Finally read Watchmen for the first time recently and yeah, it is really good. Having the plot spoiled for me years ago took some of the enjoyment out of it for me, but there was still a lot in there to enjoy and think about. And anyone who’s read it will know how it chimes with TESCREAL criticism…

Émile Torres writing last year:

[…] Nick Beckstead, a noted EA, argued in 2013 that, given the “overwhelming” moral importance of the far future — “millions, billions, and trillions” of years from now — we should prioritize saving the lives of people in rich countries over those in poor countries, other things being equal. The reason is that people in rich countries are better positioned to influence the far future.

And that about sums it up. They don’t care. They simply don’t care. Beckstead explains that it’s better to focus on the rich countries because “rich countries have substantially more innovation” and “their workers are more economically productive”. He apparently presented these ideas in a graduate thesis: I hope he got a bad grade.

This NY newspaper still makes slop the old fashioned way

And he still works there! I guess it might be hard to get a new job with “presided over largest theft of labor in human history” on your CV.

#3 suggests that people in tech have gotten way wayyy too comfortable with saying “hey, I know that company’s evil, but it’s a really good job” about companies that make software for arms manufacturers or ICE or surveillance, so of course people who think AI might kill us all think it’s ok to work for AI companies even if it might cause an extermination.

I’m already thinking about complaining about some of the stuff he’s said¹, so that might be a good idea. However I think my university’s policy for students is that you can use AI to start research, summarise notes etc. so he might not be breaking any rules.

¹ Inappropriate questions to students. Not sexually inappropriate, just inappropriate.

“the overtone window” would be a good name for the amount of racist dogwhistling that’s acceptable in the mainstream media

Nope, different degree. This guy is brought in as a guest lecturer about the field he works in: most of the actual lecturers are nowhere near this AI-pilled.

Hell is a university lecturer who not only hands out AI-generated summaries of his lecture to the class, but uses AI to generate diagrams and infographics for his lecture slides.

What the fuck is this and why am I getting emails from avaaz about it

https://humanstatement.org/

I feel like every time I turn around there’s another baffling anti/ai project

What does he think all the suddenly unemployed and angry masses are gonna do in this scenario? Twiddle their thumbs? Or does he think there’s gonna be some sort of mass killing of the surplus labour?

They’re tarnishing the Alpha course’s¹ hard-won cult branding.

¹ They might not seem too culty based on that Wikipedia page but if I remember correctly Private Eye printed some very critical stuff about the courses and people associated with them in recent years. Details not forthcoming until I flick through my big stack of old magazines…

If someone is scared that if they criticize someone they will be “retaliated against”, that seems like a sign that something is really bad. I’ve had to deal with some situations like this myself while organizing events (and I haven’t always done a good job) but surely you should at least ask some more questions and err on the side of caution.

Having said all that, this guy has done some research and has exposed an awful EA workplace, which is a good thing.

From that post about Nonlinear:

I reached out to some references Kat listed, which were positive to strongly positive. However I also got a strongly negative reference — someone else who I informed about the decision told me they knew former employees who felt taken advantage of around things like salary. However the former employees reportedly didn’t want to come forward due to fear of retaliation and generally wanting to get away from the whole thing, and the reports felt very vague and hard for me to concretely visualize, but nonetheless the person strongly recommended against inviting Kat and Drew.

I didn’t feel like this was a strong enough reason to bar someone from a space — or rather, I did, but vague anonymous descriptions of very bad behavior being sufficient to ban someone is a system that can be straightforwardly abused, so I don’t want to use such a system.

This pretty much explains how and why the workplace culture in so many TESCREAL orgs is so, so bad.

Edit: OH MY GOD, Emerson is the Emerson from Mugglenet dot com??? I used to read that site when I was a little Harry Potter fan. Jesus. He should have stuck to correcting people’s punctuation in the Hall of Shame.

I dunno, I didn’t get much out of it because I found all the connections hard to follow. That article might actually need a diagram showing all the connections between the people featured, but that probably wouldn’t help with the claims that TESCREAL critics are conspiracy theorists…

Remove one or two of those reward circuits, especially if they’re poorly adapted to the modern environment, and the human becomes more generally capable. I suspect that my own inability to feel love is one example, the amygdalectomy is another, and the general pattern of high-IQ people being somewhat autistic is a third.

I managed not to click on the linked blog post about the author’s inability to feel love.

I’m sure there’s someone out there!

I will admit I was imagining a grumbling LessWronger reading this and going “oh, so it’s wrong to care about malaria?!?!” I probably need to take some time off social media.

Thank you, that’s very interesting. To be clear I am not pro-malaria, but sometimes groups are against bad things for weird reasons. Like Scientologists campaigning against abusive psychiatric practices because L. Ron Hubbard was mad at psychologists for not taking him seriously.

Watching this online economic lecture thing for college and it just got mentioned that repeated bouts of malaria in children can cause mental disability (wikipedia says “brain damage” and “increased risk of neurological and cognitive deficits”). I have to admit I did not know this.

…is the only reason EAs were ever into “malaria nets” because of their obsession with g and their conviction that increasing it is a panacea?

Sorry, I guess I phrased my reply badly, I get what you mean about the weird blend (and the article you linked is actually well written), but having seen that dog fucking article I felt the need to inflict the horror on others so I wouldn’t be alone.