Rationalism adjacent at best I think.
However, he's also the guy behind Worldcoin, the now seemingly defunct ocular scan based cryptocurrency, which can be described as a convoluted scheme to gather biometric data from developing countries in exchange for shitcoins, while purporting to aim to set everyone in the world up with a cryptowallet to finally usher the promised web3 utopia.
So, still highly sneerable.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/
He reads SlateStarCodex and holds it in high esteem.Which explains why he thinks automated AI-dribble sounds insightful.
Rationalist want to work for openAI.They all get hired in the EA/CFAR/MIRI ecosystem, so I'm guessing there's some rationalists there.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html)
[https://web.archive.org/web/20210213101345/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html](https://web.archive.org/web/20210213101345/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html)
"Last June, as I was reporting on the Rationalists and Slate Star Codex, I called Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab backed by a billion dollars from Microsoft. He was effusive in his praise of the blog.
It was, he said, essential reading among “the people inventing the future” in the tech industry.
Mr. Altman, who had risen to prominence as the president of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, moved on to other subjects before hanging up. But he called back. He wanted to talk about an essay that appeared on the blog in 2014.
The essay was a critique of what Mr. Siskind, writing as Scott Alexander, described as “the Blue Tribe.” In his telling, these were the people at the liberal end of the political spectrum whose characteristics included “supporting gay rights” and “getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots.”
But as the man behind Slate Star Codex saw it, there was one group the Blue Tribe could not tolerate: anyone who did not agree with the Blue Tribe. “Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?” he wrote.
Mr. Altman thought the essay nailed a big problem: In the face of the “internet mob” that guarded against sexism and racism, entrepreneurs had less room to explore new ideas. Many of their ideas, such as intelligence augmentation and genetic engineering, ran afoul of the Blue Tribe.
Mr. Siskind was not a member of the Blue Tribe. He was not a voice from the conservative Red Tribe (“opposing gay marriage,” “getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies”). He identified with something called the Grey Tribe — as did many in Silicon Valley.
The Grey Tribe was characterized by libertarian beliefs, atheism, “vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up,” and “reading lots of blogs,” he wrote. Most significantly, it believed in absolute free speech.
The essay on these tribes, Mr. Altman told me, was an inflection point for Silicon Valley. “It was a moment that people talked about a lot, lot, lot,” he said."
Do people here not realize that the major AI companies are all like this, and have been for years? Demis Hassabis (DeepMind) is a Singulatarian. OpenAI's core mission is to solve the AI Alignment problem in the MIRI-mold and usher in the post-AI utopia (we can't do that ourselves, so they want to get an [AI to help do it](https://aligned.substack.com/p/alignment-mvp)). The idea that AI development stands a good chance of killing us all is *common* (EDIT: at least, much more common than you'd think among people who are pushing the field ahead) among people working at top AI labs. They just also treat technology development as an unstoppable force, so figure the best way to help is to make sure the good guys (i.e. them) get there first. Many of these people think they have a better shot at building an AI to solve moral philosophy and then globally optimize the universe than they do of simply coordinating to not build dangerous things. The build-a-benevolent-AI-god idea is absolutely in the air at every AI organization you want to think of as being sober.
It’s a good thing they will almost certainly fail to deliver on their promised goals, because these people are near the bottom of the list of people you’d want to have access to some god like AI first.
He’s not the worst person in the world. Not an angel but he’s not blithely funding fascists. Some Yang supporters wandered off and donated to Vance, but Altman wandered off and donated to Biden.
One reason why he’s the lead in this article is because the author would like to frame Joe Lonsdale as a reasonable guy, just like Sam Altman.
With a soft spot for Roman philosophy, he has created the Cicero
Institute in Austin that aims to inject free-market principles such as
competition and transparency into public policy.
Like public policy has never taken competition into account. Like
transparency is inherently associated with free markets.
And the whole thing is that bad. Look at them taking Thiel at his
word when he says he’s not involved with rationalism any more. Look at
them pretending Sam Altman is basically the same as Joe Lonsdale.
Wait, and what the fuck is this?
But they are both part of what Mr Lonsdale calls a “builder class”—a
brains trust of youngish idealists, which includes Patrick Collison,
co-founder of Stripe, a payments firm valued at 4bn, and other
(mostly white and male) techies, who are posing
questions that go far beyond the usual interests of Silicon Valley’s
titans.
Emphasis mine. The Economist is feeling awfully mask off today,
huh?
Yeah, this is on point. There’s not really a mask off as the only thing Economist ever really gets worked up about is *modest tax decreases* and *liberalizing economic reforms* (especially if you are a very poor country.)
I'm sorry I don't really follow. What exactly is the issue with their style? Is it that they don't make any hard stances and keep themselves at a remove from injecting any criticism?
that's clearly meant to be a criticism in context-"journalistic due diligence" or whatever, "blah blah blah, oh yeah and they're most white and male, there's that box ticked off so our progressive bona fides are intact and nobody can say we didn't mention it"
Hmm. I know what you mean but I just wouldn’t call that “progressive” as much as “socially normal” — like staunchly between the op ed boards of The NY Times and WSJ.
I'm not inclined to take Peter Thiel at his word, but is there evidence that he hasn't cut ties with the rationalists?
He seems to have [stopped public donations to MIRI in 2016](https://web.archive.org/web/20220801075559/https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donee.php?donee=Machine+Intelligence+Research+Institute) and [even called MIRI out publicly for having "devolved into sort of a Burning Man camp"](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/yqxixd/peter_theil_takes_a_stab_at_miri_and_east_bay/) and abandoning its original mission.
The overall tone of this article to me sounds like the Economist is
treating these people like overgrown children who came into a lot of
money and are trying to play god with technology on their side.
oh no… the CEO of openAI is a rationalist? fuck me dude
That’s a terrible article, all right.
Like public policy has never taken competition into account. Like transparency is inherently associated with free markets.
And the whole thing is that bad. Look at them taking Thiel at his word when he says he’s not involved with rationalism any more. Look at them pretending Sam Altman is basically the same as Joe Lonsdale.
Wait, and what the fuck is this?
Emphasis mine. The Economist is feeling awfully mask off today, huh?
The overall tone of this article to me sounds like the Economist is treating these people like overgrown children who came into a lot of money and are trying to play god with technology on their side.
“free-market principles such as competition and transparency”
Pardon me? Companies try to form monopolies & cartels, and make people sign NDAs. What universe are these people from?
“This guy’s totally different than the previous guy, just look at how he dresses and furnishes his house!11!!”