Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
Sorry for the X screenshot but XCancel is shut down from legal pressure.
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Post by Evan Hubinger on Sep 8:
Quote tweet by Jasmine Sun on Sep 9:
Normally I’d sneer at their 10% chance of extinction claims, but now that I think about it, if you take their claims seriously at face value, you realize just how these people are monsters. We rightly condemn brutal dictators who commit genocide, but even their crimes would pale in comparison to anything with a 10% chance of exterminating all of humanity.
These “reasons” are laughably indefensible given the supposed stakes here. The first is already terrible, and they just get worse.
Now, I think that these people sincerely believe that AI has a 10% chance of wiping out humanity, because their minds have been poisoned by Rationalist ideology. Their Rationality is so effective that after Bernie Sanders took their premises at face value, they were shocked when Bernie immediately came to the conclusion of locking these people up for 20 years.
There are two specific aspects of Rationalism that cause this mysterious blind spot. First, they believe that superintelligence is inevitable, which conveniently removes responsibility from the people actively trying to bring it about. Second, they treat everyone outside the Rationalist sphere as NPCs who dutifully follow the directions on their script. The rule of law does not even occur to them as they treat the extinction of humanity as just another dinner table conversation starter.
#3 suggests that people in tech have gotten way wayyy too comfortable with saying “hey, I know that company’s evil, but it’s a really good job” about companies that make software for arms manufacturers or ICE or surveillance, so of course people who think AI might kill us all think it’s ok to work for AI companies even if it might cause an extermination.
I find the techno-determinism specifically fascinating because it’s so self-perpetuating. Like, everyone believes they can do a better job than everyone else at building the right robot God, and every person working on it is, according to their own beliefs, accelerating the problem they’re worrying about. It speaks to how aggressively they see themselves as special, like they’re protagonists and everyone else is NPCs. I can’t think of any other way to justify the pattern of “this is a terrible idea that will kill us all except when I personally do it.”
Which XKCD comic is it that has the subway full of people pitying everyone else for being mindless sheep? Mix that with the Arrested Development gif of Tobias contemplating an open marriage.
Reading this, I get the feeling writers are gonna get a lot of mileage out of the rats and their ideology.
These people have spent years attempting to create something they believe represents an existential threat to humanity (causing untold real-world harm in the process), and they’ve remained fully convinced that they’re the good guys throughout every single step of this.
All 3 of these reasons make them monsters. 1 and 2 are saviour complex bullshit and 3 is just pure greed and selfishness
In this day and age, if I see someone talking about major life decisions in terms of +/-EV, I turn on my heel and walk away rapidly. It was kind of cute when this jargon was entering wide use during the online poker bubble, but that was 20 years ago.
This third category is the Patrick Bateman types who would have mainly been confined to finance at the turn of the century. They probably picked San Francisco over New York in part because they were worried the New Yorkers might make them wear a suit.
I’ve been thinking more about this lately, and my metamodel of the rationalist world model (if I may get away with such a pretense) is that they subtly believe that the future is already something crystallized, even if they don’t consciously realize they hold this belief. It is not really a probabilistic philosophy, no matter how much they assert that. Intelligence, to them, is a function that can more and more precisely apprehend the future as it escalates to greater values along the g-scale, and the singularity will manifest an intelligence that can do so with practically absolute precision (hence its prophesied ability to outcompete and replace humans).
When I’m talking to people who haven’t encountered this stuff as closely, I half-jokingly describe the reflexive assignment of probability estimates as a devotional practice akin to prayer or meditation… but it really is! It’s a subtle invocation of the AGI/ASI god, in that I make this imprecise estimate now, to demonstrate my belief in a precisely quantifiable future; but come the singularity, God will relieve my feeble human brain from having to commit this lamentable imprecision. In that reckoning, those who are not even willing to venture an imprecise esimate must have no intelligence worth noting.
What if someone is taking a photo at a wedding, but the scene metering is a bit off, so they apply a +1 EV bias to bring the shadows into view and wash out the background?
(in photography land, EV is ‘exposure value’)
I guess I don’t hang out with enough photographers :)
Ya see, we’re being charitable when we call them grifters instead of genocidaires.
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down, that’s not my department says Wernher von Braun.
Wernher von Braun is the way better comparison. Just maybe not one we like to make, since he basically got away with it and died an icon of U.S. space exploration.
Goering was pretty unapologetic at Nürnberg afaik, since he knew he was getting the rope.
RE: https://circumstances.run/@mawhrin/116216862870866670
@jaschop @Architeuthis aha.
At what point does doing something you think will result in the end of the world become attempted murder?