Clojurians Log v2

Hi @emccue. Can you provide some context as to why you linked to this? What does "mind melting" mean to you? What's your take on the BlueSky thread?

My take is that these are all a bunch of freaks in a cult(s), but I linked it because I think most people aren't aware of effective altruists as a category, but more specifically the absolute insanity that came from the "Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality" fanfic. It was a part of the FTX story but I, like most, didn't dig deep enough

I also think its very important context for the "hey, why do they keep saying it will kill us?" thing.

Thanks for providing your take.

Same genre of info as Lowtax banning hentai being the first domino leading directly to the rise of the modern far right

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0Sky1AyDzM - if you want to feel less happy)

There was https://open.spotify.com/episode/4FlLcoRgFa6u9DKfQ2CJdO with Cal Newport and Adam Becker which was covering this very well.

Makes me think of Renaud Camus, erstwhile author of controversial tho

Makes me think of Renaud Camus going from author of controversial though broadly unread novels about the gay underground to being the creator of great replacement theory

The Dystopia Now podcast is a great resource to learn more about the weird ideology going on. One of the co-hosts is Emile Torres who coined the term TESCREAL (together with Timnit Gebru) https://pod.link/1794217765

> Y'all in a cult?

You're surely teasing me but I don't think so 😄 It's very loose affiliation and it's conference format. But who knows. Over the years it almost never happens that a person knows Clojure when I talk to them about it. Personally I think it's well designed and it fits the way I like to think about problems very well. Nobody wants to ever try it. Even if they are really surprised about how small our team is given the size of the product. But on a Clojure conference most people feel similarly and it can feel kind of culty I guess 🙂 I do have to say though that if I caught a wiff of anyone having sex at conj I would probably second guess everything there too

The sex thing is funny to point at but it's not that relevant, you don't need that to still conclude that there's a lot of weird ideological stuff going on. The Rationalist and Effective Altruist communities are also linked to Singularitanism, Cosmism, Longtermism, etc. They're all prevalent in Silicon Valley circles, and in particular are at the root of the current AI race. We would not have OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. without first having a bunch of people holding ideas about how certain things in the future are "inevitable", things which most people would consider bad sci-fi at best. It's dangerous. It's changing the world, it's capturing policy makers. It's a side of AI that not enough people are aware of, and I'm always glad to see folks draw attention to it. See also https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/skeptical-of-the-tescreal-acronym

Thanks for the link 👀

If I were to boil the argument down - and it's going to be highly reductive - the claim is "they're a bunch of weirdos indo weird crap and AI safety is just another one of the silly weird things they're into that should be socially unacceptable"

You can fall into any combination of X and Y being socially acceptable and related to each other, so even just binary options give you eight combinations

I enjoyed the fanfic too but I imagined something completely different. It's just an entire Harry Potter alternative story from start to finish where the main characters make more interesting decisions. It was always portrayed as this brain washing text that will AGI pill you but it's just a normal story with the twist that Harry thinks about physics and science more. His doomerism is basically a set of arguments that IF AI becomes superintelligent it will develop weird alien (to us) preferences and will affect the world in deeply negative ways that will ultimately make the planet uninhabitable by humans. He doesn't really talk so much about when this might happen but given the degree of his investment towards propagating this idea and the need to halt AI development globally he seems to be assigning it a high enough probability.

Have to admit the Techpocalypse substack is quite the rabbit hole

retracted I wasn't up to speed with the discourse at all so what I wrote made no sense 🤷

@plexus, thanks for the link. Seriously, thank you - multiple times. I remember when I was curious and decided to read some e-mails on the Epstein files, and it's very hard to not draw parallels. Besides the thing everybody knows, there was a lot of pseudoscience, crazy stuff, "superhuman engineering and breeding" and other weirdness (obviously mixed and fueled by a lot of disgusting things that made me believe hell is real and it's where we're living right now). The start of the article you linked is exactly like this - if it wasn't people with money talking, they would be the "crazy guys in the park"

Well, I don't think an Epstein comparison is justified, like at all. It took me a while to work through Torres and I'm off-put by them. While there are valid criticisms and correctly sourced passages there is a lot of speculation and unfounded accusation as well. It's written in a highly emotional language and is getting increasingly hateful, don't you think? In any case, personally I see a mix of sound points and logical fallacies and unfair overgeneralization of social groups paired with too much moral disgust. The way I experienced EA and rationality groups as global diverse and decentralized communities a lot of his criticism doesn't apply. There is a lot of self criticism within those umbrellas and I can find some of the points Torres makes taken up there and discussed seriously. This is what I expect of institutions. Capacity to develop ideas and change and learn. How often do you choose a full rewrite of products in production? Of course it's alluring but we learn the hard way that there's too many unknown unknowns and there are hidden lessons all over our products that we'd have to relearn. And this is just a small product, a few dozen people being involved. What about global disorganized movements with thousands of people? I'm not disputing at all that there are some despicable views and things happening and it's hard not to vilify some of the representatives. His acronym is absurdly grouping different groups into something he can bash on as a single thing. Those "groups" are not the same and the people have vastly different moral positions and views. If you talk to molecular biologists, physicists or engineers and ask them "What will the world look like in 200/500 years" will truly none of them think about how technology might develop? Don't you think some transhumanist ideas are just part of the culture and even expectation for the far future? The way I'm reading the comments here it's portrayed like a thought crime. I heard social groups be called "freaks" and "weirdos" for typical nerd talk from where I'm sitting. Have you guys never had a harmless conversation like this? Torres is sweeping, demonizing and unusually personal, and it just stinks. I wish they can let go of the weird hate and devil language. FYI I totally despise accelerationism and fully support stopping AI development. I still assume that I have strong value overlap with this community. Edit: Slack in the browser isn't working so well for me, it left my message in a weird state.

> His acronym is absurdly grouping different groups into something he can bash on as a single thing. Those "groups" are not the same and the people have vastly different moral positions and views. @kraf but what about the multiple segments of the article where he invokes the Freudian concept of "narcissism of small differences" to argue against precisely this ^. As for the "hateful" language, I don't really see it. Seems like par for the course Internet snark to me, maybe a little overlong in terms of word count, but for its position as a popular tech blog, it seems relatively orthodox in execution and style. I don't really think he is being any more "personal" than the people he is critiquing, who, instead of writing tech criticism, are using their weird sub rosa meta-political and economic authority to advance highly personalized fantasies

https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/anthropics-ipo-and-why-you-dont-hate - titled "Anthropic’s IPO and Why You Don't Hate Effective Altruism Enough" (cheeky emphasis mine), but you're right! I was making it sound as if I meant the other article. There is less outrage there, sorry. narcissism of small differences - He may invoke this of course but does the evidence show that? For me it's no, because from having more context than his snippets on some of the mentioned people their value systems differ wildly and I quite strongly believe that he also knows better, because he argued in rationalist spaces as well. I just don't think that his grouping carries much weight. There is hardly anything interesting to be said about this particular grouping of groups and what's more, I think he even fails to establish enough homogeneity in the individual subgroups within his tescreal framework like EA or rationalists. If narcissim of small differences doesn't hold within the parts, can it fit the (fake) whole? That should be transitive. What if I asked you the question "What do you think will humanity/life on earth look like in 200 years"? Sorry I'm not really out for a prolonged adversarial discussion here, I just wanted to leave a counter weight originally and I realize I'm being the adversarial one. So take the question as a suggestion to play around with if you like. Just for yourself, see where your mind takes you. I think it's kinda fun. How would you even approach it? It's a difficult prediction to make and if you want to take it seriously and try to be as accurate as possible there's a lot to consider. You have to assign all kinds of things probabilities and then combine those to derive probabilities of stuff further down the line. What kind of technology would humans chase? They care about age, sickness, death, security, comfort, pleasure, fun, sex. Will they keep maximizing it? And then how much will you constraint the thoughts you have. Will there be forbidden thoughts when you consider possible futures? What does the exercise look like for 500 years or 1000 years? Does the difference matter of what you believe is a realistic, accurate trajectory and what you wish the future to look like?

Not entirely what I said. But what do you think? I'm really interested in your perspective