Roko gets all consequentialist about the allegations against Aubrey De Grey: “From a strictly consequentialist point of view, it seems that Aubrey is worth maybe a thousand times more to the anti-aging cause.”
(https://twitter.com/rokomijic/status/1425369173824245761?s=21)
posted on August 11, 2021 01:06 PM by
u/caquilino
81
u/Waytfm77 pointsat 1628688703.000000
Celine seems to be replaceable and most likely got to where she is
partly by being attractive to older men.
Holy shit, fucking incredible. “Your history with sexual harassment
is actually evidence that you have no value to the field”. We can’t take
her claims of harassment at face value, unless we’re using it to show
she’s worth less as a person.
Especially given this tweet:
[https://twitter.com/celinehalioua/status/1425234566789308420](https://twitter.com/celinehalioua/status/1425234566789308420)
What an asshole.
They have the utility calculation backwards. Instead of letting de
grey go free in hopes that he delivers something great eventually, let’s
lock him up and if he cures aging, we give him a pardon. Hell, let’s
give him electrical shocks every second he’s not working or sleeping so
he’s properly motivated. It’s just one person so torturing him for the
rest of his life doesn’t matter with respect to the potential benefits
to humanity. This is the actual “strictly consequentialist” view.
> It’s just one person so torturing him for the rest of his life doesn’t matter with respect to the potential benefits to humanity.
Exactly! What's the loss in torturing one brain now, vs infinite copies of the brain (and our brains) later in an acausal future if we didn't torture the brain now? Basilisk says torture now.
Not sure if anyone has seen it, but his follow-up tweet asking if
users would ‘be sexually abused in exchange for immortality’ is so
fucking gross I’m at a loss for words.
Aside from the vomit-inducing ideas, it is remarkable that all these
people who want some ubermenshen to be above law and ethics because of
the greater good, usually pick pretty disappointing ubermenschen. Like,
ok, you are willing to be (selectively) completely amoral, but for who?
For the grifter who promised the fountain of eternal youth and never
delivered? For the diamond fund kid who lives of market manipulation via
twitter?
They are so focused on how cool and rational and lib-owning it is to
sell your soul, that they forgot to negotiate a good price for it.
Probably I was overtly harsh. He worked pretty fucking hard, he knows what he is talking about, and so on. Yet, he did not deliver. The image proposed in the thread, in which people could have immortality if only we leave him work, is blatantly unrealistic, because anybody has let him work for the last couple decades and nothing came out of it. Which totally happens in science, just he's not von Braun or Heisenberg, he simply has nothing to offer in exchange for the immunity people like Roko are asking for him.
So he came up with free radical / mRNA mutations theory of aging, which in brief review seems near as anyone can tell is probably incorrect... edit: nope didn't even come up with it, just pushed for it in particular.
The issue with funding people high in griftiness is that they can just as easily be counter productive to the field as a whole, even if they actually put in some working hours.
Edit: particularly if they are inclined to look for what lets them make promises instead of following science. Like how with COVID there was this immense desire to have some simple cheap solution right then, hydroxychloroquine and such. Which immediately turned from "what if it works" slightly valuable research to being actively harmful to the field as a whole.
You might put him in the same category as Henry Markram, in that he has legitimate subject matter expertise but his promises are still irresponsibly ambitious.
Is he not a grifter? He isn't even an actual biologist, his degree is in computer science, he received a PhD-by-publication for his book on aging. He's a fringe researcher at best and an outright crank at worst and I don't think he'd have any notoriety if Silicon Valley vampires didn't love the idea of living forever.
A grifter is somebody who does whatever they do dishonestly or sloppily in order to make money, de Grey may play the money game, but it’s been clear the whole time that he does it honestly to further his particular dream
I’ve followed his stuff on and off since I was a kid, so I think I’m qualified to make a judgement call here
>He isn't even an actual biologist, his degree is in computer science, he received a PhD-by-publication for his book on aging.
I mean it's a legitimate book that the University of Cambridge accepted as a PhD dissertation, not a self-published Harry Potter fanfic? You don't have to like the guy but this sneer makes no sense to me.
He is a biomedical gerontologist. And he is the one that put aging reversal on the map. I am not quite sure where would be in the field without him. It's amazing how short sighted some people are thinking no progress has been made. If one would come out from under the rock they've been under they would learn a thing or two.
I mean...this would seem the norm for people willing to sell their soul? It's almost like being willing to be selectively completely amoral suggests deeper problems which also impact your ability to judge who is in fact a worthy contributor to human advancement.
I’m worried that there might be a few “EA” people who are secretly
doing these calculations, but are smart enough not to say them out loud.
A lotta awful shit can be excused by the ideology of the greater good,
especially if they are slavishly devoted to ridiculously large expected
value calculations.
Of course, it’s all pretty ridiculous even by their standards, does
anyone really think that we can genuinely be guided to a glorious utopia
by a movement that is infested with evil rapists?
a) You are assuming that they believe rapists exist, other than theoretically. Throw a low enough prior probability on accusations of sexual assault being true and rapists disappear in a puff of logic.
b) Pascal's Wager has always been the easily seen failure point of so called Bayesian reasoning. It’s well known, even inside the community. And yet, dust specks is an explicit argument that we should take gargantuan, unknowable, made up numbers seriously when calculating net benefit. The entire community is entirely obsessed with the idea of gargantuan sized outcomes, positive or negative. It’s all X-risks and eschatons.
Of course they believe rape exists. It just you know, is done by ... other groups of people, the genetically inferior ones, the non-anglo saxons if you know what I mean.
So, if its worth it to let de Grey or others harass people because of
their potential contributions to the world, why isn’t Roko signing up to
be harassed by potential geniuses? Weird that these arguments are always
arguing for the negative consequences to fall on other
people.
Honestly, I feel like the best way to respond to this kind of
longtermism is to just apply it, directly, in a way that takes
them at their word.
Oh, Aubrey De Grey is a pioneer in anti-aging*? Well, the longtermist
view would be that this person should be locked up, forced to work as
much as possible until the problem is solved, as though countless lives
depended on it… because they do. He shouldn’t have time to harass
anyone, otherwise he’s not working nearly as hard as he should.
And given that the most productive years of any given scientist are
often fairly short*, there should be no problem giving him increasingly
large doses of methamphetamines to ensure that he has as much energy and
focus as he can possibly get - sure, he might die faster, but it makes
it that much more likely he’ll actually solve this problem,
thus making this concern moot in the long term.
That’s how this works, right?
* Epistemic status: pulled directly from a particularly sweaty
orifice
> That's how this works, right?
But you have to understand: if consequences can actually happen to *one* useless bastard who talks a good game and is our friend ... then what if consequences might *for some reason* happen to *meeeeeeeee*? Clearly the imperative goal for the good of humanity is to make consequences not happen to the ingroup.
There should be a bingo for this bullshit. And I hit with making up
fake numbers to validate your sexual harasser continuing to have a
position where he can harass: Celine’s most contribution here could
easily be net-negative. If Aubrey is forced to step down because of her
actions, the number of lives lost per day is 150,000 per day that that
delays a cure for aging (or 150,000 gained if it speeds it up).
How do you know any of this? You dont have any proof for this?
From a strictly consequentialist point of view, it would be better if
some people were to drop dead…not naming any names or anything…obviously
only from a consequentialist point of view…
These people are so fucking awful. Seeing all the pseudo-intellectual
bullshit being used to defend absolutely regressive views on gender is
just repulsive.
His whole 'this is how men were made' argument falls apart pretty quickly when you hear that trans men on average (im sure there is a counter example) dont turn into sexual abusers when they get on hormones, even if they do get the increased libido.
If you were an outsider who “just wants a cure for aging at any
cost”, and you see that Aubrey de Grey has produced nothing, or even
that he has outlived his initial usefulness, then you should eliminate
him from the community so that his resources can be used by better
researchers. The cause demands no less. From a purely consequentialist
point of view.
on the other hand, consider the positive utility of giving him all those wedgies. The value to the sum of human happiness makes it a moral obligation, really.
I hope at some point in the future it just becomes the default
position in our culture to believe the no one is so irreplaceable in
terms of competence that we have to keep them in positions of power
where they could hurt people. There’s copious amounts of hard working
intelligent &/or charismatic people in the field of anti-aging.
“In 2012, De Grey inherited a considerable fortune of more than US6
million, US3 million of which he donated to the SENS Research
Foundation.[32]”
Boy, if the SENS Foundation ends up firing him over this, and the
SENS Foundation is dependent on De Grey’s work, well, that sure is some
Effective Altruism.
These idiots can’t even do longtermism properly, considering that the
possibility that endemic sexual harassment will discourage people from
participating in anti-aging research never entered their minds.
Holy shit, fucking incredible. “Your history with sexual harassment is actually evidence that you have no value to the field”. We can’t take her claims of harassment at face value, unless we’re using it to show she’s worth less as a person.
That’s very interesting, Roko. Would you like to dig down on that a little bit?
They have the utility calculation backwards. Instead of letting de grey go free in hopes that he delivers something great eventually, let’s lock him up and if he cures aging, we give him a pardon. Hell, let’s give him electrical shocks every second he’s not working or sleeping so he’s properly motivated. It’s just one person so torturing him for the rest of his life doesn’t matter with respect to the potential benefits to humanity. This is the actual “strictly consequentialist” view.
Not sure if anyone has seen it, but his follow-up tweet asking if users would ‘be sexually abused in exchange for immortality’ is so fucking gross I’m at a loss for words.
Aside from the vomit-inducing ideas, it is remarkable that all these people who want some ubermenshen to be above law and ethics because of the greater good, usually pick pretty disappointing ubermenschen. Like, ok, you are willing to be (selectively) completely amoral, but for who? For the grifter who promised the fountain of eternal youth and never delivered? For the diamond fund kid who lives of market manipulation via twitter?
They are so focused on how cool and rational and lib-owning it is to sell your soul, that they forgot to negotiate a good price for it.
I’m worried that there might be a few “EA” people who are secretly doing these calculations, but are smart enough not to say them out loud. A lotta awful shit can be excused by the ideology of the greater good, especially if they are slavishly devoted to ridiculously large expected value calculations.
Of course, it’s all pretty ridiculous even by their standards, does anyone really think that we can genuinely be guided to a glorious utopia by a movement that is infested with evil rapists?
So, if its worth it to let de Grey or others harass people because of their potential contributions to the world, why isn’t Roko signing up to be harassed by potential geniuses? Weird that these arguments are always arguing for the negative consequences to fall on other people.
slaps beard
You can hide so many accusations of sexual abuse in this bad boy.
Honestly, I feel like the best way to respond to this kind of longtermism is to just apply it, directly, in a way that takes them at their word.
Oh, Aubrey De Grey is a pioneer in anti-aging*? Well, the longtermist view would be that this person should be locked up, forced to work as much as possible until the problem is solved, as though countless lives depended on it… because they do. He shouldn’t have time to harass anyone, otherwise he’s not working nearly as hard as he should. And given that the most productive years of any given scientist are often fairly short*, there should be no problem giving him increasingly large doses of methamphetamines to ensure that he has as much energy and focus as he can possibly get - sure, he might die faster, but it makes it that much more likely he’ll actually solve this problem, thus making this concern moot in the long term.
That’s how this works, right?
* Epistemic status: pulled directly from a particularly sweaty orifice
There should be a bingo for this bullshit. And I hit with making up fake numbers to validate your sexual harasser continuing to have a position where he can harass: Celine’s most contribution here could easily be net-negative. If Aubrey is forced to step down because of her actions, the number of lives lost per day is 150,000 per day that that delays a cure for aging (or 150,000 gained if it speeds it up).
How do you know any of this? You dont have any proof for this?
yeah i can say with pretty good certainty that he’s got that calculation wrong.
From a strictly consequentialist point of view, it would be better if some people were to drop dead…not naming any names or anything…obviously only from a consequentialist point of view…
How are we going to torture immortal copies of people if they are not immortal? Moral utilitarianism at its finest!
These people are so fucking awful. Seeing all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit being used to defend absolutely regressive views on gender is just repulsive.
https://twitter.com/RokoMijic/status/1425440480037326860?s=20
IOW, while aging is fixable, men making creepy comments in the work place…well that’s just fixed.
If you were an outsider who “just wants a cure for aging at any cost”, and you see that Aubrey de Grey has produced nothing, or even that he has outlived his initial usefulness, then you should eliminate him from the community so that his resources can be used by better researchers. The cause demands no less. From a purely consequentialist point of view.
Holy fuck
Aubrey de Grey is a predator?
That’s like the last person I’d expect
can you imagine sucking this much at life
I hope at some point in the future it just becomes the default position in our culture to believe the no one is so irreplaceable in terms of competence that we have to keep them in positions of power where they could hurt people. There’s copious amounts of hard working intelligent &/or charismatic people in the field of anti-aging.
“In 2012, De Grey inherited a considerable fortune of more than US6 million, US3 million of which he donated to the SENS Research Foundation.[32]”
Boy, if the SENS Foundation ends up firing him over this, and the SENS Foundation is dependent on De Grey’s work, well, that sure is some Effective Altruism.
These idiots can’t even do longtermism properly, considering that the possibility that endemic sexual harassment will discourage people from participating in anti-aging research never entered their minds.
[removed]
thinking about this tweet but its Drake and Celine Dion (its still bad)
That’s alright!