Yeah that article was one of the things I had mind. It’s the peak of centrist liberalism where EAs and lesswrongers can think these people are literally going to cause mankind’s extinction (or worse) and they can’t even bring themselves to be rude to them. OTOH, if they actually acted coherently on their nominal doomer beliefs, they would be carrying out terrorism on a far greater scale than the Zizians, so maybe it is for the best they are ideologically incapable of direct action.

Yall ready for another round of LessWrong edit wars on Wikipedia? This time with a wider list of topics!

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g6rpo6hshodRaaZF3/mech-interp-wiki-page-and-why-you-should-edit-wikipedia-1

On the very slightly merciful upside… the lesswronger recommends “If you want to work on a new page, discuss with the community first by going to the talk page of a related topic or meta-page.” and “In general, you shouldn’t post before you understand Wikipedia rules, norms, and guidelines.” so they are ahead of the previous calls made on Lesswrong for Wikipedia edit-wars.

On the downside, they’ve got a laundry list of lesswrong jargon they want Wikipedia articles for. Even one of the lesswrongers responding to them points out these terms are a bit on the under-defined side:

Speaking as a self-identified agent foundations researcher, I don’t think agent foundations can be said to exist yet. It’s more of an aspiration than a field. If someone wrote a wikipedia page for it, it would just be that person’s opinion on what agent foundations should look like.

They’re cosplaying as activists, have no ideas about how to move the public image needle other than weird movie ideas and hope, and are literally marinated in SV technolibertarianism which sees government regulation as Evil.

It is kind of sad. They are missing the ideological pieces that would let them carry out activism effectually so instead they’ve gotten used as a free source of crit-hype in the LLM bubble. …except not that sad because they would ignore real AI dangers in favor of their sci-fi scenarios, so I don’t feel too bad for them.

And why would a rich guy be against a “we are trying to convince rich guys to spend their money differently” organization.

Well when they are just passively trying to convince the rich guys, they can use the organization to launder reputation or boost ideologies they are in favor of. When the organization actually tries to get regulations passed, even ineffectually, well, that is a threat to the likes of Thiel.

The quirky eschatologist that you’re looking for is René Girard, who he personally met at some point. For more details, check out the Behind the Bastards on him.

Thanks for the references. The quirky theology was so outside the range of even the weirder Fundamentalist Christian stuff I didn’t recognize it as such. (And didn’t trust the EA summary because they try so hard to charitably make sense of Thiel).

In this context, Thiel fears the spectre of AGI because it can’t be influenced by his normal approach to power, which is to hide anything that can be hidden and outspend everybody else talking in the open.

Except the EAs are, on net, opposed to the creation of AGI (albeit they are ineffectual in their opposition). So going after the EAs doesn’t make sense if Thiel is genuinely opposed to inventing AGI faster. So I still think Thiel is just going after the EA’s because he’s libertarian and EA has shifted in the direction of trying to get more government regulation. (As opposed to a coherent theological goal beyond libertarianism). I’ll check out the BtB podcast and see if it changes my mind as to his exact flavor of insanity.

So… apparently Peter Thiel has taken to co-opting fundamentalist Christian terminology to go after Effective Altruism? At least it seems that way from this EA post (warning, I took psychic damage just skimming the lunacy). As far as I can tell, he’s merely co-opting the terminology, Thiel’s blather doesn’t have any connection to any variant of Christian eschatology (whether mainstream or fundamentalist or even obscure wacky fundamentalist), but of course, the majority of the EAs don’t recognize that, or the fact that he is probably targeting them for their (kind of weak to be honest) attempts at getting AI regulated at all, and instead they charitably try to steelman him and figure out if he was a legitimate point. …I wish they could put a tenth of this effort into understanding leftist thought.

Some of the comments are… okay actually, at least by EA standards, but there are still plenty of people willing to defend Thiel

One comment notes some confusion:

I’m still confused about the overall shape of what Thiel believes.

He’s concerned about the antichrist opposing Jesus during Armageddon. But afaik standard theology says that Jesus will win for certain. And revelation says the world will be in disarray and moral decay when the Second Coming happens.

If chaos is inevitable and necessary for Jesus’ return, why is expanding the pre-apocalyptic era with growth/prosperity so important to him?

Yeah, its because he is simply borrowing Christian Fundamentalists Eschatological terminology… possibly to try to turn the Christofascists against EA?

Someone actually gets it:

I’m dubious Thiel is actually an ally to anyone worried about permanent dictatorship. He has connections to openly anti-democratic neoreactionaries like Curtis Yarvin, he quotes Nazi lawyer and democracy critic Carl Schmitt on how moments of greatness in politics are when you see your enemy as an enemy, and one of the most famous things he ever said is “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”. Rather I think he is using “totalitarian” to refer to any situation where the government is less economically libertarian than he would like, or “woke” ideas are popular amongst elite tastemakers, even if the polity this is all occurring in is clearly a liberal democracy, not a totalitarian state.

Note this commenter still uses non-confrontational language (“I’m dubious”) even when directly calling Thiel out.

The top comment, though, is just like the main post, extending charitability to complete technofascist insanity. (Warning for psychic damage)

Nice post! I am a pretty close follower of the Thiel Cinematic Universe (ie his various interviews, essays, etc)

I think Thiel is also personally quite motivated (understandably) by wanting to avoid death. This obviously relates to a kind of accelerationist take on AI that sets him against EA, but again, there’s a deeper philosophical difference here. Classic Yudkowsky essays (and a memorable Bostrom short story, video adaptation here) share this strident anti-death, pro-medical-progress attitude (cryonics, etc), as do some philanthropists like Vitalik Buterin. But these days, you don’t hear so much about “FDA delenda est” or anti-aging research from effective altruism. Perhaps there are valid reasons for this (low tractability, perhaps). But some of the arguments given by EAs against aging’s importance are a little weak, IMO (more on this later) – in Thiel’s view, maybe suspiciously weak. This is a weird thing to say, but I think to Thiel, EA looks like a fundamentally statist / fascist ideology, insofar as it is seeking to place the state in a position of central importance, with human individuality / agency / consciousness pushed aside.

As for my personal take on Thiel’s views – I’m often disappointed at the sloppiness (blunt-ness? or low-decoupling-ness?) of his criticisms, which attack the EA for having a problematic “vibe” and political alignment, but without digging into any specific technical points of disagreement. But I do think some of his higher-level, vibe-based critiques have a point.

This was discussed last week but I looked at the comments and noticed someone in the comments getting slammed for… checks notes… noting that Eliezer wasn’t clear on what research paper he was actually responding to (multiple other comments are kind of confused, because they assume he means one paper then other comments correct them that he obviously meant another). The commenter of course edits to back-peddle.

that couple

I hate that I know what is being talked about the instant I see it.

Also, they’ve appeared on 3 separate top posts in the stubstack this week, so yeah another PR blitz. I find it kind of funny/stupid the news media can’t even bother to find a local eugenicist couple to talk to. I guess having a “story” served up to you is enticing enough to utterly fail to provide pushback or question if the story is even relevant to your audience in the first place.

They are going with the 50% success rate because the “time horizons” for something remotely reasonable like 99% or even just 95% are still so tiny they can’t extrapolate a trend out of it and it tears a massive hole in their whole AGI agents soon scenarios().

I would give it credit for being better than the absolutely worthless approach of “scoring well on a bunch of multiple choice question tests”. And it is possibly vaguely relevant for the pipe-dream end goal of outright replacing programmers. But overall, yeah, it is really arbitrary.

Also, given how programming is perceived as one of the more in-demand “potential” killer-apps for LLMs and how it is also one of the applications it is relatively easy to churn out and verify synthetic training data for (write really precise detailed test cases, then you can automatically verify attempted solutions and synthetic data), even if LLMs are genuinely improving at programming it likely doesn’t indicate general improvement in capabilities.

Should we give up on all altruist causes because the AGI God is nearly here? the answer may surprise you!

tldr; actually you shouldn’t give because the AGI God might not be quite omnipotent and thus would still benefit from your help and maybe there will be multiple Gods, some used for Good and some for Evil so your efforts are still needed. Shrimp are getting their eyeballs cut off right now!

So this blog post was framed positively towards LLM’s and is too generous in accepting many of the claims around them, but even so, the end conclusions are pretty harsh on practical LLM agents: https://utkarshkanwat.com/writing/betting-against-agents/

Basically, the author has tried extensively, in multiple projects, to make LLM agents work in various useful ways, but in practice:

The dirty secret of every production agent system is that the AI is doing maybe 30% of the work. The other 70% is tool engineering: designing feedback interfaces, managing context efficiently, handling partial failures, and building recovery mechanisms that the AI can actually understand and use.

The author strips down and simplifies and sanitizes everything going into the LLMs and then implements both automated checks and human confirmation on everything they put out. At that point it makes you question what value you are even getting out of the LLM. (The real answer, which the author only indirectly acknowledges, is attracting idiotic VC funding and upper management approval).

Even as critcal as they are, the author doesn’t acknowledge a lot of the bigger problems. The API cost is a major expense and design constraint on the LLM agents they have made, but the author doesn’t acknowledge the prices are likely to rise dramatically once VC subsidization runs out.

Is this “narrative” in the room with us right now?

I actually recall recently someone pro llm trying to push that sort of narrative (that it’s only already mentally ill people being pushed over the edge by chatGPT)…

Where did I see it… oh yes, lesswrong! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f86hgR5ShiEj4beyZ/on-chatgpt-psychosis-and-llm-sycophancy

This has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. ChatGPT has 122 million daily active users according to Demand Sage, that is something like a third the population of the United States. At that scale it’s pretty much inevitable that you’re going to get some real loonies on the platform. In fact at that scale it’s pretty much inevitable you’re going to get people whose first psychotic break lines up with when they started using ChatGPT. But even just stylistically it’s fairly obvious that journalists love this narrative. There’s nothing Western readers love more than a spooky story about technology gone awry or corrupting people, it reliably rakes in the clicks.

The call narrative is coming from inside the house forum. Actually, this is even more of a deflection, not even trying to claim they were already on the edge but that the number of delusional people is at the base rate (with no actual stats on rates of psychotic breaks, because on lesswrong vibes are good enough).

He knows the connectionist have basically won (insofar as you can construe competing scientific theories and engineering paradigms as winning or losing… which is kind of a bad framing), so that is why he pushing the “neurosymbolic” angle so hard.

(And I do think Gary Marcus is right that the neurosymbolic approaches has been neglected by the big LLM companies because they are narrower and you can’t “guarantee” success just by dumping a lot of compute on them, you need actual domain expertise to do the symbolic half.)

I can imagine it clear… a chart showing minimum feature size decreasing over time (using cherry picked data points) with a dotted line projection of when 3d printers would get down nanotech scale. 3d printer related companies would warn of dangers of future nanotech and ask for legislation regulating it (with the language of the legislation completely failing to effect current 3d printing technology). Everyone would be buying 3d printers at home, and lots of shitty startups would be selling crappy 3d printed junk.

Yeah, that metaphor fits my feeling. And to extend the metaphor, I thought Gary Marcus was, if not a member of the village, at least an ally, but he doesn’t seem to actually realize the battle lines. Like maybe to him hating on LLMs is just another way of pushing symbolic AI?

Those opening Peter Thiel quotes… Thiel uses talks about (in a kind of dated and maybe a bit offensive) trans people, to draw the comparison to transhumanists wanting to change themselves more extensively. The disgusting irony is that Thiel has empowered the right-wing ecosystem, which is deeply opposed to trans rights.

So recently (two weeks ago), I noticed Gary Marcus made a lesswrong account to directly engage with the rationalists. I noted it in a previous stubsack thread

Predicting in advance: Gary Marcus will be dragged down by lesswrong, not lesswrong dragged up towards sanity. He’ll start to use lesswrong lingo and terminology and using P(some event) based on numbers pulled out of his ass.

And sure enough, he has started talking about P(Doom). I hate being right. To be more than fair to him, he is addressing the scenario of Elon Musk or someone similar pulling off something catastrophic by placing too much trust in LLMs shoved into something critical. But he really should know better by now that using their lingo and their crit-hype terminology strengthens them.

Here’s a LW site dev whining about the study, he was in it and i think he thinks it was unfair to AI

There a complete lack of introspection. It seems like the obvious conclusion to draw from a study showing people’s subjective estimates of their productivity with LLMs were the exact opposite of right would inspire him to question his subjectively felt intuitions and experience but instead he doubles down and insists the study must be wrong and surely with the latest model and best use of it it would be a big improvement.

You’re welcome.

Given their assumptions, the doomers should be thanking us for delaying AGI doom!