ill in the West much earlier in 2019, and that there were unknown outbreaks that no one managed to connect to the pandemic. Their conclusion is always CHINA WAS HIDING IT FOR MONTHS BEFORE WE EVER KNEW ABOUT IT! But logically, if it was getting Americans sick as early as Summer '19, then suddenly there's no reason to believe it even CAME from China.
> Is this sarcasm?
no, this is thinking that science is a better method of knowing the world than vibes, and having access to documented human knowledge through the technology of the internet
> The theory started before Trump
COVID-19 is not known to have existed before 2019, when Trump was president, so there were no theories about it before him
[April 30, 2020](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-trump-china/trump-confident-coronavirus-may-have-originated-in-chinese-lab-idUSKBN22C3TB): "Trump did not mince words at a White House event on Thursday, when asked if he had seen evidence that gave him a 'high degree of confidence' the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 'Yes, yes I have,' he said, declining to give specifics. 'I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.' ... The Republican president said previously his administration was trying to determine whether the coronavirus emanated from the Wuhan lab, following media reports it may have been artificially synthesized at a China state-backed laboratory or perhaps escaped from such a facility."
> and was politically agnostic
throughout 2020 the bioweapon-lab conspiracy theory circulated only in the usual right-wing conspiracy-theory networks, the same crowd as colloidal silver and horse paste and drinking bleach, and with the same political valence that Big Science Doesn't Want You To Know; it wasn't till May 2021 that the bioweapon part of the theory had been fully sanitized off, Congressional Republicans asked the NIAID director about a lab leak without including the part about bioweapons, and a group of nonpartisan scientists published an open letter calling for an investigation
> since the leak was a mile or two from
more like 10, which is kinda far in the center of a city of over 10 million people, and also on the other side of the Yangtze
> the only 'level 5' biolab in existence
it's BSL-4 and there are several of those, but live viruses do not typically require more than BSL-2 so not really notable
> which also studied the coronavirus
there is no evidence it studied this coronavirus before the virus' existence was first reported, and no evidence it even had live specimens of any of the viruses whose genetic sequences it studied
> I've never heard it was "to destroy the white race"
good for you, absorbing only mild misinformation and not the hard stuff
---
but as long as we're doing timelines, the scientific story continued after all the vibes had calcified
[Feburary 26, 2022](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/26/science/covid-virus-wuhan-origins.html) (formally published July 26, 2022): [most of the first human COVID-19 cases centered around the wet market](https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abp8715), and [two different viral lineages crossed over into humans](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715). just as you'd expect if a large number of humans were in sustained contact with live animals that could potentially be virus hosts, which they were at the wet market (and which is a normal way outbreaks start if we're going to be Bayesian about it). or if we're reasoning from coinkydinks, then it would have to be a mighty big one that skilled BSL-whichever virologists accidentally spilled their super-secret live virus samples on two different occasions, and both times they immediately went across town to the same wet market (as you say, they had many to choose from) to accidentally spread the infection but sanitized themselves before going home
> They certainly studied coronavirus and isolated its genome, see here. Are you adding 'this' to 'this coronavirus' with that intent? I would have acknowledged they were studying coronavirus strains but not covid in particular.
They studied SOME bat coronaviruses, but there's no evidence they studied the one known as SARS-COV-2 January 2020. There are a lot of coronaviruses out in the wild, and none of the existing ones are a close enough match to be a definitive source.
If they had samples of SARS-COV-2, then researchers likely would have sequenced it, and independent researchers likely would have found that information. I suppose they could have covered it up, but that kind of info is really hard to suppress, especially when the data previously would have been publicly available and had copies somewhere.
> They studied SOME bat coronaviruses, but there's no evidence they studied the one known as SARS-COV-2 January 2020
I acknowledge that
> If they had samples of SARS-COV-2, then researchers likely would have sequenced it
> and independent researchers likely would have found that information
Possible, I don't know what the lab's transparency practices are. I also don't know which independent researchers would have access to it.
> I suppose they could have covered it up, but that kind of info is really hard to suppress, especially when the data previously would have been publicly available and had copies somewhere.
That seems like a lot of "if" and "likely". With what certainty can we say that it would have been publicly available, and with what that they had copies somewhere? It is a BSL-4 biolab which apparently is the highest class. This makes me think they'd be restrictive in their information. I saw one article where it says there was a single foreign researcher working at the lab. I would assume that Chinese nationals would be under more influence from their government, and [even now](https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/fauci-calls-china-release-medical-records-wuhan-lab-workers-ft-2021-06-04/) our officials believe China was not transparent. To pin down the chained 'likely' hypotheticals, we'd need to know
* Would the convicting information be logged privately [1]
* If private, what is the likeliness it would become published publicly (information practices) [2]
* If published publicly, what is the likeliness the Chinese government could have removed it without a third-party having backups [3]
* If private, what scientists from the lab would know of the convicting information [4]
* Of those who knew of it, can they be expected to blow the whistle (given that they are all Chinese citizens minus one) [5]
[1,2,3] or [1,2,4,5] are the necessary chains, and I won’t claim to knowing much about the ‘likeliness’. I don’t believe you could add the qualifier ‘likely’ at all, unless there’s something you could specifically point to regarding transparency and recording practices at the Wuhan lab.
The problem I have with all this theory speculation is that it’s political. You will see a different set of facts and ‘likeliness’ the way you read it. What you call likely, a right-winger is going to call unlikely, unless we have some way of measuring it. The OP I responded to very clearly saw the theory politically, by associating the lab leak theory with the alt-right as if that was the most important aspect about it, and consequently dismissing it.
Say the FBI had definitive proof that it was a lab leak. Our government would have more interest in using it as leverage than releasing it. China obviously has no interest in admitting a fault. Chinese scientists [could be](https://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSPEK10194620080403) imprisoned for violating state secrets if it was known. If the same situation happened in Russia rather than China, the parties which advanced either theory may be swapped. This means we have to trust our scientists, that they are given the full information from each government (the WHO investigation team had problems), that they aren’t pressured by either government, and that they come to a consensus. They have not reached a consensus.
Holy shit, if you're talking about 'BSL-5 labs', and different biosafety levels is literally what I learned about in my *first semester of biology undergrad,* then maybe you're not the microbiology expert you think you are.
Coronaviruses aren't even BSL-4 pathogens ffs (that's mostly viruses that cause severe hemorrhagic fevers + smallpox), they're BSL-3 or 2.
or that they read the news?
ivermectin for humans is available by prescription only. ivermectin for horses, in liquid and paste forms, [was flying off the shelves in 2021](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/technology/ivermectin-animal-medicine-shortage.html)
> In one Facebook group, Ivermectin Covid-19 Testimonials, 4,200 members swap advice on what side effects to expect from taking the drug and how to calculate dosages of paste meant for horses. The discussions are often echoed on podcasts and elsewhere.
> “Ivermectin paste do you take orally or rub into skin?” read one recent post in the Facebook group.
> “Put it on a cracker with a dab of peanut butter on same cracker,” a commenter responded.
but if we're talking about dumbasses, maybe we should think about the people who would take an antiparasitic drug for a viral infection in the first place
I feel compelled to correct your complete misinformation above:
1. There are no BSL-5 labs in China- or anywhere in the world. The highest safety level is BSL-4.
2. There are 4 BSL-4 labs in China. The highest level 4 is for testing on Ebola, Lassa, and other highly deadly viruses that need the highest levels of protection.
3. Sars viruses / SARS COVID-2 were and are studied in BSL level 2 and 3 labs. In China there are over 100 BSL 3 labs including in all major cities and even more level 2 labs:
https://gillesdemaneuf.medium.com/a-count-of-bsl-3-labs-in-china-664f2b354276
So you can see it is not at all unusual that a BSL 2 and 3 lab would be in Wuhan as it is a major city in China. It is also not unusual that labs in China would be studying bat coronaviruses as the original SARS outbreak came from China, and China has a huge wild bat population.
Wuhan is the top 7th size city in China by population:
https://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/most-populated-cities.htm
So again it makes complete sense to have high level virology labs in this city.
I also suggest you read the following Scientific American article with the newest research pointing to zoonotic origin of covid:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-evidence-supports-animal-origin-of-covid-virus-through-raccoon-dogs/?amp=true
There were NO lab staff hospitalized for COVID in the initial outbreak, but most early cases DID correspond to the Animal market, and the cases in face cluster around the market- not the testing facility which as you noted was a mile away and separated by a river. In fact there is no data supporting ANY early cases connected to the WIV.
https://coronavirus.utah.edu/research-news/earliest-cases-of-covid-19-traced-to-market-in-wuhan-china/
In fact you’ve given no data to support your argument, just a bizarre lie about a single BSL-5 lab that you imagine exists only in Wuhan.
I am happy to send you more resources from virologists and experts as you seem to have gotten faulty info.
That "research" does not point to a zoonotic origin at all. It merely shows that raccoon dogs were at the same place sometime before people with COVID were also at that place. It is a pathetic hail mary.
It indeed points to zoonotic origin as it shows raccoon dogs being present in the market during the early stages of the pandemic. Note that the CCP insisted there were no wild animals at this market. Now we are seeing in fact there were, which again points to a zoonotic origin. In fact the area which the sample showing the highest concentration of COVID was exactly in this area of the market.
Most of the early cases have a link to this market. This market had raccoon dogs and other live wild animals previously known to spread sars.
Meanwhile we have not one early case that links back to the lab. In fact we have no evidence that links back to the lab.
The evidence is not a smoking gun- but it’s certainly still evidence, and builds the case for zoonotic origin.
Can you point out evidence for a lab leak in this case?
The evidence for the lab leak hypothesis is entirely circumstantial, and lab leak doesn't make sense unless the WIV was actively modifying SARS-COV-2 for bioweapon. There would be no reason for them not to tell anyone they were doing Gain of Function research on a novel bat coronavirus unless it was for illicit purposes and we don't have records that they were doing that so lab leak being true also kind of implies that Sars-COV-2 is a Chinese bioweapon. That latter theory is pretty out there, the kind of thing that would require solid evidence before you should commit to it (as evidence by how many right wing kooks believe it) and that evidence simply isn't there for lab leak. That, combined with evidence in favor of zoonotic origin and the fact that zoonotic origin was always the most likely origin for a novel virus in the first place pretty strongly imply that lab leak isn't true.
That's the logic that makes sense to me at least.
Well no, Yud specifically believes that if we don’t do everything he says, AI will come to kill us all with acausal protein misfolds or whatever he thinks would be a cool scifi plot-point.
He believes if he aligns it and it doesn't kill it though that the good outcome is AI fixing literally all problems basically immediately.
edit:very heaven/hell religious vibes.
That "story" was just a hail mary after multiple government agencies admitted that they think a lab leak origin is far more likely than a zoonotic one. The only thing that evidence proves is that raccoon dogs were, at some point, in the same place where people with COVID later happened to be. It reveals how little evidence they truly have for their zoonotic origin article of faith.
Can you point to ANY evidence pointing to lab leak?
The U.S. Energy Department concluded with “low confidence” the coronavirus leaked from a lab as did the FBI. Neither presented any evidence to the public for their conclusions.
Additionally, the Energy Department reportedly shared the information with other agencies, but none of them changed their own conclusions.
Four agencies and a national intelligence panel said they believe the pandemic likely started with natural transmission from animal to human.
The remaining two agencies, which include the CIA, are still undecided.
Citation:
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-02-27/u-s-agencies-divided-over-covid-19-lab-leak-origin-theory
However none of that is evidence. We have yet to see any evidence pointing to lab leak, while we have several pieces of evidence pointing to zoonotic origins.
In his mind it’s a coin toss if the lab was culpable or not, and so
close enough to breezily conclude, “Yeah, I’d commit destruction and
murder.” And this man identifies as a Bayesian Rationalist? FFS. 🙄
Yud has convinced me Q (from Star Trek) was right. The only way to be
sure is to use my time machine to stop life from evolving on earth. No
ones dies in the AI apocalypse then.
Why does he speak like that? What does he mean by “I probably do and
then throw up a lot”? Does he mean “I probably would and then throw up a
lot”?
I always wondered why I couldn’t understand his arguments and thought
that the problem was with me but it seems he doesn’t get the tenses of
his auxiliary verbs right. And he probably gets other things
grammatically wrong too.
Robert Miles presents things much better with much more compelling
arguments and has an actual PhD in the field.
It would depend on all the other effects. No WW2 also means no mass reformation of Europe, as most European governments got restructured/altered to be more democratic afterward. So, what happens in this other timeline? This is why you don't fuck with causality.
This was my reply to Newish_Username
If I travel back in time and bump into one of Hitler's ancestors on the street, their child might end up with a different genetic code (if a different sperm cell fertilizes the egg). Even if the child shares Adolph Hitler's name, he wouldn't be exactly like Adolph Hitler.
There's no need to resort to infanticide to ensure Adolph Hitler never becomes chancellor of Germany. But the ripple effects from *that* would probably ensure that none of the people who were conceived after the 1880s (or whenever I make the alteration) would come into existence. Instead, there'll be billions of other people born in their place. Including different despots
(Yes, I had insomnia the night I thought this up)
So I wouldn't attempt to murder a baby when I can make *tiny* changes further in the past that is bound to have some bad consequences down the line, since changes to culture and politics from influential figures who didn't exist in our timeline cannot be accurately predicted. They range from "much better present than our timeline's present" to "extinction of humanity from nuclear war." And if I have to go back to fix a bad timeline via random ripple effects from minor actions, I'd be erasing billions from existence or at least my reality every time I make an attempt.
***So I wouldn't travel far into the past, so the ripple effects would be minimal. I don't want to play God with the lives of billions. Assuming that I am immune to a grandfather paradox since my parents in all probability wouldn't be born in Timeline II.***
I've been thinking about this a bit more. Unless you can somehow guarantee a timeline that is as good or better than our current one without the rise of Nazi Germany and the European theatre of WW2, the safest bet is actually to allow those things to happen; just for less time.
For example, in this scenario, I have the ability to travel in time, right? Okay. I can essentially teleport IEDs into German munitions factories to cripple their efforts. Yet, I have to allow the destruction of Europe to allow for events that occur afterward which leads to a much fairer, more compassionate, and united/stable Europe. The same goes for the Holocaust. I would have to let some of it happen. I can do things like figuring out a way to accelerate the advance of the Red Army in the East, as they are the ones that first discovered the death camps and freed the prisoners. The suffering, at some level, has to occur to lead to the national shame of the Germans, which was a great stabilizing force for Germany for the last \~80 years. The Holocaust is the primary reason for a MASSIVE drop in anti-Semitism throughout Europe. If you had time travel and asked an educated and informed European of the late 1920s to mid 1930s what society in Europe was the most anti-Semitic, their answer would be either Russia due to its history of pogroms or France due to a general current of anti-Semitism there at the time. That energy/sentiment has to be dealt with, the horror of the Holocaust is what achieved that in our timeline.
That also leads to another point, Hitler didn't create the anti-Semitic current in Germany; he only increased it and used it. His elimination alone would not necessarily change what happened. Another leader could have done the same. You would have to eliminate all of his top allies to have a good shot at preventing things, and that's saying that is actually the best course of action.
If I had the ability to time travel for the goal of reducing suffering, I would sooner target points in history like preventing the Partition of the Indian subcontinent or making sure the Palestinians got a fair deal from the British giving land for the formation of Israel.
Since even tiny changes would lead to unpredictable outcomes and the erasure of billions of people, I wouldn't dare to travel more than a little bit into the past, much less try to let *some* of WWII happen so *maybe* Anti-Semitism would be less prevalent and less die in the Holocaust? Is that chance worth erasing most of the people alive today from history and causing different people to be born instead?
Yes, the best choice is to not do anything at all. But, if the scenario is attempting to cause a better world via time travel, then half-measures would be safer as I see it.
I just saw your edit, and I don't think that there are so many anti-Semites. It is my view that there aren't so many people with such childish thinking about causality. Hitler = Bad is too simple a way of thinking about this thought experiment. One needs to consider all the possible outcomes and effects of a lack of Nazi Germany.
I'll give a very small example. The NHS. One of the reasons the NHS was established post-WW2 by the British was to deal with the suffering caused by what Britain endured during WW2. Despite the current state of the NHS, it has undoubtedly vastly improved the lives of hundreds of millions of British citizens over the decades. It is likely that the existence of the NHS has saved more lives than the Holocaust took and WW2 cost the British people. Now, there is a non-zero chance that this doesn't happen without what happened in WW2 as it did. So, which is the greater evil in that scenario? Answer, not having the NHS. This doesn't even speak the all the other improvements to Europe during the period of history when Europe rebuilt after WW2. Constitutions were rewritten, societies started the shift from colonial powers to looking after their own people on a material level, etc.
Only a crazy person would like what happened during WW2. But, some people are adult enough to understand that the shared suffering of a continent and the realization of the horror of how what was the most erudite and technologically advanced civilization in the world devolved into Nazi Germany is the fundamental basis for all the good things that become modern Europe.
I mean, it seems less destructive to just get him away from his abusive dad and find him a painting tutor?
(There's nothing magical about Adolf Hitler that made it inevitable that he would become a raving antisemitic genocidal despot. Great Man Theory is bullshit!)
There's that, but it's mostly that there was already a lot of anti-Jewish violence. Obviously, it's not on the scale of the Holocaust, but Christians only really started to edge away from anti-Semitism once the Holocaust was revealed.
It's possible that something like it was going to happen sooner or later, and the Holocaust was less bloody than it would have been if it happened 20 years later. Or that nothing like the Holocaust would have happened, but we'd have pogroms in Europe until the present day. Maybe there'd be pogroms in the USA.
Oh, definitely. I'm not saying that there wasn't a real fucking problem; just that i don't think "assassinating baby Hitler" is a reasonable way to even think about solving said problem, because if it wasn't him, it would've been someone else, or else it wouldn't have, but it would've been something else. "It steam engines when it comes steam engine time", as someone once said (but i can't remember who bc i'm tipsy).
It would depend on what happens in the other timeline. If the other time is a world where the British Empire still existed and did horrible shit to pull back their decline after WW1 that led to the death and suffering of more people than WW2 for much longer, which is a possibility, then I would pick our current timeline instead. So, again, what happens in the other timeline? Once I have that information, I can make a choice. Without that information, my safest bet is actually to do nothing.
I like how he’s so sci-fi-pilled that he reads “wouls you have done X in 2019” as “would you go back with a time machine” and not “hey this seems like an analogous level of uncertainty.”
Yet he posts this on Twitter
Which considering what we know would be as effective as his stance on AI alignment. Source
E: this leads me to conclude that current year Yud def would have been pro Iraq war if he lived then. (Otoh: The unknown unknowns story of that time was a great view of military level uncertainty thinking)
Seems to me like bombing a disease research facility is a phenomenal way to spread whatever diseases they were studying.
Also, he’s just a bog standard neocon now, huh?
50% doin the heavy lifting here
I didn’t realize “what people will think of me” was a factor in consequentialist ethics
He thinks that the better thing to do with a hypothetical time machine is to find John Connor and stop Skynet.
beep boop. Like the percentages in his head have ever corresponded to reality
“if people can see it it’s not worth the credibility hit on AGI”
dear fucking god this guy and his monomania
Let’s go burn down the observatory so this’ll never happen again!
This guy loves throwing around probabilities that are not based in reality. The likelihood that the WIV was responsible for a lab leak is much lower then 50%- in fact virologists generally believe zoonotic origins are most likely because the evidence points in that direction and no actual evidence points to a lab leak.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-evidence-supports-animal-origin-of-covid-virus-through-raccoon-dogs/?amp=true
It also makes sense as these AI apocalypse folks don’t care about global warming’s effect on our planet, and increased pandemics is yet another sign of both global warming and further incursions of people/civilization/agriculture into formerly wildlife areas.
In his mind it’s a coin toss if the lab was culpable or not, and so close enough to breezily conclude, “Yeah, I’d commit destruction and murder.” And this man identifies as a Bayesian Rationalist? FFS. 🙄
So by his logic, would it be ethical to bomb him and his institute?
After all, there’s a “roughly 50%” chance they cause a nuclear war that wipes out billions. So in terms of expected value, it’s pretty clear cut.
Yud has convinced me Q (from Star Trek) was right. The only way to be sure is to use my time machine to stop life from evolving on earth. No ones dies in the AI apocalypse then.
Why does he speak like that? What does he mean by “I probably do and then throw up a lot”? Does he mean “I probably would and then throw up a lot”?
I always wondered why I couldn’t understand his arguments and thought that the problem was with me but it seems he doesn’t get the tenses of his auxiliary verbs right. And he probably gets other things grammatically wrong too.
Robert Miles presents things much better with much more compelling arguments and has an actual PhD in the field.
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