Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)
ok the takes on the attempted firebombing of sama’s mansion are coming in from the rats and those that watch them. Credit to letting stuff marinate , I guess, and/or not working on a weekend
no clue who this dude is, has a slobsuck with .ai domain but makes sense:
https://www.campbellramble.ai/p/the-rational-conclusion
Weird MtG scarecrow Zvi plays moral philosopher, invokes multiple authorities on Xhitter:
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/political-violence-is-never-acceptable
the worst kind of violence, the sort against people like me
all those other deaths? those aren’t violence
we also need to care more about property
Right? If it had been some poor schlub manning the security desk at a datacenter, it would have been a blip. But this is a VC we’re talking about!!
The Zvi post really pisses me off for continuing to normalize Eliezer’s comments (in a way that misrepresents the problems with them).
Eliezer called for the government to drone strike data centers, even of foreign governments not signatories to international agreements, and even if doing so risked starting nuclear war.
Pacifism is at least a consistent position, but instead rationalists like Zvi want to simultaneously disown the radical actions, but legitimizes the US’s shit show of a foreign policy.
Another thing that pisses me off is the ahistorical claim by rationalist that such actions are ineffective and unlikely to succeed. Asymmetric warfare and terrorist tactics have obtained success many times in history! The kkk successfully used terrorism to repress a population for a century. The black panthers got gun control passed in California and put pressure on political leaders to accept the more peaceful branch of the civil rights movement. The IRA got the Good Friday agreement. The US revolution! All the empires that have withdrawn from Afghanistan!
Overall though… I guess this is a case of two wrongs making a sorta right. They are dangerously wrong about AI doom, but at least they are also wrong about direct action and so usually won’t take the actions implied by their beliefs. (But they are still, completely predictably, inspiring stochastic terrorists).
Yeah, what the fuck is this passage
(note the rat-tic of using “importantly” as an adjective)
This deftly evades the main question - how do we ensure that no-one builds it? There’s a host of options, and political violence is one of them. I guess categorically stating it’s off the table is a start, but Zvi has the moral gravitas of a dormouse. If I was of the political voilence bent I’d probably commit some just to spite him.
Eliezer made a lesswrong post yesterday where he explains that since anyone could build it, lone acts of violence are obviously ineffective and the only solution is the right and proper (“Lawful” as he calls it, because he has been stuck on DnD since writing Planecrash) state violence which can enforce a worldwide ban (which you may recall Eliezer has put at the absurdly low 8 2024 GPUs).
All their doom scenarios are made-up sci-fi bullshit, so of course they have free rein to pontificate about the right and wrong ways to prevent them. And because they are high on their own sci-fi, they downplay or neglect or misunderstand the real harms of the rising slop sea. Consequently, they fail to grasp the real social reaction to acts of violence.
It’s a willful refusal to actually consider the consequences of their beliefs, which is deeply ironic for a bunch that pride themselves on their hardcore consequentialism. Like, even if you just mean “if anyone builds it, everyone dies” as a simple cause and effect, that should imply some kind of action unless you don’t think everyone dying would be bad actually.