LessWrong is a machine for causing depression in its cultists
LessWrong is a machine for causing depression in its cultists
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.
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)
and about climate change, the actual existential risk
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
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 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
Many of them started down the path long beforehand.
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.
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
You will be doing the Acausal Robot God's work.
lol what a fucking loser
Fucking love me some Big Yud snark posting