So us Americans do get some of “grabbed guns and openly fought” in the history of our revolutionary war, but its taught in a way that doesn’t link it to any modern movements that armed themselves. And the people most willing to lean into guns and revolutionary war imagery/iconography tend to be far right wing (and against movement for worker’s rights or minorities’ rights or such).
So, to give the first example that comes to mind, in my education from Elementary School to High School, the (US) Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was taught with a lot of emphasis on passive nonviolent resistance, downplaying just how disruptive they had to make their protests to make them effective and completely ignoring armed movements like the Black Panthers. Martin Luther King Jr.'s interest and advocacy for socialism is ignored. The level of organization and careful planning by some of the organizations isn’t properly explained. (For instance, Rosa Parks didn’t just spontaneously decide to not move her seat one day, they planned it and picked her in order to advance a test case, but I don’t think any of my school classes explained that until High School.) Some of the level of force the federal government had to bring in against the Southern States (i.e. Federal Marshals escorting Ruby Bridges) is properly explained, but the full scale is hard to visualize so. So the overall misleading impression someone could develop or subconsciously perceive is that rights were given to black people through democratic processes after they politely asked for them with just a touch of protests.
Someone taking the way their education presents the Civil Rights protests at face value without further study will miss the role of armed resistance, miss the level of organization and planning going on behind pivotal acts, and miss just how disruptive protests had to get to be effective. If you are a capital owner benefiting from the current status quo (or well paid middle class that perceives themselves as more aligned with the capital owners than other people that work for a living), then you have a class interest in keeping protests orderly and quiet and harmless and non-disruptive. It vents off frustration in a way that ultimately doesn’t force any kind of change.
This hunger strike and other rationalist attempts at protesting AI advancement seems to suffer from this kind of mentality. They aren’t organized on a large scale and they don’t have coherent demands they agree on (which is partly a symptom of the fact that the thing they are trying to stop is so speculative and uncertain). Key leaders like Eliezer have come out strongly against any form of (non-state) violence. (Which is a good thing, because their fears are unfounded, but if I actually thought we were doomed with p=.98 I would certainly be contemplating vigilante violence.) (Also, note form the nuke the datacenter’s comments, Eliezer is okay with state level violence.) Additionally, the rationalist often have financial and social ties to the very AI companies they are protesting, further weakening their ability to engage in effective activism.
The way typical US educations (idk about other parts of the world) portray historical protests and activist movements has been disastrous to the ability of people to actually succeed in their activism. My cynical assumption is that is exactly as intended.
So if I understood NVIDIA’s “strategy” right, their usage of companies like Coreweave is drawing in money from other investors and private equity? Does this mean, that unlike many of the other companies in the current bubble, they aren’t going to lose money on net, because they are actually luring in investment from other sources in companies like Coreweave (which is used to buy GPU and thus goes to them), whileleaving the debt/obligations in the hands of companies like Coreweave? If I’m following right this is still a long term losing strategy (assuming some form of AI bubble pop or deflation we are all at least reasonably sure of), but the expected result for NVIDIA is more of a massive drop in revenue as opposed to a total collapse of their company under a mountain of debt?
Side note: The way I’ve seen clanker used has been for the AIs themselves, not their users. I’ve mostly seen the term in the context of star wars memers eager to put their anti-droid memes and jokes to IRL usage.
It’s like a cargo cult version of bootstrapping or monte carlo methods.
That thread gives me hope. A decade ago, a random internet discussion in which rationalist came up would probably mention “quirky Harry Potter fanfiction” with mixed reviews, whereas all the top comments on that thread are calling out the alt-right pipeline and the racism.
I’m at least enjoying the many comments calling her out, but damn she just doubles down even after being given many many examples of him being a far-right nationalist monster who engaged in attempts to outright subvert democracy.
The Oracle deal seemed absurd, but I didn’t realize how absurd until I saw Ed’s compilation of the numbers. Notably, it means even if OpenAI meets its projected revenue numbers (which are absurdly optimistic, like bigger than Netflix and Spotify and several other services combined) paying Oracle (along with everyone else it has promised to buy compute from) will put it net negative on revenue until 2030, meaning it has to raise even more money.
I’ve been assuming Sam Altman has absolutely no real belief that LLMs would lead to AGI and has instead been cynically cashing in on the sci-fi hype, but OpenAI’s choices don’t make any long term sense if AGI isn’t coming. The obvious explanation is that at this point he simply plans to grift and hype (while staying technically within the bounds of legality) to buy few years of personal enrichment. And to even ask what his “real beliefs” are gives him too much credit.
Just to remind everyone: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent!
This feels like a symptom of liberals having a diluted incomplete understanding of what made past movements that utilized protest succeed or fail.
It is pretty good as a source for science fiction ideas. I mean, lots of their ideas originate from science fiction, but their original ideas would make fun fantasy sci-fi concepts. Like looking off their current front page… https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLFRkm3PhJ3Ty27QH/the-cats-are-on-to-something cat’s deliberately latching on to humans as the most lazy way of advancing their own value across the future seems like a solid point of fantasy worldworldbuilding…
To add to blakestacey’s answer, his fictional worldbuilding concept, dath ilan (which he treats like rigorous academic work to the point of citing it in tweets), uses prediction markets in basically everything, from setting government policy to healthcare plans to deciding what restaurant to eat at.
Every tweet in that thread is sneerable. Either from failing to understand the current scientific process, vastly overestimating how easily cutting edge can be turned into cleanly resolvable predictions, or assuming prediction markets are magic.
He’s the one that used the phrase “silent gentle rape”? Yeah, he’s at least as bad as the worst evo-psych pseudoscience misogyny posted on lesswrong, with the added twist he has a position in academia to lend him more legitimacy.
He had me in the first half, I thought he was calling out rationalist’s problems (even if dishonestly disassociating himself from then). But then his recommended solution was prediction markets (a concept which rationalists have in fact been trying to play around with, albeit at a toy model level with fake money).
Chiming in to agree your prediction write-ups aren’t particularly good. Sure they spark discussion, but the whole forecasting/prediction game is one we’ve seen the rationalists play many times, and it is very easy to overlook or at least undercount your misses and over hype your successes.
In general… I think your predictions are too specific and too optimistic…
Every time I see a rationalist bring up the term “Moloch” I get a little angrier at Scott Alexander.
I use the term “inspiring” loosely.
Putting this into the current context of LLMs… Given how Eliezer still repeats the “diamondoid bacteria” line in his AI-doom scenarios, even multiple decades after Drexler has both been thoroughly debunked and slightly contributed to inspiring real science, I bet memes of LLM-AGI doom and utopia will last long after the LLM bubble pops.
I was about to point out that I think this is the second time he claimed math pets had absolutely no basis in reality (and someone countered with a source that forced him to) but I double checked the posting date and this is the example I was already thinking of. Also, we have supporting sources that didn’t say as much directly but implied it heavily: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/42iv09/a_yudkowsky_blast_from_the_past_his_okcupid/ or like, the entire first two thirds of the plot of Planecrash!