campfireSmoresEaten
No bio...
User ID: 2560
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
Yudkowsky wasn't saying "this is likely to happen." He was saying "this is the sort of arrangement where humanity could avoid being made extinct by a hostile superintelligence." Which seems right to me if you agree with the premise that superintelligence is dangerous and possible and hard to align.
The difference between nuclear weapons and ASI is that ASI kills everyone and nuclear weapons don't. If people realized that then it would not be hard to ban it. Imagine if one nuclear weapon destroyed the whole solar system. Do you see how a treaty banning them would not be difficult? Even if China wasn't convinced, it still would not be that difficult to convince or prevent them from building one. Far easier than WWII, as Yudkowsky has said.
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
"Futurists tend to have this problem where they're so fixated on hypothetic possibility they tend to forget anything we do, including novel technology, is still part of nature and still restricted by the same limits as everything else. It's rare that we can come up with something that is both legitimately more efficient than what evolution has come up with and sustainable in time."
Cars, planes, buildings, roads, computers, printing press, guns, bombs, boats, submarines, ice cream, space ships, etc. A grizzly bear's claws are sharp, but a sword is made of metal. Why do you think improving on nature/evolution is rare?
Why do you think smarter than human AI is impossible? For one thing, human brain size is limited by the size of the woman's hips, so we're not even as evolutionarily selected as we could be.
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
Why do you believe that humanity could never invent something capable of causing our extinction? Even if you think strangelets are safe, is there some rule that says they have to be? What about nanobots? What happens when you create an AI advanced enough to make itself more advanced?
"Nature doesn't work that way." Why? What does that mean? Why are you using the word "nature" and not "technology and its future"?
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
Why is that stupid?
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
Your argument is premised on the assumption that continued AI development only holds a partial risk of human extinction. You're not disagreeing with the airstrike plan, you're disagreeing with the premise that it follows from.
You're also assuming that airstrikes would escalate to nuclear war, but that's a less glaring error.
The choices are: airstrikes -> you might die in nuclear war, no airstrikes -> you definitely die from ai, along with all humanity, but you say that you don't care about that so I don't know why I'm bringing it up
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
Thanks for the info
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
Of course, if prediction markets were legal that would change all this.
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
If you value the capacity for independent thought, how about donating to fund voluntary sterilization for people with tragic drug addictions?
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
Are Cuban-Americans really great or do people who complain about immigrants not complain about them because they're more sympathetic?
Kind of a stupid question, I know.
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
I don't think HBD has anything to do with "deserve". Most of the prominent HBD-people would agree with that, I think. It's not like someone with a genetic disease like Huntington's "deserves" to be sick.
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
Speaking of historical revisionism, I do sometimes wonder if pedophilia (NAMBLA) had more of a home in the 1950s-1990s gay rights movement than is shown in the history books.
Evidence:
Allen Ginsburg and a few others not being shunned.
Gay rights group ILGA disassociates with NAMBLA reluctantly only after pressure from the United Nations, with 12% voting that they would rather include NAMBLA even at the cost of their UN consultancy. (The vote was 214 to 30)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILGA_consultative_status_controversy
Helmut Kentler getting funding from the West German government.
Ultimately it's only a suspicion, and my confidence in the suspicion is below 40%. I haven't researched it much though, so I don't know.
Edit: and then of course there's France.
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
Biden didn't have a real base of supporters before he won the primary either. There were even articles about it. Picture a stereotypical Hillary fan. A stereotypical Bernie fan. A stereotypical Biden fan. The last one is impossible, like trying to picture a square circle.
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
Ware has an immense incentive to tell people what they want to hear.
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
"seeing the bad consequences of things they support doesn’t move the needle at all in terms of their worldviews"
It is important to ask others (and yourself) "what would change your mind?" Yudkowsky taught me that.
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
I fear that if we start brutally murdering blasphemers, it'll be a slippery slope to brutally murdering other types of people.
(jk)
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
To me, having sex with an attractive woman in a restroom, even in otherwise ideal circumstances, sounds like it would be at most 50% as enjoyable as the same encounter on a bed or a couch.
Should I start identifying as a demisexual?
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
Oh, ok.
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
" I hear rogue like and that makes it seem like you are intended to fail until they give you enough honorable mention trophies to buy upgrades that let you win. "
For the record, that's not what roguelike means. Or at least, not what it used to mean. For a long long long time before modern "rogue-lites" came along and got super popular.
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
I'm skeptical that this would or could work. It also seems like it would be hard to keep secret.
Well I read some of the Robert Galbraith detective novels and those had cell phones being used to solve the problems one would expect a cell phone to solve, pretty much. To the extent that they didn't solve problems, it never felt forced. I can't recall anyone's phone running out of batteries at a crucial moment. I don't think lack-of-bars ever featured into the plotline.
It's probably easier to have phones not solve problems in a detective story than a thriller.
Edit: Really, cell phones obviate danger when you know you're about to be attacked soon but you have still have time for the police to show up, wherever you are. So that aspect is not that limiting.
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
The mistakes made by boosters of the soviet union are perhaps not criticized as much as they should be by historians, but they're not praised either.
In other words: the degenerated and corrupted aspects of hyperprogressivism may be minimized, but at least they mostly won't be glorified.
In non-singularity situations.
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
https://etgarkeret.substack.com/p/boohoo-to-you-too
Well for the record, here's a non-fiction short story/essay written by an Israeli Jew named Etgar Keret that you would approve of.
"A few days ago, I met an old friend. Like most Israelis I’ve seen since October 7, she looked broken and anguished. But in addition to the familiar feelings of grief, terror and loss, I picked up on something else she projected: a sense of betrayal.
As a staunch progressive, this had come out of nowhere for her. After all, she’d always been one of the good ones, she’d done all the right things: joined the most righteous protests, refused to use plastic straws, cancelled everyone that deserved to be cancelled. She was the first to switch her Facebook profile to the Ukrainian flag, the first to share the cartoon of Putin with a little Hitler moustache. For years, she stood with the weak and the oppressed, always identified with their pain and derided anyone else’s. And then, on the worst day of her life, on that bloody Saturday when a brutal terrorist organization murdered and kidnapped hundreds of her people, all those American and European partners to the struggle – the ones who’d always been at her side in various protest movements – were now suddenly giving her the cold shoulder.
“I don’t understand,” she lamented, her voice cracking, “don’t they have eyes? Can’t they see the massacre? The cruelty? The inhumanity? Can’t they understand that in the horrific story of October 7, we were actually the good guys?”
The answer is no. They can’t see that we’re the good guys because, in the world we now live in, there are no good guys: there are only bad guys and worse guys. The progressive paradigm has come to mean that you decide who the victims are, and you identify with them so completely that you utterly disregard the claims and suffering of the alleged perpetrator. And in that mode of thinking, it’s very easy to find yourself on the side that gets cancelled. Especially when you’ve been occupying another people for over 56 years. Reality is complex and ambiguous, while the progressive worldview is simplified, unequivocal and righteous—or at least it can appear that way when you’re part of the well-meaning crowd gathered for a public stoning."
(it continues)
Some background on Etgar Keret: not a hardcore Zionist, but also not in the "Israeli Jews are colonizers" perspective. A mind capable of nuance.
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
Like who? Whom dost thou quote?
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
You can plead the fifth to every question but you do have to show up.
North Korea's dysfunction does extend to its air force, or so I've heard. It's hard to invade a country that has a vastly superior air force.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Korea_Air_Force#Aircraft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_People's_Army_Air_Force#Aircraft
Even with the element of surprise, it's hard to imagine that North Korea could neutralize this disadvantage.
More options
Context Copy link