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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Eliezer joins the trend of condemning āpoliticalā violence with confidence on the far end of the dunning-kruger curve: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5CfBDiQNg9upfipWk/only-law-can-prevent-extinction
Iāve already mocked this attitude down thread and in the previous weekly thread, so Iāll try to keep my mockery to a few highlightsā¦
Heās admitting nuke the data centers is in fact violence!
But then drawing a special case around it.
I donāt think Eliezer has checked the news if he think the US government carries out violence in predictable or fair or avoidable ways! Venezuela! (It wasnāt fair before Trump, or avoidable if you didnāt want to bend over for the interest of US capital, but it is blatantly obvious under Trump) The entire lead up to Iran consisted of ripping up Obamaās attempts at treaties and trying to obtain regime change through surprise assassination! Also, if the stop AI doomers used some clever cryptography scheme to make their policy of property destruction (and assassination) sufficiently predictable and avoidable would that count as āLawfulā in Eliezers book?
If he kept up with the DnD/Pathfinder source material, he would know Achaekekās assassins are actually Lawful EvilHis practical argument against non-state-sanctioned violence is that we need a total ban (and thus the authority of state driving it), because otherwise someone with 8 GPUs in a basement could invent strong AGI and doom us all. This is a dumb argument, because even most AI doomers acknowledge you need a lot of computational power to make the AGI God. And they think slowing down AGI (whether through violence or other means) might buy time for another sort of solution that is more permanent (like the idea of āsolve alignmentā Eliezer originally promised them). Lots of lesswrong posts regularly speculate on how to slow down the AI race and how to make use of the time they have, this isnāt even outside the normal window of lesswrong discourse!
Sources cited: 0
One of the comments also pisses me off:
āDrone strike the data centers even if starts nuclear warā is the exact argument Eliezer made and that we mocked. It is the rationalists that have tried to soften it by eliding over the exact details.
This feels somehow tied to the whole āagenticā thing Iāve ranged about previously. Like, individual acts of violence are strictly destructive because the people doing it arenāt sufficiently āagenticā to change things, even though American history is full of cases where (usually racist) vigilante violence had a huge impact on peopleās decision-making. But when the government does it itās different because people in government got there by proving their agency and ability to actually impact the world. Like, it feels almost like heās offended that the NPCs might try and do something as drastic as killing someone without GM permission.
Meanwhile in reality, people legitimately do feel like they donāt have a lot of options to protect themselves from the real harms this industry is doing, to say nothing of the people who buy his line about the oncoming class-K end-of-life scenario. Anger is an appropriate response to the circumstances we find ourselves in, and in a nation that has been quietly cultivating a culture of heroic violence for decades we shouldnāt be surprised to see people trying to inflict that fear and rage upon the outside world.
Nay a culture where every citizen is entitled to one armed crashout and threats of such have been an important lever used by the party that believes in that entitlement for decades.
Eliezer complaining about vigilante actions is really ironic considering one of his main themes in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationalist was about āheroic responsibilityā and complaining about how ordinary people default to doing nothing. I guess what he actually meant was for right-thinking people (people that agree with him) to take the actions he approves of.
eliezer misses that (as used in decolonization/civil rights era) nonviolence is effectively a sophisticated propaganda strategy that takes existing injustices and violence and uses it to bait opponent into attacking you, all while your own people take photos and show to entire world carefully crafted messaging that appeals to general public conscience. the messaging part is extremely important in this. thereās no fucking way this could work for him because his cause is comprehensible only to those who already buy his cult messaging as ground truth. heās in just for the moral superiority of being nonviolent. heās never gonna get it because comprehending it requires touching grass
Yeah both non-violence and pure terrorism are communication forms at the root. I remember reading long ago that the Rote Armee Fraktionās master plan was:
It kinda stopped at stage 2, because the BRDās security services were a bit less ex-Nazi than they expected, and also there was basically no proletariat.
Also the Southern police chief who correctly deduced that mass arrests were what the civil rights activists wanted, got the go-ahead from neighboring county jails, and then politely and non-violently arrested everyone protesting and spread them out over a wider area, thus preventing the media-friendly repression that was the goal.
Yeah there are only so many ways to get it going, you donāt hear about these that donāt figure it out because cops bust them making them look like clowns and nobody wants to get associated with them afterwards
there is also a barrier between step 2 and 3, because sometimes news like that are suppressed. american school shootings get that treatment sometimes, not to mention all the info filtering at facebook and friends. this is why sympathetic media is an important bit to have in advance. thereās also this bit where any serious insurgency needs money and it looks like what they got didnāt work out
that southern police chief was per blogpost Laurie Pritchett and this kind of thinking is also what makes COIN tick. worry not, Hegseth declared it all woke nonsense
Remember the cartoon of the bombs being dropped on people and the people going āI hear the next bombs will be sent by a womanā, this but āwith lawful forceā.
On a long enough timeframeā¦
This is always one of those things that baffles me, and makes it clear to me these people have never even been close to any real movement. All these movements have violent and non-violent parts. Hell, you see it even now with the far right, they have a violent and non-violent part, and the non-violent part scores points by pointing to their violent friends and going āwe are not with themā while going to the same parties, sharing the same ideas, and all being friends with each other. Hell, look at the various LW people who went āwow, all these rightwingers in our mids are horribleā and then not stopping being friends with them. I see now how Sam got the drop on all these naive people.
Life is too short to be that pompous
Reading Heinlein as a kid isnāt even especially notable, but itās Yud so he definitely means the polyamory advocacy stuff specifically.
And itās not like Orwell wrote a book about talking animals that is required reading in schools across the land.
Yud says so much, and its often so confusing, that I think a lot of his followers donāt know his main messages. It used to be orthodox that you cannot have a two-faced message any more without each audience learning what you say to the others, but that assumed you were a good communicator aiming at a mass audience.
Yud has strange views about legal responsibility:
But if you release a virus and it infects people, we donāt hold the virus responsible, we hold you. If you build a car and it explodes when it gets rear-ended, we donāt blame the car, we blame you.
Ah, so itās Mythos that will create the
nanobotsdiamondoid bacteriaThis is very late to respond but what Iāve noticed is that a when people in rationalist spaces respond to Yud, they often say āmy interpretation of this isā¦ā and things along similar lines, which always struck me as weird