OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
Oh, and to that I should add works like Blade Runner or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, or even Frank Herbert's original concept for the Butlerian Jihad, where even perfectly well-behaved thinking machines might challenge what it means to be human metaphysically. Even that has been considered potentially existentially threatening. It's not literal destruction, but what if machines change our very concept of what it means to be alive, or to have a soul?
Less Wrong asked some of these questions in the 2010s, but then, so did Mass Effect. It's a genre staple.
I was struck, thinking about it for this, by just how diverse the genre is?
You have the classic 'killer robot' trope, where the machines are just plain evil and intentionally want to destroy humanity - thus Skynet or AM.
You have the machine that is faithfully executing the commands given to it in good faith and threatens to destroy everything out of ignorance - thus WOPR.
You have the machine that is attempting to fulfil its designed purpose in good faith but which suffers some kind of fatal error and goes crazy - thus HAL 9000.
You have the machines that genuinely want the best for humanity and try to achieve that even contrary to our explicitly stated preferences - think 'With Folded Hands' (1947), or Asimov played around with this. 'The Evitable Conflict' (1950) was about machines taking charge of the future with humanity's welfare in mind, and seems ambivalent about whether that's desirable.
It seems like these categories cover most plausible AI fears. The AI could be actively hostile to humans, the AI could be indifferent to or ignorant of human life, the AI could be schizophrenic or malfunctioning, and the AI could be benevolent in ways that we do not desire.
Obviously none of these stories map perfectly to contemporary worries, but there's enough, I think, that the concept of AI or robots or machines going wrong in a dangerous way was firmly stuck in the public consciousness long before an autodidact started a blog in 2009.
I don't particularly see Less Wrong as having been important in popularising the idea that AI might be dangerous - come on, killer robot or killer AI stories have been prominent in popular culture for decades. Less Wrong launched in 2009. The film WarGames was from 1983, and it was hardly original at the time. The Terminator is from 1984. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is from 1967. 2001: A Space Odyssey is from 1968, based on stories from the 1950s. There are multiple Star Trek episodes about mad computers! It seems ridiculous to me to even suggest that Less Wrong led the charge on popularising the idea that AI could go badly. AI going badly is a cliché well over half a century old - it predates home computers!
Not that I think this even particularly matters, because as far as I can tell the AI safety movement has achieved very little, and perhaps more importantly, the goal of that movement is to slow down AI development, which seems like the opposite of what you gave the rationalists credit for.
More generally I am by no means surprised that lots of people in Silicon Valley are aware of rationalists, or even call themselves rationalists. What I'm questioning is whether there's a causal relationship between that and the development of AI or LLM technology. That may have been something that some of them believed, but so what? Perhaps being rationalist-inclined and developing AI are both downstream of some third factor (the summer, in the ice cream drowning example). They seem to me both plausibly downstream of being analytical computer-inclined nerds raised on a diet of science fiction, for instance. It's just all part of the same culture.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Even though they are both describing the same general category of behaviour, the symbolic role that violence plays in their model of the world is radically different. There are many ways to cash out what that means in practice - for one, for Kulak, violence in itself represents a kind of success, a triumph over our sheepish instincts, whereas for the other, violence in itself is a failure, an undesired last resort that always carries a terrible cost. Either way, it means that the worldviews just don't translate into each other neatly. The whole world of moral assumptions around, say, Orestes choosing to engage in retributive violence to avenge his father is invisible and alien to the modern reactionary.
Violence is an extreme example, but I daresay there are similar clashing worldviews in other politics. Probably the one I've run into most often today is the concept of revolution, where even though two people may both be talking about the overthrow and replacement of a particular political establishment, the invisible worlds of assumptions around it are so divergent as to almost untranslatable.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Yudkowsky himself? He's best described as an educator and popularizer. He's hasn't done much in terms of practical applications, beyond founding MIRI, which is a bit player. But right now, leaders of AI labs use rationalist shibboleths, and some high ranking researchers like Neel Nanda, Paul Christiano and Jan Leke (and Ryan Moulton too, he's got an account here to boot) are all active users on LessWrong.
That the rationalist subculture is something that some people in the tech industry are also into by no means means that rationalists can take credit for AI companies.
(Though frankly why you would want to is beyond me - "is responsible for AI" is something that lowers my estimation of someone, rather than raises it.)
You presented a genetic or causal relationship:
You believe that the Rationalist movement is an "utter failure", when it has spawned the corporations busy making God out of silicon.
But the fact that some people are both rationalists and work at AI companies does not show that rationalists are the reason those companies exist - "rationalists caused AI" is of the same order as "ice cream causes drowning".
OliveTapenade
3d ago
That's about as organised and consistent as I expect racial identification in the Americas to be!
OliveTapenade
3d ago
The census bureau categories don't have great overlap with how people behave in real life, though, do they? For instance, the census categories include Middle Easterners as white.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Rachel Zegler, even though she is probably about 3/4ths European genetically, is viewed as a brown woman both by the left and the right.
Isn't this the case for pretty much all Hispanics?
American racial categories have never made much sense to me, but taking 'Hispanic' as roughly coterminous with 'South and Central American', the vast majority of Hispanics are in fact significantly European in descent. I understand most South Americans to be mixtures of European and indigenous American, with the exact proportion changing from place to place and class to class; in general, the higher the social class the more European descent, but there are plenty of exceptions. There are also a lot of South Americans with partial or majority African descent, but the fact that we use terms like 'Afro-Hispanic' or 'black' for them suggests that we consider them slightly differently?
It does confuse me a little - as I understand it, all Brazilians, say, are Hispanic, even though they are ethnically diverse and include white, black, indigenous, and mixed-race people.
(Technically you could argue that Brazilians aren't Hispanic at all - sometimes I see 'Hispanic' as synonym for 'Hispanophone', and Brazilians are Lusophone - but American racial categories don't have a separate section for Brazilians. In general I get the sense that in America, Brazilians are lumped in with Hispanics, and Spanish people are not, even though in the literal sense Brazilians are not related to Hispania and the Spanish should be the central example.)
Anyway, Zegler is majority-European-descent, but isn't that quite common among Hispanics? Most Mexicans are mestizos, i.e. of partial but significant European descent, and then roughly a third of Mexicans are just European. I think that even white Mexicans would be considered 'Hispanic' in the United States? Or am I mistaken?
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I wonder if this is the natural course of all Substackers? Fleeing big media for Substack was meant to be a way to seek independence from traditional constraints, but if it just enables a stronger form of audience capture that ever existed before, while encouraging writers to avoid risks and double down on the same crowd-pleasing themes over and over, we may find ourselves missing the old system.
Kulak isn't a journalist, of course, but I do notice something of the process with more 'mainstream' Substackers. It may have taken a few years, but, to pick an example, I feel like Freddie deBoer has ended up just writing the same half dozen articles over and over, as predictable as the tide. I can think of a few others that I read that seem to be sliding down the same incline.
Maybe it's all just bad.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I remember quite enjoying a piece he wrote about Shakespeare. But I suppose the internet does have a tendency to turn people into parodies of themselves. Even people like Trace, bless him, feel like they've become flattened over time - or at least their online personae have.
This is the first time I've seen it and it is a baffling article.
In particular it seems to build a case entirely from an imagined literary genre? He makes this appeal:
You must actually READ primary texts written before 1900 like the Epics of Homer, the History of Rome, the Sagas of the Vikings, the Romances of the Medieval Knights, the Plays of Elizabethan England, the novels and memoirs of the 18th and 19th century...
But the fact there is that if you do read those texts, they completely undermine his primary case, which is a plea for more retributive violence, even vigilante violence. If you read, say, Le Morte d'Arthur, you will notice regular and conspicuous displays of mercy to defeated enemies, and unnecessary bloodshed is portrayed as a major threat. Arthur and Pellinore become trusted friends and allies, for instance, and the fact that Pellinore killed King Lot, rather than spare him as he ought to, becomes one of the causes of his eventual death. Sir Gareth defeats several knights in a row, all of whom are acting as vicious bandits, and spares them (at a lady's request, no less) and they come to Arthur's court and are forgiven. When characters choose bloodshed, this is usually bad - the tragedy ends with Arthur's determination to kill Mordred, rather than allow him to flee, bringing his own doom upon him.
The trope of defeating someone and then forgiving them and becoming friends is extremely common in pre-modern literature. Half of Robin Hood's merry men are people that Robin defeated, and then extended a hand to in friendship, saying "you are a man after my own heart!"
Heck, this happens biblically: consider David's repeated and conspicuous refusal to harm his enemy Saul, even when Saul is in his power.
What about classical antiquity? Here I'd note something they have in common with the Viking sagas, which is deep concern about the possibility of blood feuds, and the demand that violence ought to be limited and proportional in order to avoid them. Destroying enemies in a temper is bad. The Aeneid ends with the defeated Turnus asking for mercy, or failing that, to have his body returned to his people for burial rites, and Aeneas' furious refusal to do this and act of retribution is presented as a bad thing, or as a moral failing. Likewise the way the Iliad treats Achilles' disrespect of Hector's body. Neither the Aeneid nor the Iliad are pacifist works that believe that violence is always bad, but they are written with an awareness of the dangers of vengeance. The same is true of the sagas.
What's the last one he cites? Elizabethan England? Suffice to say that I do not think the people who wrote this endorsed bloody-minded retribution.
Now, sure, in all of those cases there is a specific local context - David doesn't hurt Saul because he's God's anointed, and so on. All the examples are a bit more complicated. Everything always is.
Likewise there are acts of retribution, and those acts also have context - Odysseus kills all the suitors, not because they're his enemies in some general way, but because they have specifically violated the laws of hospitality, which are sacred, and even then the way Homer describes the slaughter does not seem to be one that we are intended to cheer for. In the Odyssey itself the act is presented as something somewhat transgressive. The slaughter itself is an extended sequence in which the suitors beg for mercy, try to rally a desperate defence, and so on; there is something terrible about it. And then in the poem the families of the suitors demand justice afterwards and Odysseus must reconcile with them, in book 24. Antinous' father gets up and makes a moving speech about his sorrow, and the suitors' families plan to attack. The Odyssey actually ends with Athena intervening and telling Odysseus to stop being violent lest he incur the gods' anger: "men of Ithaca, cease this dreadful war, and settle the matter at once without further bloodshed... Odysseus, noble son of Laertes, stop this warful strife, or Zeus will be angry with you."
Kulak is LARPing an imagined history, not reading the historical texts that he actually refers to. The ancients were extremely conscious of the perils of violence, and, though not always uncomplicatedly, prized mercy and reconciliation as well.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Another way of putting it would be that Schmitz and company care about what fatherhood does to the father, as well as to the children.
A Motte poster defended Musk to me on the basis of outcomes for the children - "the goal is to raise the next generation of adults", and insofar as Musk has provided them with sufficient material abundance and with sufficient mentoring, he has discharged his duty and everything is all right, from a traditional perspective.
My reply to this was snarky, but I think substantially correct. From the traditionalist perspective, you do not only take into account the results for the child (they will argue about the child's welfare, but as you say, that's at least partially ablative), but also the results for the father. Fatherhood is meant to be morally forming, even educative, for the father as well as the child. The discipline of raising a child well should make you into a better, wiser human being.
Your mention of "perpetual boyhood" is a good way of putting it. Musk is a failure of masculinity because he's avoiding growing up, becoming responsible, disciplining himself, and so on. He is failing to learn the proper lessons of fatherhood. No amount of material provision for children can compensate for that.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Fatherhood is not fungible.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Sure, if you like losing to us.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Yes, I'd agree with this. There is definitely a strain of Australian populism, especially combined with resentment of the Canberra bubble. Palmer is, I would say, pretty incompetent, but Katter and Lambie have made very good runs at it and carved out niches for themselves. To an extent some of the other rising independents of the last decade or so also show the possibilities of political entrepreneurship - Nick Xenophon, more recently the Teals, and so on.
The wider context for all of this, which I imagine would be familiar to anyone in the US or UK, is the continuing decline of the major parties. It's been a relatively smooth decline without major shocks (there was no Australian Trump or Australian Brexit; the closest equivalent is the failure of the Voice, but even that was just preventing something, not actually changing the established order), and preferential voting has maintained the appearance of business as usual, but you can definitely see the yearning for something other than the current two-party system. Both Labor and Coalition primary votes have been steadily declining.
Unfortunately no minor parties seem to have really picked up the slack. The Greens have periodically had ambitions of eclipsing or even outright replacing Labor, but they seem to have hit a ceiling. There just aren't that many yuppies and they struggle to grow past that. One Nation is ramshackle and tends to shoot itself in the foot. We haven't seen any unified alternatives to the major parties. Instead it's just been more and more fragmentation, to independents and to doomed micro-parties like Trumpet of Patriots or Australia's Voice, while the major parties keep winning on preferences.
That can't last forever. Eventually either the major parties pivot towards what the electorate actually wants - Dutton's experiments with populism seem like an attempt to try this - or eventually someone gets their act together enough to overcome one of them. I think, barring some massive exchange in external circumstances that shifts the landscape, the former is more likely than the latter, but we'll see.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
You mean in John 4? I don't see where that passage implies female inferiority? He asks the woman for a drink of water, and the text immediately indicates that he's asking her because the (male) disciples have gone into town to buy food, so it seems like he's comfortable asking people of either sex for nourishment. The woman's response does not mention sex either - she's surprised because he's a Jew and she's a Samaritan. The operative categories are ethnoreligious, not sex.
There is a subsequent discussion of the woman's husband, but again I don't see anything that implies that he considers her the inferior of men?
If I were looking for a gotcha passage showing Jesus giving priority to men or being demeaning of women, I feel like I could do better.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I'm sorry, this is a dumb joke, but I can't help it.
"Abolish education and science? That would be the end of civilisation as we know it!"
"We're only abolishing the department. Education and science will flourish."
"Without a government department? Impossible!"
I realise this may not apply to the American Department of Education, which for all I know does a lot more than just provide funding, but sometimes you've got to reach for the low-hanging fruit.
I don't actually think it's a good fit for the Australian Red tribe equivalent, for two reasons.
Firstly, Trumpism relies a lot on charismatic authority and trust in the leader. Americans have a lot more reverence for leaders and especially for businessmen than Australians do. Tall poppy syndrome is still a very powerful force in Australian culture, which means that a Trump-style campaign would not work. There's a reason why, despite its success in both the US and the UK, the Australian series of The Apprentice failed to attract an audience. (Meanwhile The Celebrity Apprentice did well over here, but that's okay because it's all about making celebrities look like an idiots, and if there's one thing Australians love, it is bringing people who think they're better than everyone else back down to earth.) This can be a subtle thing, but in general we just don't feel good about people who put themselves forward like that. Trump-style braggadocio would fail in Australia. If you'd like an example, businessman Clive Palmer has been trying to run Trump-style campaigns here and has mostly failed. Trumpet of Patriots is very blatantly trying to run the Trump strategy here and it is not working. The language is totally alien to Australians, especially the kind of working class or regional voters they need to swing.
Secondly, I think the Trump base is characterised by a kind of defiance or rebelliousness that does not exist in Australia, at least not in the same way. For all that Australians typically dislike authority, and especially proud people, we also tend to be compliant or obedient in a way that Americans are not. The default Australian posture is to grumble about the idiots and bastards in charge and then follow all their instructions faithfully anyway. (You'll notice this in e.g. Australian war drama, where common themes are firstly that our British officers are all a bunch of morons with their heads up their arses who don't know what they're doing, and secondly that nonetheless we are faithful and dutiful and do everything we ought to. We complain, but we obey.) You'll notice this if you look at the covid lockdowns, for instance - Australia had some of the longest lockdowns on the planet, but we also had relatively few protests. There were a couple, but they were few and small especially if compared to those seen in the US. Australians may not like popular authority, but we also tend to view it as legitimate. I trace a lot of this back to the early experience of colonisation - convicts ruled by appointed officers and governors. A prison is a context where you resent the people in charge, and you may be quietly insubordinate where you can get away with it, but you mostly obey orders. While only the very first generation of colonists were convicts and free settlers came to outnumber them very rapidly, I think the political structure of a penal colony influenced the Australian mindset in formative ways.
Anyway, long story short I do not think Trumpism would work in Australia. You would need to find a way of advocating for similar ideas that nonetheless resonates with the Australian psychology.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
My experience has been that outside the small group of professionals and academics who live on the politics of deference, most people don't notice and don't care. I work in a role where I give weekly talks, and the organisation officially prefers an acknowledgement of country before every talk. I mouthed my way through them for the first couple of months, but then gave up, as nobody reacted or seemed to notice. I have since not done an acknowledgement for around a year and not once has anybody even mentioned their absence to me, much less complained. Likewise one of my managers once had a few compulsory seminars about reconciliation within the organisation, brought that to a team meeting, I offered to help (because I have had much more training with this nonsense), and I never heard a peep from her again, nor was any other thing actually done on the ground. The most we do in practice is put up posters and things during NAIDOC Week and similar events, but there is at least a 50% chance that when that happens, people will put up the Aboriginal flag upside down. (In their defence, it is really tempting because the Australian Aboriginal flag's correct orientation looks wrong. Intuitively you want the black on the bottom.) My workplace is heavily Asian so it may not be entirely representative - in my experience Asian migrants generally don't give a damn about Aboriginal people - but I would be shocked if it's completely off-base.
I think that the situation is basically:
A small group of intellectual and media elites like Aboriginal representation, deference, welcomes to country, and so on.
Elite or aspirational white Australians generally defer to this. They imitate the behaviour of the most prestigious class, the media, and so on. They will generally go along with or support any or all symbolic statements, but will get cold feet whenever it might affect their hip pockets.
Lower-middle and lower class white Australians generally find this all pointless, or they actively resent it. They will usually not sign on with it, though they will sit quietly in the back of a compulsory work meeting and zone out if need be.
Non-white non-Aboriginal Australians generally either do not understand these issues, or just don't care about them one way or the other. "What does this have to do with us?" is a common refrain. That said they won't get involved or do anything either - they seem to largely accept it as some weird thing that white Australians do.
Aboriginals themselves... genuinely poor Aboriginals either don't notice or don't care, because they have more pressing issues, but will be willing to do a smoking ceremony or a welcome dance if the whitefellas ask for it. Middle class or aspiring Aboriginals are more likely to see that they can benefit from the politics of deference. I think most see it as white hypocrisy, but it's generally not advantageous to point that out, so only a few do that. But pushing the politics of dfference can be a path to individual or career success, so some do use that.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I would like to apologise for my people's barbarism.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Certainly that represents my hopes.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Nothing whatsoever in Genesis 1 says or even implies that women exist for the benefit of men.
I'd guess you're thinking of Genesis 2:20, and the idea of the woman as a 'helper' or 'support' for the man? I'd argue that it's quite a tendentious and implausible reading of that verse to simply interpret it as suggesting female inferiority or servitude, but at any rate, it is not in Genesis 1. Genesis 1 only mentions gender once, in 1:27 ("male and female he created them"), and that verse does not suggest any superiority or inferiority.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
What's your evidence that they aren't doing any or all of these three things?
I think they are doing most of those things, and I commend them for it. My top-level post here was in fact about a conservative Christian attempting to both issue a call to reform and repentance to MAGA and warn Christians away from being influenced by MAGA.
Our fight now is centered on what Christianity actually is within itself, not on how best to impose Christian values and rules on the pagans without. It seems to me that people arguing for a Christian broadside against Musk's or Trump's paganism come mainly in one of two varieties: Christians who haven't grasped the scale of the change in our society and of Christianity's position in it, and non-Christians who for reasons of mental habit or momentary expedience prefer the Christianity of the past to the Christianity of the present. Neither, it seems to me, really has a coherent argument here.
I'm not sure I'm arguing for a broadside, or for any kind of concerted political campaign. I'd hold that Christians ought to, where possible, speak the truth and call people to better behaviour. That may take a different form when it is issued to other Christians as when it is issued to secular society (and Christians should of course try to improve secular society), but either way I don't see a valid argument for Christian quietism.
It is, incidentally, worth noting that Trump himself claims to be a Christian, and Elon Musk, though stopping short of saying he's a Christian himself, identifies as a 'cultural Christian' and says that he's 'actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity'. For Christians to issue a call for Trump and Musk to live out Christian values more fully is not actually a call to pagans in the first place. Trump claims to be inside the tent; Musk has at least one foot in. So Christians asking Trump or Musk to behave in more Christian ways is by no means "policing non-Christians".
OliveTapenade
15d ago
It does not seem Christian, to me, to excuse or justify what is evil? What you've said reminds me of the "we need our own Putin" argument from conservative Christians circa 2016 (criticised here). The last I checked Christians were not supposed to act out of fear. When Musk or Trump behave badly, it seems entirely appropriate, to me, for Christians to say that behaviour is bad and to issue a call to repentance.
Christians are supposed to be signs of contradiction to the world. As that blogger says, "the idea that we should keep our mouths shut instead of "dividing"... is an insidious falsehood that is totally off the mark".
It's a short, four episode UK TV series about a teenager who murders a classmate. It's being interpreted as a penetrating look at the radicalisation of young boys by social media.
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