The most useful of fools. Yudkowsky acts, speaks, dresses and looks like the most neck-beard of neck-beards. He wears that cringey trilby hat in podcast interviews.
I've often thought that the popular promotion of people like Michale Moore and even Noam Chomsky works in the favor of those in power. Choose the ugliest, most boring and laughable opponents and then allow them to speak while just rolling your eyes and giggling. It works even better when they are speaking sense since you can demonstrate you are allowing legitimate dissent.
I wonder if Chomsky ever suspected that his own promotion and fame were the result of the establishment using his yawn-inducing academic tone in their own attempts to manufacture consent. Can you imagine someone who is obsessed with the Kardashians being caught dead agreeing with Chomsky, Moore or Yudkowski? And then consider if the number of those who are swayed by such superficial appearance are the majority or minority and how that effects democracy.
Consider Shrek. The story is made to subvert the trope that the ugly person is the villain, as it was in Disney movies.
But the real point isn’t some Platonic view of Beauty. It is about expectations. Like how advertisers use people wearing lab coats to subliminally feed credibility into the words of actors.
You may wish to be free of such bias, and you may even work to raise your own awareness and strive to critically examine the message of people. And let us all work towards such a world. But we should not pretend such a world exists today, despite our desires. It is a world that may exist in the future once we mature as a species.
Until that day arrives, advertisers and political movements will use our biases against us.
My claim isn’t that yudkowski is ugly, it is that he represents a trope that is being used to bias his message.
He appears to make an effort to look good just like most everyone else. If he was trying to look a certain way he might have tattoos or have died his hair. He doesn't, that I know of.
You seem to be policing a small recent decision he made to wear a hat.
Just like I didn’t create the trope of a scientist wearing a white lab coat. But if someone is doing a 2 min video sketch of a scientist, it is a good visual aid to include a white lab coat to communicate to an audience the role of a character.
And in the same way, a top hat would communicate a certain kind of character in a movie.
In the same way, there is a communication of a particular kind of character with other hat choices.
But why should he not be allowed to wear one? Again, you're policing. It's a discriminatory dick move.
He can wear anything he wants. So can you. So can anyone.
If he wants to, and for all I care, he can dress up like a clown. Or dress up like a jester. Or he could wear Gucci or Prada. Or wear steampunk leather outfits like he is in the world of mad max. Or he could go clean cut preppy. He can wear a fedora and a trilby on top of one another.
But, by personal choice and temperament, he wants to dress as he dresses. It just so happens that his personal preference aligns with a particular trope. A particularly uncool trope in popular culture.
I’m pointing out that alignment. I am not making him dress that way and I am not forcing culture to judge him.
It takes a lot less effort to generate your superficial criticism than it takes the GP to reply.
Fortunately, he did reply in a sibling post, but he didn't have to.
I'm not buying this alternative reality where I'm trolling by pushing back on mocking someone's choice of a hat that is one of a limited number of common hat styles.
It's sort of unfixable because the taste-makers at NYT and WaPo sorted themselves into the conformist camp so early in their lives that anyone outside that camp is trivially portrayable as "weird" to them.
And yet he doesn't think it is worth the effort to take off his trilby hat in order to come across as marginally more respectable to the average person? When the way he is choosing to present himself is undermining his own message then yes, it is worth bringing up.
So what if he likes wearing a hat?
We don't have an AI safety problem, we have an human safety problem. Violent extremists are unsafe, greedy corporations seeking to suppress the free exploration and exercise of mathematics are unsafe. Existent language model chatbots are primarily just a public relations risk, at least so long as the government doesn't step in and create a monopoly that gives the market leaders choice of training biases the force of law.
> Yud is a doomsday cult leader (https://archive.is/YTqlI)
Are you really using that link to support your argument in the earnest? You know this was posted on April Fool's day? The text itself mentions it near the end, and it's also explicitly tagged as such directly below the headline/byline. At least warn people who're going to skim this.
> who has publicly advocated using mass murder in the form of nuclear weapons to forestall his predicted apocalypse.
You mean that bit from his article in Time Magazine? Where he talked about airstrikes against GPU farms might be necessary in case some country/group is violating the international moratorium he's proposing? I don't recall him advocating mass murder there, or ever. Of course, since he is insisting on a strong international agreement, military intervention - yes, including nuclear weapons - is part of the picture, because that's literally how international agreements are ultimately enforced.
As for the rest - the guy has been saying the same thing for way over a decade now. The mainstream interest only really picked up in the last half a year. But somehow he's in on it.
indeed, and by many who saw it regarded as a kookery, not justifying of much concern. If he wanted to preach to his S&M dunegon about the big bad machines that will punish you for all eternity, well not my circus, not my monkeys.
Thus far his followers who've turned violent have only directed it at their extended group [1] for not doing enough to stop the end of the world (and that one murder and attempted murder of their landlord [2], but I'm willing to believe that was a chance event and not a trend).
I now consider it an actual concern now that the profile has been expanded so dramatically there is a much greater risk that someone will fall for ℚ-anon who isn't so distracted by their S&M dungeon that they actually find time in their busy schedule to 'save the world'-- just like Qanon was some internet joke until the wrong person fell for it and rolled up to Comet Ping Pong and opened fire. That person only thought they were saving children from being sex slaves, whats someone powered by the belief that they are saving the lives all current and future children going to be willing to do? Their prophet says even nukes would be justified.
[And not just their lives-- there are fates worse than death, some of their scripture involves fearmongering about malevolent AI's simulating trillions of copies of people and subjecting them to the worst torture imaginable, just because they didn't do everything in their power to bring the malevolent AI into existence. Lets not even get into the fact that their proposed solution--since malevolent AI is inevitable unless we abandon advanced technologies "just don't do it" is only a short term fix at best-- to create an AI god embodying the values of the faithful so that it can permanently suppress all competing machine intelligence and engineering human life to 'optimize' away suffering.]
Maybe you live far enough away or don't have anyone you love peripherally connected to AI enough that you're not concerned that they'll be murdered due to this insanity, but I am a little worried and right now the best way I can think to mitigate the risk is to bring people's attention to the fact that they're normalizing and legitimizing a mentally ill position that expressly justifies the use of violence (and not just in "ha ha only serious" April fools posts) against a fanciful apocalyptic threat from the fevered imagination of a cult.
> Are you really using that link to support your argument in the earnest?
Yes, the post was presented as a joke but it legitimately reflects his position, as also reiterated in interviews and articles.
Moreover, it's a "rational" response to those who actually believe the claimed threat, particularly from the utilitarian ethics perspective advocated in ℚ-anon circles: they hold that it's ethical to murder a million to save billions (or trillions 'discounted to present value', counting all the humans that will never exist due to extinction-- "What matters most about our actions is their very long term effects.").
> I don't recall him advocating mass murder there
Nuclear weapons have been used twice in combat in human history. In one instance the death toll was a hundred and twenty nine thousand people, in the other it was two hundred and twenty six thousand people. The nuclear weapons in the US arsenal today are many times more powerful than those early weapons.
It's not like data centers are not blast hardened targets, no one has described NAFTA, the Paris agreement, or the berne convention as being enforced by nuclear weapons. In a serious publication with a readership of millions Yud unambiguously advocated using the threat of mass murder as a deterrent against parties performing too many mathematical calculations.
How many of his new followers will agree with the widespread death of a nuclear weapon as a proportional response but reject a few targeted kaczynski-grams as inappropriate?
(Heck even kaczynski only thought he was saving people from the general unhappiness brought on by technology, not extinction...)
[1] https://sfist.com/2019/11/19/four-people-in-guy-fawkes-masks...
[2] https://sfist.com/2022/11/22/two-alleged-squatters-charged-i...
I only meant to imply the latter. I suppose I inadvertently applied the former by mentioning him juxtaposed to Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, although it is a stretch for me to even see those two as "Thought Leaders" in the present day. Chomsky is some weird kind of anarcho-syndicalist and Michael Moore seemed to fade away during the Obama years. Neither are really "leading" anything these days.
> A week or two ago ... Yudkowsky was apparently a Complete Nobody.
There is nothing contradicting being a punching bag and a complete nobody. It's like a D-list actor whose entire career is to get his ass kicked by the hero in action movies. Or the B-tier heel in professional wrestling. You might eventually recognize his face and he may even achieve some cult-status fame. Their whole purpose is to display the might of the eventual hero so we often allow them to embody some apparent strength so that a sense of risk for the hero is maintained.
Yudkowski makes for a juicy target. For example /r/sneerclub has been around since 2015! The fact that the mainstream media has now identified him as a magnet for derision isn't surprising. No one has to know who he is. They just take one look at him, hear a couple of sentences from his mouth and they immediately form a strong opinion on his character.
> The mainstream interest only really picked up in the last half a year. But somehow he's in on it.
What do you mean "he's in on it"? I'm suggesting he is an unwitting participant. I have no doubt he actually believes he is the main character. He doesn't lack the ego for that.
FWIW, even though I personally really dislike Yudkowski as a person - I believe he has some interesting points to make. And frankly, it bugs me that he is so often dismissed without deep engagement with his arguments. But he is so lacking in media training and social skills that he is easily misdirected to look like the exact foolish/cartoonish caricature the media wants. Even in friendly podcast situations he comes off as unhinged.
And I honestly believe that boosting the signal of characters like Yudkowski is part of the mainstream establishments playbook for dealing with dissent. In comparison, Sam Altman's "aw shucks" performance in front of the senate, with favorable sound bites where he boyishly claims to have no financial stake in OpenAI, was positively wholesome.
Have you even read the article?
Many of those people were not tricked, tech CEOs are involving themselves with this and picking up Yudkowsky's particular strain of AI safety intentionally.
Instead of focusing on the very real problems AI causes and exacerbates today, problems that might affect tech companies' bottom lines if addressed, CEOs can control the narrative and appear proactive by buying into this brand science fiction.
Yudkowsky's take on AI safety is tech companies what greenwashing is to the auto industry or oil companies.