Exilian
Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter => Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza => Topic started by: dubsartur on November 23, 2022, 06:57:52 PM
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I am wondering whether to give in and do a newspaper-clippings-and-ball-of-string map to show the connections between the American Rationalists, American or Right Libertarians, Effective Altruism, 'human biodiversity' (sic), neoreaction, and the American pundit-economists with blogs (plus a few figures with lives and influence off the Internet such as Steven Pinker and Peter Thiel). I am so not surprised to learn that the rationalists started writing Harry Potter fanfic and ended up shilling the FTX ponzi scheme.
A lot of effort has been put in to spread these ideas in the California and New York tech spaces. This Tumblr post is not bad but does not get into the 'scientific' racism or the connections with economists with a PhD and a blog or a newspaper column https://leviathan-supersystem.tumblr.com/post/180724263214/what-is-lesswrong-and-can-you-summarize-why-its (This RationalWiki entry (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander#Race_and_IQ) is not bad on them and race theories but focused on one prominent figure rather than the faction within that space which likes to cite Razib Khan and has racist cranks posting in their comments). OTOH, you can waste your life documenting people on the Internet who push terrible ideas or terrible people.
Edit: thinky professional centre-left mag Vox discovered neoreaction a few weeks ago https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23373795/curtis-yarvin-neoreaction-redpill-moldbug It also fails to draw the whole network of connections (S. Alexander and R. Hanson are not just "ideas bloggers" but part of specific subcultures where there is sympathy for neoreaction).
Edit: also, back in the Before Times, Dominic Cummings' blog seemed to be drawing on some of these communities (although I don't remember any sign that they noticed him).
Edit: Back in the Internet Feminism Wars of the early 2010s, a famous rationalist blogger wrote an essay with an infamous paragraph comparing feminists to Voldemort. I am told that was a response to an essay by journalist Laurie Penny who went on to skewer cryptocurrency scammers! (https://lauriepenny.substack.com/p/ship-of-fools) So this is a tiny tiny space with dense connections and far too much public drama. (Which is one reason why descriptions of these spaces are cluttered with personal attacks and misleading insinuations).
David Gerard cites the following two posts as early attempts to move 'race science' into rationalist discourse
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould
He mentions someone called Aella (https://nitter.ca/davidgerard/status/1556391089124286467) who I never heard of.
Edit: someone spelled out Cummings' connections to the rationalist movement without being quoted on their connections to shady and not just weird ideas https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/demis-hassabis-the-deep-mind-dominic-cummings-turned-to-as-the-pandemic-hit
as well as being a generally respected scientist, (Cummings advisor Dr. Denis) Hassabis is linked to the rationalist movement, which has guided much of Cummings’ thinking.
“We know that Dom is rationalist-influenced from his own blogroll and comments,” says Tom Chivers, author of a book on the movement, The AI Does Not Hate You. While Hassabis is not himself a member of the community, his involvement in advanced AI research brings him into the same circles.
“What rationalism implies from a policy perspective is a big question,” Chivers says, “but you can see something like it in the effective altruist mode of thinking: trying to separate emotional responses from outcomes. And, by extension, it can lead to serious thought about long-term existential risks, AI and bio-terror, because they have the potential to crush human flourishing in the long term.”
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A blogger in Australia has also noticed that figures and tropes from the Social Media Right from the early 2010s are being talked about again (https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2022/11/27/the-weird-attempt-at-a-2014-revival/). Two people tried to restart the Internet Feminism Wars from that period with me in the past week, and I am sorry but I won't touch that with a dragonlance.
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I guess my view with some of this weird Very Online Politics stuff is that I think it's maybe worth working back to it from anything with hitting power (politicians, tech barons, mass media, etc) that it might have influenced, but probably not forward from it starting with it as a core premise. So I think the Cummings or Thiel connection might have some interest as a product of this milieu and its influence on wider society, more than the milieu is per se interesting in and of itself for example.
I never really know if I should learn more about some of this stuff: I suspect it might be information my brain doesn't actually need, in that I'm not sure what I'd usefully do with it if I did know how some of these groups fitted together? My interest in politics is a fairly practical (or at least policy-level) one, and I don't think my own political movement (here meaning "the UK tradition of radical liberalism") has been all that drastically influenced by the weirder end of blogosphere currents.
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I guess my view with some of this weird Very Online Politics stuff is that I think it's maybe worth working back to it from anything with hitting power (politicians, tech barons, mass media, etc) that it might have influenced, but probably not forward from it starting with it as a core premise. So I think the Cummings or Thiel connection might have some interest as a product of this milieu and its influence on wider society, more than the milieu is per se interesting in and of itself for example.
I never really know if I should learn more about some of this stuff: I suspect it might be information my brain doesn't actually need, in that I'm not sure what I'd usefully do with it if I did know how some of these groups fitted together? My interest in politics is a fairly practical (or at least policy-level) one, and I don't think my own political movement (here meaning "the UK tradition of radical liberalism") has been all that drastically influenced by the weirder end of blogosphere currents.
One thing I noticed is that some American spaces in the 2010s which proudly stated that they were focusing on politics because that was much more important than geekery didn't seem to start acting on politics. They just kept talking about politics online and yelling at people who had hurting wrong labels. But to do electoral politics, you need to build coalitions with people you are different from around common interests! And those coalitions have to be built around electoral districts, not weird global ideologies.
I would also respectfully suggest that many of these figures have serious hitting power in the form of a receptive audience of thousands of professionals, many of whom build and maintain New Media systems. The average racist with logorhea does not count, but S. Alexander probably does, so so many of the pundit-economists such as Yglesias.
I agree that if you try to learn about these spaces and their influence you will hear far more than you want to hear about who bedded whom, who snubbed whom on Tumblr, etc. The RationalWiki article I linked has that problem, so do David Gerard's birdsite posts. And many of these people's most notable achievement is writing or talking endlessly online.
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And those coalitions have to be built around electoral districts, not weird global ideologies.
In fairness this is most true in the Anglosphere: you can have a much more ideologically-driven coalition in theory in a lot of other countries, though there are limits to that (one of the reasons that the Austrian right-liberal NEOS never gets above ten or twelve percent is that it's not socially conservative enough for the conservatives but anyone on the left thinks their economic policies are absolutely nuts.)
I guess I agree that pundits like Yglesias do have a meaningful amount of power, but I do wonder how much: their political preferences aren't terribly well represented in actual policy or electoral results, as far as I can tell. Though maybe their professional-leaning and media-type audiences do mean they have outsize narrative power or possibly outsize financial power or executive power over all the bits of government nobody really looks at much (they might concievably reach and influence a much higher percentage of political donors or special advisors than voters).
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On the open web, the classlc example was that right or American libertarians were big, whereas that ideology basically only exists as an organized movement in the USA, and even in the USA has very little influence on policy. It was just fashionable with white American men in the IT industry and SF fandom, and that demographic had an outsized influence on open web culture.
I would argue that in systems with proportional representation, the relevant electoral districts are "the areas across which votes are distributed." Even if you want a national or state policy, then you need to organize people within your nation or state. Organizing a bunch of fellow travellers from Switzerland and Oregon won't help you get policies enacted in New Hampshire or Quebec.
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Yes, I think that's very fair on both counts. Though "we need to get a chunk of 1% of the ten million or so Dutch voters" is maybe at least in theory a much easier lift for a niche ideology than "we need forty percent of voters in a specific geographical block of 50-60 thousand people in England". That said, the Dutch parliament does actually rather lack e.g. a weird overly-online neoliberal party, though it has various weird far-right brands, a splitting constellation of small parties on the left, and some long-standing niche religious parties. I guess maybe the wide array of "normal" parties give most people some bit of ideological flotsam to hang onto.
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This is bringing up big nihilistic topics I don't have energy to tackle.
In the USA, electoral politics have to be 'big tent.' So eg. if you are a Democrat who wants to get things done, you have to be willing to work with Black Christians even if you are neither, and you absolutely can't define yourself by being angry at either even if that goes well on social media.
I don't see any way of knowing who is actually influential this century. Journalists on birdsite say that they sometimes write opinion pieces for American policy magazines with an intended readership of one (and people in Washington DC have seen very specific ads posted along commuter routes to specific agencies and departments). Journalists in Canada say that all important federal policy decisions are made behind closed doors at the PMO by appointed (not elected) advisors whose only interest in evidence is the evidence of polls. I would expect that politicians have the same lazy epistemology as most people, so their opinions come from their friends and newspapers and magazines and social media. There are lots of policies which are widely supported but can't get enacted because of status quo bias or because a small group is very firmly for the current policy (eg. marijuana legalization / decriminalization had won all the arguments by the 1990s but took until the 2010s to be enacted).
As a heuristic, I would assume that anyone who earns their living sharing opinions on policy is influential (unless almost all their income comes from a single patron). So the pundit economists would qualify, and arguably S. Alexander since the NYT doxed him (although he gets paid through Substack which is funded by other people's money, and its possible to create a bunch of fake subscribers to funnel money his way and make him look influential - the same scam as buying birdsite followers). But I agree that their influence is mainly in New York State and California tech communities, where people are often not very good at electoral politics (although they build media systems and allocate capital).
As far as I can tell, most people are not interested in electoral politics at all! That is why newspapers used to print the story of a trial every single day, to catch the people who just flipped through a paper every so often rather than read the same paper every day.
I have a conversation about anything serious with people I don't live every month or so during the pandemic. My friends are scattered around the world. Yes, the Internet is written by crazy people with too much time on their hands. But how on earth could I know what most people in my area think?
The Old Media are mostly dead and get most of their info from social media and press releases these days anyways.
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The Effective Altruism movement came up on Mastodon. That seems to have a number of factions. There are groups like GiveWell whose point is "if you claim to be doing good with donations, prove it! and isn't it generally easier to reduce suffering and death in poor places than rich places?" There are a lot of well-funded charities whose mission is "raising awareness" or "advocacy" or who can't produce photos of all the schools they say they built. https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities As far as I can tell, they are still around and still have the same basic approach of reducing sickness and death among people alive today (these are easy to measure, whereas its hard to measure the effect of "raising awareness").
There is Longtermism who like speculative risks and who have been infiltrated by the people who are worried that chatbots will be like the AI in Terminator or Reign of Steel or The Forbin Project. "Longterm" or "existential risk" means the future of humanity and avoiding human extinction (or keeping humans alive long enough to transition into digital minds). If you believe that the welfare of trillions of potential future humans is an end that can justify any harm to actually existing human beings today, you can talk yourself into doing terrible things. This is a known danger of Utilitarianism (https://crookedtimber.org/2022/11/13/a-rant-on-ftx-william-macaskill-and-utilitarianism/) as well as Christianity, Communism, and other belief systems which envision an end. Eg. someone got on twitter and started calling for bombing unlicensed AI research facilities, even in the territory of other nuclear powers, and there are a lot of people whispering "why help millions of poor brown people when we should be focused on stopping engineered bioweapons from wiping out humanity oh look I have the blueprints for a lab to do that right here and for just a billion dollars plus operating costs ..."
There are the 80,000 hours people who argue that the best way to do good is to get a high-paying job and donate the proceeds (80,000 hours is the time you spend in a 40-year career). This can clearly be an honourable way to live, but because humans are rationalizing not rational, this can become an excuse to live in luxury on other people's work doing all kinds of damage in the name of the Cause. What is publishing propaganda for a tobacco company or mining a few mountaintops if you build some nice libraries?
And there are the grifters like Sam Bankman Fried who wanted to donate to improve their reputations, or want to suck up donors' money. They seemed to find longtermism and 80,000 hours useful smokescreens.
If you read things published before Sam Bankman Fried's Ponzi scheme collapsed, you can find hints that groups 2-4 were gaining more influence because they brought money and charisma https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism And a lot of people are outraged by the grifters and frightened by the Longtermists / AI risk movement so they have launched a propaganda counterattack with the whole Effective Altruism movement as a target. I don't have the contacts in that space to say how much of it the Longtermists and the grifters control, I suspect the answer is "more than I would have guessed."
The New Yorker estimated the EA movement's assets at around USD 30 billion in August 2022. That is also much more than I would have guessed in the early 2010s when groups like GiveWell seemed to be a small part of the charitable sector.
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The New Yorker article also has a hint of sexuality:
In graduate school, “I started giving three per cent, and then five per cent, of my income,” he (Effective Altruism philosopher William MacAskill) said. This wasn’t much—he was then living on a university stipend. “I think it’s O.K. to tell you this: I supplemented my income with nude modelling for life-drawing classes.” The postures left him free to philosophize. Later, he moved on to bachelorette parties, where he could make twice the money “for way easier poses.”
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When MacAskill took his vow of relative poverty, he worried that it would make him less attractive to date: “It was all so weird and unusual that I thought, Out of all the people I could be in a relationship with, I’ve just cut out ninety-nine per cent of them.” This prediction was incorrect; in 2013, he married another Scottish philosopher and early E.A., and the two of them took her grandmother’s surname, MacAskill.
That is harmless but compare the polyamorous household which ran Bankman-Fried's ponzi scheme (and his girlfriend Caroline Elison making comments about a Chinese harem) and the reports that LessWrong guru Eliezer Yudkowski encourages female fans to compete for his attention at sex parties. I don't like sticking my nose into people's private lives but powerful men among the grifters and LessWrong 'rationalists' use power in ways that raise red flags (cp. Ayn Rand deciding that Objectivism demanded that she trade husbands with one of her students and the student could not object without rejecting Objectivism).
Edit: some good keywords to bring up cultlike behaviour among the 'rationalists' if cults are not a trigger are "Leverage Geoff Anders"
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Yeah. I feel like the pushback against EA stuff is a bit linked to the big pushback against Net Zero in environmentalist circles, and in general against the idea of "I can do a bad thing and balance it with a good thing" which utilitarianism kind of has a risk of. It probably helps that these causes tend to have the traditional villains of the left heading them in that it's largely a movement among people in high paying and somewhat more damaging sectors.
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I have not seen that connection! Net zero seemed like a figleaf for "maybe we can save some of the ways things are done right now if we invent magical technology." (or for scams pretending to plant trees in Brazil)
I agree that the 'scientific' racists with lots of time to post on the Internet, the LessWrong and SlateStar 'rationalists', and the Longtermists are not likely to cause more destruction than one airliner crash. Rich people give money to strange or scammy things all the time, so while spending $80 million to prevent Skynet seems like a bad use of that money, its probably no worse than a donation to a church, or We Charity, or the PAC for Electing Bad People.
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I'm not sure it's a very visible connection, just two things that have the same zeitgeist and underlying argument of "the things that the rich people are doing that nominally are about saving the planet are actually about protecting their ability to do harm in a deniable way". And yeah, in terms of bad impacts 80 million to prevent skynet is probably a lot better than the Electing Bad People PAC, but it certainly doesn't count as a good use of money either.
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And while you can quibble about the GiveWell style of Effective Altruism, I think its true that donors who follow their strategy will reduce suffering and death more than donors who give more or less at random to worthy-sounding causes with honest-looking local representatives.
The problem with risks which have not happened yet is that its not clear how to tell how likely they are, or how damaging different outcomes would be, or what actions that we can take today might actually reduce them. Humans are terrible at predicting the future and since chaos theory we know that many aspects of the future are inherently unpredictable. Eg. nobody predicted how much containerization would change the logistics of transport, not the longshoremen, not the shipping companies, not the business press, not militaries with logistics problems, not the port authorities. Many of them believed that it could reduce transport costs, but not that it would almost complete replace breakbulk and enable whole new modes of manufacturing based on importing subassemblies by sea. And if the Port of London and the Longshoremen of New York had funded a Containerization Research Institute in the 1920s, its not clear that they could have stopped the transition (or that that would have been good!)
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Yes. I don't think trying to work out what will happen in the future is a wholly valueless exercise, but in general, I think it's a good rule of thumb that you're likely to get a better future first and foremost by producing a better now: if we had a society more robust at fixing its present problems, that'd be likely to be a society better able to cope with the strain of any new problems.
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This essay on AI cult longtermism came up on Mastodon https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo One of its points is that this movement simultaneously believes that humans have a duty to turn the universe into simulated humans, and that the greatest threats to humanity's future are radical near-future technologies. So they have the problem that they push for aggressively developing dangerous technologies (its hard to imagine humans expanding outside the solar system without radical biological and information and energy and propulsion technologies), but also see these technologies as something they must control even at the risk of nuclear war or unchecked global warming.
In my view, long-term predictions (ie. centuries not trillions of years) of a system like the human species are obvious quackery.
I am sure there are forms of longtermism focused on 10,000 year clocks (https://kk.org/thetechnium/neal-stephenson-and-the-10000y/) and seed banks in the Arctic and other practical things, not on conquering the universe and stopping Skynet.
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Another handy essay on the connections between Bostrom's Longtermism, the "speculative threats" kind of effective Altruism, the rationalist movement, Steven Pinker, and race-and-IQ 'science' (sic) https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/ Again, there are the longtermists who are building millennium clocks in Arizona and seedbanks in the Arctic, and the Effective Altruists who point out "before you donate to We Charity look if someone has independently verified their accomplishments and whether others are doing the same for less money" but dangerous quacks are trying to appropriate the names for their own uses.
Edit: A Timnit Gebru @timnitGebru@dair-community.social coined the term TESCREAL for these weird Internet and California / New York / Oxford spaces (although again, not all Effective Altruists!)
#TESCREAL stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism. Émile P. Torres @xriskology@mastodon.bida.im coined it in our upcoming paper. Great to see everyone following the bandwagon of a secular religious cult.
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I'm not sure I know what extropianism or cosmism are...
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I'm not sure I know what extropianism or cosmism are...
I could not define them either but I imagine she says something in her paper.
There is a lot of overlap in these spaces and ideas that don't seem obviously related like race 'science' keep coming up in them. I think that is one reason for the social media offensive focusing on people and painting with a broad brush so the eugenicists and racists and builders of hierarchies can't just rebrand.
I have trouble getting too angry with Scott Alexander because clever lonely dudes with blogs rarely do much harm (and the NYT did not need to publish his legal name to show his connections with shady people and advocacy of dubious ideas), but I would not recommend entrusting any of these people with a hot dog stand, they often push terrible ideas or get grifted by terrible people. The AI Foom people have a thought experiment "what if you lock the AI in a box and it persuades someone to let it out?" and I think the David Gerards of the world are scared that someone is trying to let these ideas out of weird Internet communities and geeky clubs in San Francisco, New York City, and Oxford and let them control serious money. And they are not polite Canadians so they play dirty.
I see that Maciej Ceglowski was suspicious of Nick Bostrom's ideas before that was cool https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm (and he moved in those same software and venture capital circles in California)
Edit: I think I have finally found the essay which lays out the connections between these people without personal attacks, unverified claims, or misunderstanding arguments https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapter-1-the-wunderkind Professor Nick Bostrom's 1996 email endorsing 'scientific' racism was on, you guessed it, the Extropians mailing list which Extropia's Children begins with (1996 is a long time ago and I have no idea of Bostrom's current views, but the idea of a racial hierarchy of IQ comes up frequently in these spaces and it is one reason to be suspicious of them, given that even 1996-Bostrom said "I have begun to believe that I won’t have much success with most people if I speak like that" and given that he did not wholeheartedly renounce these ideas in his appology at the start of 2023 (https://thetab.com/uk/oxford/2023/01/12/senior-oxford-uni-academic-argues-blacks-are-more-stupid-than-whites-in-unearthed-emails-29768))
Edit edit: and unsurprisingly defenders of Longtermism accuse Emile P. Torres (they/them) of misrepresenting their arguments. Torres and others certainly spend a vast amount of time and energy criticizing these movements but these movements do seem to control billions of dollars and influence policy. And what I have seen does not make me think that sitting down and reading key works by Longtermist thinkers would make me wiser or happier. We all have limited time and attention. https://markfuentes1.substack.com/p/emile-p-torress-history-of-dishonesty {lots of twitter drama on this one}
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Yes. I don't think trying to work out what will happen in the future is a wholly valueless exercise, but in general, I think it's a good rule of thumb that you're likely to get a better future first and foremost by producing a better now: if we had a society more robust at fixing its present problems, that'd be likely to be a society better able to cope with the strain of any new problems.
Activisty types sometimes object to bednet Effective Altruism on the grounds "it does not address the underlying causes, just the symptoms." And while that seems true, "cure children in Botswana of parasites which will stunt their growth and health" is much more tractable for busy people in London or Chicago than "solve the global, national, and local inequities which lead to so many children in Botswana getting infected in the first place." Its also much easier to know whether your actions are improving what you say they want to improve.
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Yes. I don't think trying to work out what will happen in the future is a wholly valueless exercise, but in general, I think it's a good rule of thumb that you're likely to get a better future first and foremost by producing a better now: if we had a society more robust at fixing its present problems, that'd be likely to be a society better able to cope with the strain of any new problems.
Activisty types sometimes object to bednet Effective Altruism on the grounds "it does not address the underlying causes, just the symptoms." And while that seems true, "cure children in Botswana of parasites which will stunt their growth and health" is much more tractable for busy people in London or Chicago than "solve the global, national, and local inequities which lead to so many children in Botswana getting infected in the first place." Its also much easier to know whether your actions are improving what you say they want to improve.
Yeah, I think this is a complex problem that internet discourse tries to simplify too often: one doesn't want to never try and fix underlying problems, that's really bad, but it's also morally bad to simply tell people they have to sit and die while you spend all the money on funding the grand progressive takeover of the world which may or may not happen. But it wrongly becomes an either/or for too many people.
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Its also probably the case that the people who go into "bednetting" EA are better at solving well-defined, context-independent problems than at squishy things like land reform in Malaysia or getting the right people elected and appointed in Ploughkeepsie. Just like the average person who glues themself to a crosswalk in Berlin probably lacks the money and skills and personality to build a windbreak forest in the Sahel. That does not mean that one type of action against climate change or poverty is hurting wrong.
Some aspects of rationalism, longtermism, etc. are hostile to this kind of thinking but other parts of EA seem to be open to dividing donations between a few strategies. But I didn't know anything about Longtermist EA before fall 2022!
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For an interesting counterpoint, a friend on Facebook shared this article which pushes back on the TESCREAL idea by splitting out the component parts and suggests that Gebru etc are joining more dots than actually exist on some of this:
https://medium.com/institute-for-ethics-and-emerging-technologies/conspiracy-theories-left-futurism-and-the-attack-on-tescreal-456972fe02aa
I think there are some fair points in there but I'm not sure I'm convinced as a whole - in that I didn't think all these people and groups were in a single evil cabal anyway, and that my concern is not nefarious scheming so much as wasting vast amounts of money in ways that tackle imagined problems over and above present ones and fail to recognise the actual legal and social adaptations we need urgently. The authors of this piece do recognise that, but I think they brush past the organisational, reputational, and movement scale problems that things like EA have right now.
Some of the apologia from EA advocates I know feels like the Lib Dems who in 2015 were just outraged the electorates was rejecting them because they had tried their hardest to stop Tory overreach: but a lot of the criticisms of them and especially of some of their most prominent advocates were also substantially true and people knew it, so that wasn't going to be enough for people to trust them again for a while.
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My first thought is that in the part I know best (the rationalists and economists with blogs), sneering at people who see connections and mutual influence as conspiracy theorists is dead wrong. Its a fact that leading thinkers hung out on the Extropians mailing list in the 1990s and later became publicly enthusiastic for ideas which former buddies had promoted in the 1990s! Its a fact that of the three most prominent rationalist bloggers who are not economists, two have expressed enthusiastic support for scientific racism (and a very young Bostrom did so, and his recantation suggests that he is still interested just not sure about the 'genetic' part). Its elementary that people often adopt ideas from their friends, family, and lovers, one basic form of political lobbying is to organize nice meals or parties, invite fellow travellers and the people you want them to influence, and let nature take its course. No one person in this space has the same terrible ideas or sinister goals, and its not reasonable to ask a member of the public to keep straight the difference between Eliezer Yudkowski and Robin Hanson.
Edit: A random look at Caroline Ellison's Tumblr (https://web.archive.org/web/20191224190021/http://worldoptimization.tumblr.com/) showed me a post which begins "btw a link from SSC sent me down a rabbit hole of reading (scientific racist blogger) hbd chick and related links lately and the whole intellectual edifice is pretty fascinating. I don’t have a great summary, and epistemic status tentative so you should just read the blog and follow the rabbit hole yourself. "
I can not speak to longtermism since I have not read key works and do not know the key figures. So I can't say how well the Internet criticisms represent it. There may well be some conspiratorial thinking in Torres and co's belief that small passages show a hidden agenda. But I have seen Caroline Ellison's tumblr blog computing the suffering of fish on a scale with the suffering caused by specific human diseases, and everything I know about singulitarianism screams "run. Do not engage. Its a trap for minds like yours, in the way that a confidence game is a trap."
OTOH, I agree that I have not heard of any major sinister Transhumanist groups and I have never heard of Cosmism or Extropianism. I also agree that some of the critics have a beef against utilitarianism, which can be a useful ethical framework if you don't go too far.
"Perhaps the best example of grounded, careful thinking on these topics is Nick Bostrom’s book 2014 Superintelligence," Ceglowski is not an intellectual but his takeaway from that book was that it was designed to catch people with a weakness for clever ideas.
"An attack on rationalism has to be understood in light of the postmodernist critique of rationality." No, most of us who run screaming from those people (and especially from the LessWrong crowd) are scientists and makers who, as Evans said, deeply distrust their building of castles on the clouds before they set a single stone upon a stone on earth. I agree that its common for people in these spaces or adjacent ones (eg. Michael Shermer or Richard Carrier) to ignore Hume and argue that the one true morality can be deduced from the study of the world by formal logic. But Kant and Hume are not postmodernist thinkers!
"we see its connections to reactionary (as opposed to liberal or centrist) political views as exaggerated" The Rationalism of the Rationally Speaking podcast is full of young sheltered Right Libertarians, polls of the SlateStarCodex readers show that active commentators skew right or right libertarian while readers are more like a sample of the US population. See also Robin Hanson and the Marginal Revolution guy, or Peter Thiel's funding of MetaMed and Yudkowski's foundation (this essay describes Thiel as a Transhumanist but he has funded Yudkowski's flavour or rationalists).
One of the key points of Dan Davies' Lying for Money is that fraudsters want you to be overwhelmed with a million details, while successful prosecutors want you to focus on the broad outlines of the scheme. I think that is what critics like Timnit Gebru or Maciej Ceglowski are doing. Its fair to tell the average person to run screaming whenever a 'rationalist' or longtermist wants them to do something in the real world. Its not reasonable to spend endless time arguing semantics about individual thinkers' politics or exactly which of these terrible ideas they support at a given time. I think they are tarring the innocent and the guilty with the same brush, but I think they would say "yes this is unjust but it will force the decent people to distace themselves from the rationalists and longtermists if they want to get anything done offline."
Edit: Hughes, the author of the Medium piece, co-founded his organization in Boston (yellow flag for this family of ideas, its not so infected as SoCal NYC or Oxford but close) with Nicholas Bostrom (red flag!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Ethics_and_Emerging_Technologies
Edit: so TL;DR I think that Evans' approach to these spaces (https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapter-1-the-wunderkind) as a social space where people adopt each others' unusual ideas and support each others' hilariously doomed projects is the best I have found; maybe supplement it with one of the early criticisms of the singularity or the AI as god by a pop culture figure such as Doctorow. Don't let the drama and the "he said, she said" distract you from the key point that many rationalists and longtermists support some disturbing things and have a history of failure whenever they try to do anything other than post on the Internet and hold geeky social events.
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On a nerdy level, apparently the late Daniel Ellsberg had some writing on the limits of quantified probability as a model for rational decisions eg. in a paper "Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms." The rationalists are prone to doing arithmetic on made-up numbers as if it proved anything, and to waving around the term "Bayesian" when they mean "updating your opinions as you learn new things." One reason I thought the bed-net EA worked relatively well is that they had actual numbers to calculate on and seemed to put thought into the source of those numbers.
If they let a lot of that money be diverted to buying castles and paying friends to sit in a room imagining how to deal with malign superintelligences, that seems like a bad criticism (especially if donors thought they were contributing to bed-netting and actually got a bunch of autodidacts with dreams about things which might happen in the future). And so does the connection with Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX fraud.
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Back in April 2018, SBF barely survived accusations by the board of Alameda that he was a serial liar who refused to implement basic corporate controls against fraud and embezzlement and had sexual and romantic relations with subordinates (the board and half the staff left instead). People involved at the time say that MacAskill and the rest of the Oxford EA movement were thoroughly informed but still accepted SBF's money and spoke in public about how wonderful his businesses were: https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism-alameda-ftx/
Edit: economist John Quiggin talks about what happens if we try to maximize average utility rather than total utility (because total utility is what leads the Longtermists to dream of conquering the universe and turning the solar system into a giant computer simulating minds, just like minimizing suffering leads to the conclusion that humanity should end itself) https://johnquiggin.com/2023/07/30/against-the-repugnant-conclusion/ There is an Isaac Asimov story where humanity has reduced the biosphere to humans, algae tanks, and a few lab animals, and someone notices that they could reach perfection by euthanizing the animals and authorizing a few more human births
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Interesting thread. Behind the Bastards did an SBF update recently (https://youtu.be/S54GrXDjokg?si=snIvNiDfdW9B279q), which was my onboarding for Effective Altruism.
I don't find it very surprising that there is a connection there with Utilitarian thinking, through his parents. While I do think we owe some debt to consequentialist arguments for the improvement of social equality, I'm very suspicious of the attempts this tradition makes at 'solving' morality like a mathematical equation. We cannot help but fall into all kinds of absurd paradoxes once we seek to ground morality in outcomes alone.
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This is certainly an interesting topic I've vaguely encountered floating around. To me, the main concern is that this vague constellation of beliefs is held by and seems to be viral among people with such an outsized degree of wealth. These people have the power to waste (not only their own) time, energy and resources on what seem to me to be ultimately doomed ventures, based in many cases on false premises. For example, transhumanism is based on technology that is so nascent at present that it's barely even experimental and singularitarianism requires that the pace of technology improvement is exponential, despite (in my opinion) the distinct observation that it is stagnating. By fuelling research into such sci-fi technologies, we lose the opportunity to instead spend those resources on things that would help people more immediately, with less risk, and as a sure deal. It's also concerning that the desire for such futuristic tech is also causing corners to be cut, such as the tragic cruelty shown at Elon Musk's Neuralink.
However, I get the impression that while these beliefs are truly held by many, they also provide a utilitarian purpose of driving hype in technology to the end of lining the pockets of their adherents. Sam Altman may well believe that the singularity is coming, say, but I rather get the impression that hand-wringing over the field of "AI" requiring regulations is more to do with driving up the public perception of OpenAI's chatbots than it is genuine concern over the future of humanity. I'm not overly familiar with Effective Altruism, but I had the feeling that it was always more about PR and justification of amassing vast wealth than it was about actually helping people.
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Does anyone else know the story of Matthew White's atrocitology? He is a librarian who ran a classic 90s and oughties website where he collected statistics about early diasters in books and encyclopedias. But he was an uncritical compiler, so most of his sources were just books by people which just read earlier books and picked a number which felt right, so garbage in, garbage out. Most of the books he used did not have data, did not have a rigorous method for estimating, and did not have a rigorous method for choosing between earlier estimates, they just made up a number or picked between earlier numbers.
Steven Pinker loved the site when he was writing The Better Angels of our Nature (published 2011) because it was full of numbers and citations and he wanted numbers and did not care how they were created. He got White a contract to turn his website into a book with a big trade publisher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Big_Book_of_Horrible_Things), and he used White's numbers in his book. If you knew that part of the early Internet, you knew to be very skeptical of this big data which was bad data (http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2018/12/when-big-data-are-bad-data.html). But Pinker's books probably reach 1000 times as many people as careful scholarship with reliable methods.
I have briefly talked about how Pinker seems to toy with race 'science' and has occasionally supported people who push race 'science' although again I am not doing the strings-and-pushpins-on-a-wall thing. But this shows how obscure person with red flags (White's lack of achievements endorsed by trained historians, the racists' racism) + famous person with credentials and Old Media connections = misinformation explosion
Edit: "According to White, the Atlas (his webpage that includes the atrocity statistics) been used as source by many authors, including in 377 books and 183 scholarly articles" ia cthulhu cthulhu ftaghn
Edit: In his 2011 book, White estimated that Genghis Khan killed 40 million people in China (about 2/3 of his total estimate from WW II, which also involved mass slaughter in China) based on a book by McEvedy and Jones which is such bullarmadillo that there are articles dedicated to explaining the problems. ia cthulhu cthulhu ftaghn
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Molly White's latest post on the trial of Sam Bankman Fried is clear, focused, and without too many random acronyms or angry asides https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-fraud-was-in-the-code
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I greatly enjoyed that Molly White piece, her writing on the cryptocurrency world in general is well worth reading. It's almost surprising to see such clear and readable code for doing fraud---you'd expect something more obfuscated than an "infinite money" flag.
On the topic of Sam Bankman-Fried, the linked tweet in https://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2023/10/08/underestimating-shakespeare-and-real-numbers/ (https://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2023/10/08/underestimating-shakespeare-and-real-numbers/) to me exemplifies the nonsense within the over-quantification that comes in "rationalist" spaces. It's utterly alien to me that the fact that it's unlikely that Shakespeare is literally the greatest writer that has and will ever be is taken as a reason to dismiss his works. As the article itself suggests, I don't think we can assign a real number to "literary greatness," and even if we could there's still plenty of reason to read works not by the Empirical Greatest Writer of All Time.
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I can't see that quote because its a screenshot behind a scriptwall on twitter and not archived on nitter.
One of the many reasons I wonder what happened to education in the USA is that "garbage in, garbage out" is classical computer science (like Charles Babbage is supposed to have made a joke about it and technicians were including it in their 'introduction to electronic computing' for journalists in 1957). The rationalists often have little or no formal education in probability, statistics, or computer science and the crypto grifters often know even less about the technical side of blockchain but Sam Bankman-Fried is supposed to have an undergraduate degree in physics. But making up numbers to express opinions in pseudo-statistics is fashionable among the rationalists, and SBF was trying to appeal to them or blend in with them.
Which gets us back to how these communities are interlinked, conduct money and influence, and often have a front which looks mostly harmless and a covert wing which is dubious or criminal. Where most rationalists and the effective altruists stand on a "useful idiots to swindlers" spectrum is a judgment call but there are groups at the core of these spaces with clear, sinister goals.
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I can't see that quote because its a screenshot behind a scriptwall on twitter and not archived on nitter.
Voila, here it is :)
(https://i.imgur.com/KaMigfx.png)
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People in these weird Internet communities tend to simultaneously dismiss the value of education and worship pop science books, so suggesting that going to university makes you a better writer would be controversial there. But SBF was just a clever superficial dude high on proscription stimulants running a bunch of fraud and embezzlement so I'm not sure how much thought went into that tweet.
In general, I see tweets as the equivalents of what a drunk friend says in private at 11 pm.
Edit: Scott Alexander essay from 2017 describing how many US persons in finance, competitive exam-taking, etc. want adderall; others in the rationalist subculture experimented on themselves to self-optimize with various substances (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nootropics) https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ (Alexander did not discuss the common side effect of impulsivity, just uncommon side effects such as psychosis and Parkinson's disease, and he said that in his professional opinion as a psychiatrist adderall will help most people focus) FTX's pet psychiatrist had some weasel words about how his patients among the staff used these drugs at similar rates to other finance workers.
David Gerard misrepresents this in service of a higher truth as "he (= Scott Alexander) told the rationalist subculture it made you into a financial genius" ("focus better" is not the same as "genius"). IME he does this a lot; he knows these people's Internet posts and the Internet gossip about their private lives, but you can't trust him on the details.
I hope the fact that a subculture that grew out of Southern California encourages experimenting with mind-altering substances and unconventional sexual relationships does not surprise readers. Or that this movement has gurus and Leaders who get accused of taking financial and sexual advantage of their position.
Edit: one of the American tech billionaires just successfully seeded a manifest (https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/) onto Hacker News only for the posters there to notice "hey, he cites the Futurist Manifesto as a model and a lot of their followers became Fascists! And if 'Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.' how is that different from venture capitalists deciding who to shower with money and connections and publicity because they worked for the right company in 1997?" So even the wannabe Silicon Valley startup people are getting the message.
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One useful thing from Gerard (https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/10/26/the-beautiful-mind-of-sam-bankman-fried/): SBF spilled his guts in a text thread with journalist Kelsey Piper (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy) (currently at Vox). Piper promptly published part of the exchange.
Piper was one of Scott Alexander's examples (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/) of someone who desperately needed Adderall but was kept from it because people with ADHD have trouble completing long bureaucratic procedures, and he had her on his blogroll under Rationality. So she seems to have been part of the SoCal rationalist subculture in 2017. And SBF has complained that he is not getting the heavy dose of adderall which he was accustomed to. So SBF texted indiscreet things to a fellow traveller, who was also a journalist and shared his interest in proscription stimulants, not a random journalist.
This is a small densely-connected space and the connections are not always obvious to a casual observer even if they are documented in endless detail online. I already discussed how little interest the media had in exploring what Dominic Cummings' connections to the rationalists implied about his ideas and associations, because those were blog posts not tweets.
Edit: I also note that the online-and-tabloid, Moscow-based newspaper The eXile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_eXile) (1997-2008) had both journalist Matt Taibbi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbil) (who I don't know but seems to have slipped into that Glenn Greenwald space 'calls himself a lefty but really likes Putin, Assad, and conspiracy theories about lefty Anglos') and pottymouthed commentator John Dolan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dolan_(writer)) alias Gary 'War Nerd' Brecher (today,YouTuber LazerPig has a similar voice). Dolan supposedly taught as an adjunct English professor in BC circa 2006-2008 and was interviewed by understimulated Internet racist Steve Sailer in 2003 (https://web.archive.org/web/20170808073034/http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7021). Around that time Christopher Wylie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Wylie) the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower was leaving school in the same city.
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I genuinely wonder if a prosopography of internet thinkers and movers and shakers of the 2000s-2010s would actually be a useful piece of research work for someone to build (I'm not volunteering, I should hasten to add, though it's the sort of project where I'd happily give thoughts on the data modelling).
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I genuinely wonder if a prosopography of internet thinkers and movers and shakers of the 2000s-2010s would actually be a useful piece of research work for someone to build (I'm not volunteering, I should hasten to add, though it's the sort of project where I'd happily give thoughts on the data modelling).
I think some people tried something like that with their projects on Rational Wiki, but they didn't have any thoughts on visualization or organization, and they didn't have a Rankean goal of just figuring out who was connected to whom. Jon Evans, "Extropia’s Children" (2022) tried to be a prose account in the style of Nevala-Lee's Astounding!
Edit: the Pinkerite blog has an essay with diagrams on what it sees as Steven Pinker's racist and far-right connections (they make a good case that Pinker is intrigued by race 'science' and quietly boosts some people who believe in it)
Piper's Vox article certainly did not spell out that she had social connections to Sam Bankman-Fried, although she describes her section of the newsroom as "effective altruism-inspired".
I'm just trying to understand how these weird Internet people were so much more successful at offline networking and getting resources for big projects than my weird Internet people. Ok "do crimes" and "lie a lot" can help for getting access to resources!
Edit: a few years ago I would have pegged all these spaces as somewhere between the Los Angeles SF Society in the 1960s and the kind of people who hang out in comment threads, as big on talk and unconventional opinions but mostly harmless. There are worse things in the world than shy people with opinions I think are bad. But it seems like they got their hands on some levers of power.
Edit: anyone familiar with the rationalists sees Piper's page at Vox (https://www.vox.com/authors/kelsey-piper) and her Twitter account (https://nitter.net/KelseyTuoc), sees "Tyler Cowen Bryan Alexander AI risk existential risk YIMBY effective altruism," let alone the endorsement by Scott Alexander, and hears "here be a rationalist." And that is obviously relevant to a story where an EA- and rationalist-linked fraudster sends her texts confessing to misdeeds. But it took another clever angry lonely person in Australia to spell out the connection.
Edit: David Gerard's blog post has a beautiful sad moment where after criticizing rationalists for disagreeing with (all?) psychologists about IQ, and criticizing the rationalists as lacking offline achievements, he has to criticize psychiatrist Scott Alexander for talking about Adderall in the wrong way. To my knowledge Gerard has no verifiable expertise in psychiatry, he is just a sysadmin and journalist. Gerard thinks offline achievements and expertise are valuable until someone he hates has them (and because he obsessively follows the rationalists' internet posts but seems to rarely attend their parties, he blames a lot on Internet posts and less on the fact that drugs are popular in the USA and Adderall and cocaine are especially popular with bankers in the USA and "its medicinal!" is a really popular excuse for getting zonked)
I have seen this kind of pseudo-skepticism, where people cite 'the authorities' when they mean Wikipedia or what a friend told them experts think, a lot since smartphones came out. Gerard rightfully criticizes the rationalists for reading pop science books and thinking that makes them experts, but that does not stop him from pronouncing about the G/IQ construct with the confidence of Eliezer Yudkowski.
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Patrick McKenzie has a good long rant about how on one hand cryptocurrency scams grow out of the small worlds of Internet subcultures and colourful characters, but on the other hand they spread through Anglo institutions like cholera through an army camp. Neither journalists, not police forces, nor financial regulators, did much to stop them; two Canadian pension funds invested sums in the $100 million range in crypto companies which any graduate of an accounting program could see were frauds. Different fraudsters tried to buy small Pacific islands with UN membership, and got both major US parties to start proposing legislation written by the fraudsters by convincing each party that the fraudsters would give them lots of money and let them crush the other party. Even now, the CBC of all places is printing stories full of quotes from crypto advocates which don't mention the stream of bankruptcies and convictions for defrauding people of billions of dollars (this story (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cryptocurrency-political-conversation-waning-1.7011672) was published one day (!) after one of those convictions of a fraudster who cost a Canadian pension fund big money).
So on one hand there are stories about people like "had Kelsey Piper had informal chats with SBF before he sent her those indiscreet texts?" or "how close was Dominc Cummings to these spaces?" but on the other hand there are stories of how some confidence men with the right lingo can run wild through established institutions in the rich Anglo countries. Most of us as individuals just have to know to keep away from anyone associated with rationalism, LessWrong, longtermism, longtermist Effective Altruism, blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFTs, etc., but our institutions struggle to do that much.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/a-review-of-number-go-up-on-crypto-shenanigans/
Edit: Molly White has a handy list of some of the aspects of crypto fraud which are open for investigation. There are 80 billion Tether tokens in circulation, each theoretically worth 1 USD, but since a theft in 2016 (!) they have not had enough actual money or money-like assets to redeem those. Some was stolen, some was embezzled, some is in bank accounts frozen by governments that don't like money laundering, and some may have never existed at all- their current wording gives them room to back Tether tokens with other cryptocurrency or equity in other crypto companies rather than boring old US dollars that their customers can pay their boring old taxes and mortgages with. And this is the version of events that they have more or less admitted in court, its possible that the rot goes further back because crypto companies are run by incompetent people and crooks and crypto software makes it easy to, for example, lose large amounts of cryptocurrency on an old hard drive.
https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-stones-left-unturned
If you assume that most of those 80 billion Tethers are not actually backed with anything you can sell for USD, then you have two to four Madoffs worth of bezzle (money which the mark thinks they have but the embezzler has already stolen)
Tether alone could be a USD 80 billion bezzle (the gap between when the embezzler has stolen the money, and the victim realizes it is missing). And when it collapses there will be fireworks.
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The board of OpenAI just removed its CEO, a random billionaire. The chairman of the board the quit in protest. The board consisted of six people: Greg Brockman (chairman and president), Ilya Sutskever (chief scientist), Sam Altman (CEO), Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner. Of them, McCauley and Toner are involved in rationalism or effective altruism, and Sutskever throws around the term 'AI safety' which can be a LessWrong term of art for their specific dreams of how machine intelligence could go bad.
Microsoft bought 49% of OpenAI for USD 13 billion. So Effective Altruists and LessWrong rationalists made up about half of the board of a USD 26 billion company in a sector which could have very big consequences (OpenAI's charter (https://openai.com/charter) presumes that "artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work" is coming in the next few decades).
NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/19/business/media/openai-sam-altman-why.html) - Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/what-openai-really-wants/) - Castor and Gerard (https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/11/18/pivot-to-ai-replacing-sam-altman-with-a-very-small-shell-script/) (with G's trademark personal attacks, gossip, and statements that don't match my observations of these movements online)
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Yeah, I think a lot of how much this particular tiff matters is quite dependent on how much you believe maximalist claims about AI's capabilities. From what I'm reading it sounds like there seems to be a bit of a struggle between the people who want to run OpenAI as a Rationalist/EA nonprofit (possibly aligned to Sutskever) and those who want to run it more like a standard business (possibly aligned to Altman).
At the moment I'm definitely seeing LLMs and generative models becoming increasingly in-use by people in general and colleagues in neighbouring fields, but most of what I'm hearing about in terms of job losses is in things like content writing, and I think that may be an outcome of the SEO-isation of content anyway, something I wonder if there'll be a backlash too as the current generation of internet systems end up creaking under the strain of autogenerated garbage.
I see another AI lead has resigned (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67446000) over the exploitative nature of using copyrighted materials in training sets.
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Yeah, I think a lot of how much this particular tiff matters is quite dependent on how much you believe maximalist claims about AI's capabilities. From what I'm reading it sounds like there seems to be a bit of a struggle between the people who want to run OpenAI as a Rationalist/EA nonprofit (possibly aligned to Sutskever) and those who want to run it more like a standard business (possibly aligned to Altman).
At the moment I'm definitely seeing LLMs and generative models becoming increasingly in-use by people in general and colleagues in neighbouring fields, but most of what I'm hearing about in terms of job losses is in things like content writing, and I think that may be an outcome of the SEO-isation of content anyway, something I wonder if there'll be a backlash too as the current generation of internet systems end up creaking under the strain of autogenerated garbage.
I see another AI lead has resigned (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67446000) over the exploitative nature of using copyrighted materials in training sets.
I am interested because it shows that Rationalists and Effective Altruists now control significant money and power (eg. Clarkesworld magazine had to close submissions due to a deluge of LLM spam which overwhelmed their slush readers, and its not clear that essay assignments have a future).
I don't think the Internet needs my speculations about politics between people I heard of today or the future of spicy autocomplete.
The problem with copyright is that copyright is a racket too. I have never seen a justification for copyright longer than 20 or 30 years after the creator' death, its just an excuse for corporations to collect rent. But its concerning that these programs often spit out their original training data and that some are designed to take all the money and recognition out of things that some people really love to do.
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The problem with copyright is that copyright is a racket too. I have never seen a justification for copyright longer than 20 or 30 years after the creator' death, its just an excuse for corporations to collect rent. But its concerning that these programs often spit out their original training data and that some are designed to take all the money and recognition out of things that some people really love to do.
Agreed on the general awfulness of copyrighted, though I think a lot of the biggest negatives of AI are avoided if it can't train on reasonably copyrighted (author still alive or very recently deceased) content, because an AI where most of its data set has to be ca fifty years old is not exactly going to be producing the kinds of outputs where it can purport plausibly enough for nonspecialists to be an up to date artist, journalist, or scientist. I think I'd be finding AI a lot more fun if what it could mostly produce was rehashed variants of 19th century book illustrations or even 1940s era comics, the kid of stuff that is or should be reasonably in the public domain anyway and where there isn't an issue of people basically providing unpaid labour in vast quantity to the AI developers.
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This essay is billed as a criticism of Effective Altruism but is really a criticism of Utilitarianism. https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-altruist
I still say that if you look at things like We Charity, "raising awareness," or scams run by churches and gurus, you have to ask "couldn't we be doing this better? shouldn't we ask to verify the results? we say we want to reduce suffering but do our actions help to achieve that?" And in actual emergencies, nobody starts raising deep philosophical questions about the ethics of triage, they just start allotting their resources with the desperate efficiency of Homer's widow spinning someone else's wool to feed her children.
Likewise, every day we make decisions which will create suffering somewhere far enough away that we don't have to think about it. Every time our local council votes on bus lanes vs. bike lanes vs. automobile lanes they are making a choice like that, because commutes take time and people die of car crashes and air pollution and not being able to get to a hospital quick enough. Isn't it better to explicitly consider the tradeoffs than to let some rich guy decide on a whim?
Edit: the essayist wants you to know that he was a bold cryptocurrency trader (ie. gambler or fraudster). Ia ia Cthulhu ftagn.
Edit: another essay in an internet magazine aimed at Americans with university education and above-average incomes https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/05/why-effective-altruism-and-longtermism-are-toxic-ideologies
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'Cecil Adam' of the Straight Dope column (1973-2018) returned in 2023 with a column on longtermism https://boards.straightdope.com/t/straight-dope-1-13-2023-is-longtermism-the-worlds-most-dangerous-belief-system/978173 Apparently some people believe 'Cecil' is a team of writers or a series of writers.
Edit: short life of Napoleon Hill, the early-20th-century swindler and self-help author (specialty: how to get rich quick). Many aspects of his career overlap with dubious people in the spaces in these threads. https://gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-greatest-self-he-1789385645
The Royal Fraternity of the Master Metaphysicians was founded by James B. Schafer and is largely forgotten today. Born around 1896, Schafer came from Michigan to New York sometime around 1930 and by the mid-30s had amassed a following through his speeches on the spiritual potential hidden in the material world. He explained to crowds of hundreds at Carnegie Hall each Sunday morning that the human mind had the ability to change everything around it. If you could simply imagine it, those thoughts could become real. By some estimates Schafer counted nearly 10,000 people amongst his followers by the end of the decade. ...
Schafer’s intentions with the cult were unclear. He seemed to believe every word he breathed, but he also saw that his status afforded him access to a great deal of money and women. There’s a strange psycho-sexual component to the Master Metaphysicians that’s always hinted at in news articles of the day, but never said outright.
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An animal-rights activist has alleged that she had an affair with Peter Singer, the utilitarian philosopher with many crappy opinions, and that he had a series of physical relationships with female co-authors. This is obviously a deeply personal conflict (the plaintiff sued about events in 2002-2004 in 2022 and represents herself) but it adds to the suspicion that many influential men in this space are in it for the chicks, and that some of the public controversies are shaped by private interpersonal drama.
Singer was one of the early advocates for Effective Altruism, although he seems to have aged out of the spotlight by 2022 (as a famous tenured professor at a rich private university he does not need the money or attention).
Teacher-student relationships (not just mentor-mentee relationships) seem very common between tenured faculty and students at wealthy US universities.
Docket 22CV01792 at https://portal.sbcourts.org/CASBCIVILPORTAL/ Many content warnings (cosmetic surgery, messy breakup with someone who likes to share crappy opinions)
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Teacher-student relationships (not just mentor-mentee relationships) seem very common between tenured faculty and students at wealthy US universities.
This is one of those things where I'm not sure how much it's the case everywhere, or if the US has a specific problem, or if the US is just more on it with calling out the problem, or what. I've definitely seen a lot of US scholars with a very particularly forceful public approach against staff having relationships with anyone who is in a study position, whereas it just doesn't seem to be something European academics discuss and that may mean there's a bit more quietly sweeping it under the table or it may mean there's less of a problem and I'm not sure what the balance of those things is (though I've heard enough stories from the European side to suspect that there's a lot of sweeping it under the table going on).
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Teacher-student relationships (not just mentor-mentee relationships) seem very common between tenured faculty and students at wealthy US universities.
This is one of those things where I'm not sure how much it's the case everywhere, or if the US has a specific problem, or if the US is just more on it with calling out the problem, or what. I've definitely seen a lot of US scholars with a very particularly forceful public approach against staff having relationships with anyone who is in a study position, whereas it just doesn't seem to be something European academics discuss and that may mean there's a bit more quietly sweeping it under the table or it may mean there's less of a problem and I'm not sure what the balance of those things is (though I've heard enough stories from the European side to suspect that there's a lot of sweeping it under the table going on).
It is hard for me because I mostly see the version from people who like to share strong opinions on old or social media. My understanding is that universities with such policies imposed them in response to a lot of bad behaviour and essays by tenured professors insisting that there is nothing wrong with it, and that in practice these policies are more often enforced against TAs than tenured faculty. The social media discourse on the topic adds jealousy and discomfort with the fact that humans vary and are not infinitely maleable (easier to forbid than engage with the complexities of a relationship between a yoga instructor and her cutest student, or a 25 year old and a 19 year old). A lot of bad people have discovered that sexually frustrated people are easy to line up behind a CAUSE, so they contrive reasons to sexually frustrate junior members of their community. And a certain kind of bad person learns to climb in an organization to on one hand get sexual access to more people, but on the other hand use power in the organization to cover up any complaints ("the most active people in our community are spending so much energy getting together, breaking up, and talking about it that our official activities are stagnant" is a complaint).
I also believe that some of the absolute discourse during the Internet feminism wars grew out of cases like the ones discussed here, where a powerful person was using his place in the community to get laid and either treating partners badly or preferring them, and nobody with concerns dared name them directly just speak of general principles.
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An American financier named Eric Falkenstein thinks that the California Effective Altruism movement of young, unattached, ideologically committed people was used to create a network of trusted people at key international locations (http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2023/03/ftxs-mythical-origin-story.html) in the same way that say Armenians in 16th/17th century Old World or Chinese diasporas in Southeast Asia dealt efficiently with each other across long distance because they spoke each other's language, were married into each other's families, worshipped the same way, and so on. Wikipedia says that Falkenstein converted to Christianity at the age of 51 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Falkenstein) which might be why he does not use the term 'affinity fraud' (when someone joins a church or a club, makes friends, convinces them to invest in a venture, and runs off with the money)
A casual reader might get the impression that William McAskill the philosopher was part of the California branch, but as far as I know he never lived in CA and just saw fellow travellers at events.
He found a FTX white paper circa 2019 on how to spot fake trading which is amusing.
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An (rolls dice) effective altruist from (rolls dice) New York with a background in (rolls dice) trading assets at Jane Street has written a longform retrospective on SBF which starts "anyone could have been fooled!" but then moves on to "wait, after SBF offered me a job, after one conversation with someone familiar with financial fraud I had several dozen questions for him, and the first time I talked to a friend outside the world of finance he said 'this business sounds like a scam.'" It does not ask why effective altruists and LessWrong rationalists keep being involved in major frauds, scams, and cult-like movements beyond "moving people to another country, working them long hours, and encouraging them to date each other makes it easy to manipulate them." https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/michael-lewis-s-blind-side
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After the collapse of MetaMed (the startup which promised to revolutionize medical care through the power of LessWrong Rationalism!) Sarah Constantin wrote essays like: https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community.html
It seems to me that the increasingly ill-named “Rationalist Community” in Berkeley has, in practice, a core value of “unconditional tolerance of weirdos.” It is a haven for outcasts and a paradise for bohemians. It is a social community based on warm connections of mutual support and fun between people who don’t fit in with the broader society.
We’ve built, over the years, a number of sharehouses, a serious plan for a baugruppe, preliminary plans for an unschooling center, and the beginnings of mutual aid organizations and dispute resolution mechanisms. We’re actually doing this. It takes time, but there’s visible progress on the ground.
I live on a street with my friends as neighbors. Hardly anybody in my generation gets to say that.
What we’re not doing well at, as a community, is external-facing projects.
I have heard the same kind of phrasing from people in other geeky cultures which emerged out of SoCal, such as the Society for Creative Anachronism. And the way these communities have sometimes ended up covering for members who commit violent crimes, let alone a bit of embezzlement, has been written about elsewhere.
Edit: she has another post from 2017 Effective Altruism has a Lying problem https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/01/17/ea-has-a-lying-problem.html
if there are signs that EA orgs, as they grow and professionalize, are deliberately targeting growth among less-critical, less-intellectually-engaged, lower-integrity donors, while being dismissive towards intelligent and serious critics, which I think some of the discussions I’ve quoted on the GWWC pledge suggest, then it makes me worry that they’re trying to get money out of people’s weaknesses rather than gaining from their strengths.
I think that somehow these movements were good at creating both online spaces and social scenes in key areas such as Oxford, Greater NYC, and the SF Bay Area (did not know about Berkeley). I have to be honest that this kind of commune culture is totally beyond my experience. But it would be relevant to know (for example) did Dominic Cummings just read their web postings, or was he part of the face-to-face culture? And how did this geeky SoCal community end up controlling real money, when the LA SF Society mostly just held meetings and argued with each other? Close-knit nerdy communities have been full of drama since Plato died and his students had to decide who was in charge of the Academy, or the Pythagoreans tossed someone off a boat for proving there are irrational numbers.
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A software person in the USA just told his followers that big parts of this (gestures to the thread) are just a typical California apocalyptic cult as has been common since the 1930s. That person has a cryptocurrency address and wants you to know that spicy autocorrect will change everything for the good as creatives become AI-feeders. A typical California Ideology is that if we turn everything into data and feed it into the computer our problems will be solved, and if actually existing computers don't seem so helpful we just need to give them more power.
So there are a lot of messages about the impending doom or rebirth of the world circulating in parts of these spaces, and someone can reject one of them ("my company which is currently raising funds with several well-known VC firms is not building Skynet" or "anomalous sensor readings on classified hardware are neither aliens nor angels") but fall for others.
The NXIVM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NXIVM) cult / self-help movement / pyramid scheme was also based in New York City and had many tropes which will be familiar to anyone who has looked into all of this (lots of bad Latin, 'rationality', 'doing well by doing good', a male Leader surrounded by adoring women)
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Cathy O'Neil interviewed someone who dropped out of the Effective Altruism movement while still practicing some of the belief system. Interviewee reports that a philosophy professor thinks EA is getting major influence in philosophy departments in the UK through donations. Contrast the LessWrongers whose preferred way to interact with academe is to read pop science books and computer science and psychology papers and who tend to be dismissive of philosophy, history, philology, etc. https://mathbabe.org/2024/03/16/an-interview-with-someone-who-left-effective-altruism/ (And Sam Bankman "if you wrote a book you made a mistake" Fried the son of two professors)
Interviewee, like the people above, noticed that many of the movement leaders are thinky talky people not doers ... except that some EA people now control big money!
Edit: American on how he spent a year working for a crypto company trying to decide whether it was as scammy and fly-by-night as it seemed then left when he decided the answer was "yes" https://johnsundman.substack.com/p/100-bafflegab