Posted by thedudeabides5 6 hours ago
They hate the framing that LLMs are just stochastic parrots, which is ironic, because Yudkowsky's many parrots are (latent, until now) stochastic terrorists.
Look at what the molotov cocktail guy accomplished by "taking direct action against a clear and present danger": Nothing, besides casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large.
It's downright dumb to attempt to impose your will via unilateral violence when you aren't in a position to actually complete the goal. Note that that goes whether you're actually right or not.
I think the majority of the population at large either doesn't care about what happened or wish that the guy had actually managed to kill Altman. Not even necessarily because Altman is involved with AI, but just because he is extremely rich. I don't imagine any increased resistance from the population at large - the population at large either doesn't mind when rich people are killed or loves it. The exceptions would be people like entertainers who develop a parasocial relationship with the public and provide direct joy to people, but AI company leaders don't fall into that category.
That said, it is true that killing Altman would almost certainly achieve nothing. See my other post in this thread.
I'll answer with a quote from the founder of the Rationalist movement, Eliezer:
"How certain do you have to be that your child has terminal cancer, before you start killing puppies? 10% sure? 50% sure? 99.9%? The answer is that it doesn't matter how certain you are, killing puppies doesn't cure cancer."
If you wanted to be a contrarian concerned about x-risks go try to find $1B to pay Embraer or another minor aviation vendor to make a plane to do stratospheric aerosol injection or something.
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If you want my diagnosis it is, in a time of lower social inequality cults frequently tried to steal labor and money from a broad base of people.
For instance in the L. Ron Hubbard age Scientology would treat you as a "public" if you had money to take and if you didn't or after you'd been bled dry you would be be recruited as "staff". Hubbard thought it was immoral to take donations without giving something in return so it was centered around getting people to spend on "auditing". Between 1950 Dianetics and the current Miscavige age, income and wealth has gotten concentrated and he changed that single element of the Hubbard doctrine and now it is all about recruiting money from "whales" who donated to the International Association of Scientologists (IAS)
https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientologys-ias-trophy-wi...
(A good backgrounder on pernicious cults is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic...)
In the case of the Yudkowsky thing the mass just doesn't have a lot of money to steal after paying the rent and turning the labor of the unskilled and ignorant (even if they think otherwise) is a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze, so the point is to build a Potempkin village that looks like a social movement that creates a frame where you can get money from sources such as "SBF steals it and gives it to the movement" as well as "rich kids who inherited a lot of money but don't have a lot of sense"
If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you would be taking action that maximizes the chances of reducing a clear and present danger.
Between Yudkowsky and the Molotov cocktail guy, which approach do you think had and is having more of an impact?
An individual can rarely, if ever, enact change through violence. The history of nearly all successful movements is violence often makes change harder.
Rallying people through speech is a far more successful way for an individual to enact change through violence
The only meaningful way to affect change against the oligarchy is and always has been violence.
This is not a novel insight.
The "Boston Massacre" involved a crowd of people throwing rocks and balls of ice at soldiers and getting shot at.
But now it's all "Oh political violence must be avoided at all costs". Now it's "Political violence doesn't work, now lets set off fireworks on July 4th to celebrate the birth of our nation through violence"
There is a real, undeniable, build up of political tension. When it fails to be released in the legislative arena, it doesn't dissapate. When we point out that, "the quality of life right now is the best it's ever been," it doesn't dissapate. When we try to crush it, it doesn't dissapate. The last remaining pressure release is violence however condemnable it may be. Perhaps we should, you know, fix participatory democracy rather than pontificating on a natural outcome of machine we created yet refuse to fix. If fixing it continues to be more difficult than eliminating violence we should continue to expect violence.
1. https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/clausewitz-war-as-politics...
2. https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
Ah yes, a popular codeword for "I did not get my way".
There is no electoral majority behind the AI doomer cult. It is not a failure of "democracy" that they haven't gotten what they want. It is a failure of their activism, or just the general unpalatability of their wild ideas, or both. They don't get to throw Molotovs just because they lose.
Society evolves through epiphenomena caused by the behaviour of the majority; the fact that some minorities view that evolution as 'flawed' cannot change that evolution, unless they're able to influence the majority to also see it that way.
Now, democracy is essentially a way for everybody to broadcast their views on society's flaws on non-violent ways. The alternative is that some groups broadcast their opinions in violent ways, and we have learned to see that situation as undesirable.
Go ahead and read Gilens and Page and tell me participatory democracy is working. Until then, expect more of the same impotent condemnations and a refusal to understand the social mechanics producing acts of violence.
When you talk about "participatory democracy" in a thread like this, you are enabling them in their delusion that people do care. The AI safetyist think tanks put out these pushpolls trying to convince themselves that voters care about AI doom. They seal up the walls of their echo chamber, and they believe themselves to be heroes. Then one day, one of them throws a Molotov, and nobody is surprised.
Which is precisely why they've resorted to violence.
We can do better than denigrating positions as "hobbyhorse." HN deserves better than that.
We can attempt to deduce the root cause, but please don't assume we're on different epistemic footing. It's speculation and that's fine.
how can you be sure? has anyone polled it? are they too scared to poll it?
Wealth inequality isn't just about economic wellbeing but political power. Separately, the US legislature is almost entirely crippled, only able to pass one major bill per presidential term, while the dominant political party celebrated this and cedes all power to an executive whose intention is to tear apart the administrative state and bring about techno feudalism.
I once again note that none of the AI leadership has even tried to address government policies to guarantee a baseline of economic wellbeing for our citizens, while they acknowledge AI will likely have massive, disruptive impacts on society and economy. Anthropic is the only one that has shown any public concern for the dangers of AI by insisting on some moral baseline of AI use in the Defense department.