The New Yorker has a piece on the Bay Area AI doomer and e/acc scenes.
Excerpts:
[Katja] Grace used to work for Eliezer Yudkowsky, a bearded guy with a fedora, a petulant demeanor, and a p(doom) of ninety-nine per cent. Raised in Chicago as an Orthodox Jew, he dropped out of school after eighth grade, taught himself calculus and atheism, started blogging, and, in the early two-thousands, made his way to the Bay Area. His best-known works include “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” a piece of fan fiction running to more than six hundred thousand words, and “The Sequences,” a gargantuan series of essays about how to sharpen one’s thinking.
[…]
A guest brought up Scott Alexander, one of the scene’s microcelebrities, who is often invoked mononymically. “I assume you read Scott’s post yesterday?” the guest asked [Katja] Grace, referring to an essay about “major AI safety advances,” among other things. “He was truly in top form.”
Grace looked sheepish. “Scott and I are dating,” she said—intermittently, nonexclusively—“but that doesn’t mean I always remember to read his stuff.”
[…]
“The same people cycle between selling AGI utopia and doom,” Timnit Gebru, a former Google computer scientist and now a critic of the industry, told me. “They are all endowed and funded by the tech billionaires who build all the systems we’re supposed to be worried about making us extinct.”
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This was such a chore to read, it’s basically quirk-washing TREACLES. This is like a major publication deciding to take an uncritical look at scientology focusing on the positive vibes and the camaraderie, while stark in the middle of operation snow white, which in fact I bet happened a lot at the time.
The doomer scene may or may not be a delusional bubble—we’ll find out in a few years
Fuck off.
The doomers are aware that some of their beliefs sound weird, but mere weirdness, to a rationalist, is neither here nor there. MacAskill, the Oxford philosopher, encourages his followers to be “moral weirdos,” people who may be spurned by their contemporaries but vindicated by future historians. Many of the A.I. doomers I met described themselves, neutrally or positively, as “weirdos,” “nerds,” or “weird nerds.” Some of them, true to form, have tried to reduce their own weirdness to an equation. “You have a set amount of ‘weirdness points,’ ” a canonical post advises. “Spend them wisely.”
The weirdness is eugenics and the repugnant conclusion, and abusing bayes rule to sidestep context and take epistimological shortcuts to cuckoo conclusions while fortifying a bubble of accepted truths that are strangely amenable to allowing rich people to do whatever the hell they want.
Writing a 7-8000 word insider expose on TREACLES without mentioning eugenics even once throughout should be all but impossible, yet here we are.
Inside the Strange World of the Uwu Smol Beans: An Exposé of a Quirky Community with No Racists Whatsoever
Oh, good, ex-incel Scott is in a polycule now, the wonders of the cult lifestyle.
“Socialists think we’re sociopathic Randroid money-obsessed Silicon Valley hypercapitalists.”
No, Scott, we just think you’re a coward and a racist
Wat
[Grace’s] grandfather, a British scientist at GlaxoSmithKline, found that poppy seeds yielded less opium when they grew in the English rain, so he set up an industrial poppy farm in sunny Australia and brought his family there.
To grow opium???
(OK I guess for medicinal purposes but maybe point that out)
I wonder how much of that family fortune has found its way into EA coffers by now.
In another part of the article, it states that Grace grew up “semi-feral”, so perhaps the fortune was smoked away in the Tasmanian opium dens (those exist, right?)
In yet another part of the article:
She had found herself in both an intellectual community and a demimonde, with a running list of inside jokes and in-group norms. Some people gave away their savings, assuming that, within a few years, money would be useless or everyone on Earth would be dead.
More totally normal things in our definitely not a cult community.
Yet another news story that omits how the science in HPMOR, the Sequences and the flagship e/acc blog is just wrong. Like, failing junior-high biology wrong.
The A.I., trying to access a Web site, was blocked by a Captcha, a visual test to keep out bots. So it used a work-around: it hired a human on Taskrabbit to solve the Captcha on its behalf.
Wait, didn’t that turn out to be bullshit?
Yeah, a lot of these TESCREAL exposés seem to lean on the perceived quirkiness while completely failing to convey how deeply unserious their purported scientific and philosophical footing is, like virgin tzatziki with impossible gyros unserious.
he dropped out of school after eighth grade, taught himself calculus
Lmaou, gonna need a citation on this one chief. This the same guy who said we need people monitoring for ‘sudden drops’ in the loss function? I’m supposed to believe this poser understands what a derivative is now?
