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This is flogging the FTX crash horse, which if not expired yet is certainly not in the best of health, but I'm currently reading the Chapter 11 declaration by the guy put in charge of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, and it is prime entertainment.
He is not impressed with how FTX and its web of companies was run, and he makes no bones about it. The recurring refrain all through is "However, because this balance sheet was produced while the Debtors were controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried, I do not have confidence in it, and the information therein may not be correct as of the date stated" for all the balance sheets he's quoting. He was the guy put in to handle Enron when it was wound up, and he says (reading between the lines and you don't need to do much of that) that the FTX mess is even worse than that:
He throws shade everywhere:
(Translation: Bankman-Fried is a lying liar)
Ouch. As if Zuckerberg didn't have enough problems with the Metaverse already. Is this really the kind of PR he wants associated with it? 😁
What really interested me in all this, though, was the interview/transcript of a Twitter conversation with Bankman-Fried that Kelsey Piper published in Vox the other day. I have no idea what Bankman-Fried is trying to achieve here, but it's pretty plain that he is in a state of denial and is not accepting any responsibility for the eventual outcome. He admits he fucked up, but then shifts into blaming others, including his co-founders, and everyone who advised him to file for bankruptcy. Reading Ray's declaration, it sounds less like "I was advised" and more like "I was told do this or else", but whatever; now he is spinning a story (and I don't know if he believes this himself or was just trying it out on Piper) that if he had toughed it out and refused to file for bankruptcy he would have been able to cover most of the debts and settle up within a month or two:
Considering, according to the filing, that amongst the lawyers he consulted about that, one of them was his dad - ouch again. Sorry Dad, Sonny-boy is lumping you in with the bad advisors who led him astray. But he is in a state of delusion that he could have fixed this, or can fix it. He still can't admit he messed up because he was too greedy and not as smart as he thought he was, and all that rationalist woo about risk and utility maximisation was only a cover for bad decisions and fraud.
I would definitely recommend reading this document to get a picture of what was going on. There is no way, unless he's trying to set up for an insanity plea or operating under impairment due to drugs/mental health problems, that Bankman-Fried can deny it was all down to him. He pretty much owned or controlled every entity that was going on, it was him and literally about three others who made all the decisions, and they seem to have treated the interlocking parts as their own private piggy-bank (e.g. "three loans by Alameda Research Ltd.: one to Mr. Bankman-Fried, of $1 billion; one to Mr. Singh, of $543 million; and one to Ryan Salame, of $55 million"). Then read the Vox article to see how he is admitting all his EA/altruism talk was basically telling them what they wanted to hear so he'd be popular and well-liked and they'd trust him, because getting people to like you is winning and winning is all that counts.
And this set-up was having billions of dollars in investment funding thrown at it, and it was less well-organised than a school bake sale when it came to handling and keeping track of what money was coming in and where it was going.
Seems pretty obvious to anyone paying close attention, but SBF has gotten swooning media coverage which desperately wishes to whitewash what he did by going along his explanation of "it was just a big mistake". We'll see how many dumb people fall for it.
It's kinda odd how soft the NYT has been on SBF, but claims that it's the democrats/establishment/media 'protecting him' like this ignore the very harsh coverage from every other mainstream non-nyt source - vox/financial times/bloomberg/reuters/cnbc / many others. So ... the 'mainstream' isn't protecting him, and nobody significant is gonna be misled! And claims that he'll not be investigated because democrat money donation (FTX actually donated a lower but similar-magnitude amount to republicans via ryan salame, co-ceo) / the media loves him just aren't true given that.
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I have a question. Why, after this fiasco with FTX, should I have any faith that the Effective Altruism movement has any handle on existential risk or any capability to determine what actions will increase or decrease said risk? My impression is that this management of existential risk is a substantial part of EA's brand. Especially William MaCaskill and longtermism as a movement. Some of the leading lights of the EA movement (like MaCaskill) were apparently unable to manage the well defined risk of "maybe this guy running a cryptocurrency exchange is a scam artist" but I'm supposed to believe they have a handle on the vastly more nebulous and ill defined risk of "maybe an unfriendly artificial intelligence extincts humanity." Why should I believe this?
First of all ... EA doesn't claim to 'have a handle on AI risk'. EA claims to be worried about AI risk, and not have a handle on it, hence the worry.
from @moskov on twitter: "The other day a very close friend said "of course I believe pandemic and AI risk are huge problems, but you've got them covered" and I screamed "NO WE ARE FAILING". That wasn't even about money per se, just making any kind of attempt."
Second, why do you need to have 'faith in EA'? You should evaluate their actions individually. Entirely possible for GiveWell to be good but their AI risk work to be bad, even if FTX didn't go down.
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Existential risk is a hack job for human psychology. Once you can convince someone (especially yourself) that something is an existential risk to all life, why you can do goddamned anything you can convince yourself has even a tiny chance of preventing it. It's "Deus Vult" for atheists. The further into the future this dystopia lies, the less likely you'll ever have to deal with the fallout of your failed predictions. We've been on "ten years to save the world from global warming" for a good forty years now.
My stupid moron religious parents think the world is going to end because people are sinful and God is vengeful. Really smart people believe the world is going to end because.......people are sinful and (AI) gods are vengeful. Environmentalists believe the world is going to end because......people are sinful and mother earth is vengeful.
FWIW, I think AI x-risk is real, and this doesn't match my psychology. I am unhappy about this, and wish I could just go back to thinking about purely technical problems. I dislike the flavor of AI risk work (qualitative research, politics, and activism) and also dislike being seen as a self-important, deluded ninny (which others are right to suspect of me).
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None of that makes their claims wrong. Is this even a psychology thing? Things like 'existential risks to all life' do exist (for historical examples: atmosphere oxygenation "caused the extinction of many existing anaerobic species on Earth ... constituted a mass extinction", Chicxulub "a mass extinction of 75% of plant and animal species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs.", ice ages, human population bottleneck), and technology makes it easy for us to do similarly bad things. Preventing such things is important, and it would be stupid to write them off. So this isn't even a psycholoical "hack", it's just ... something important that one can be wrong about. But it's not any more worth ignoring than it is to ignore the doctor saying you need surgery or you'll die, because faith healers say you need to get a protection spell or you'll die. That X-risk leads people to make difficult and complex decisions is good
Yes, all predictions of the apocalypse up until this very second have been wrong.
Yes, the next one might be right.
No, it won't be, but it might.
Sooner or later, it's either the big 'ol HDU or something else.
There is an absolutely unbroken line of apocalyptic dreamers who prefer their fantasy to dealing with the reality of the world. It goes back to the beginning of time when the first dipshit looked up at a shooting star and said "that means the gods are mad at us, we're all gonna die".
I'm doing a rationalist calculation. What are the odds that I meet the first Jeremiah in the history of the world to be right? I mean, a lot of people have lived a lot of lives and most of them thought the world was going to end in their lifetime. I'm pretty hot shit, but I doubt I'm lucky enough to even be alive at the same time as that guy, much less live in the same country, speak the same language, share enough personality quirks with to wind up in the same internet forums etc. What are the odds?
Pretty goddamned good, since I've lived through fourteen to twenty apocalypses (apocalypsi? apocalyps'?) to date. What a life. Fire, flood, the return of Christ, acid rain, Y2K, nuclear war (several times!), the Macarena, Global Warming and now AI? Bring it on, I say.
I gave several examples of literal apocalypses though
Again, it's entirely possible for massive technological change to make apocalypses possible. There clearly is a difference between 'god will fire lighting boom everyone for not being religious enough' and 'the billions of dollars and millions of man hours of the smartest people on the world are being invested in AI, what if it works'.
Given that EA spends more time and money on malaria nets than AI risk, this is clearly not an accurate statement about them. More generally, that doesn't actually make AI risk false.
Even if EA and lesswrong were - entirely - irrational and religious cults around AI risk, that wouldn't make AI risk false. And there are stupid, illogical cults around AI - there was and still is a lot of popular scifi larp about "the singularity", "mind uploading", etc. This doesn't make the AI go away.
Yeah, but those occurred on the rough timescale of once every billion years, and all prior to anything anywhere near humanity existing. The ratios on apocalypse-level events Humans have worried about to things that have actually happened during a timeframe that concerns us is therefore at least that high.
Technology has increased the rate of change of everything, though. a million years of hunter gathering, 100k years of fire, 10k years of agriculture, civilization ... 300 years of industry, 60 years of computers... If AI doesn't happen, what does happen in 10k years, and why hasn't AI taken power from humans yet?
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I got raised on "we must avoid nuclear war, if it ever happens it will doom humanity, never mind the hundreds of millions killed by the bombs, the nuclear winter afterwards will mean we all starve and freeze to death in the dark". Nuclear war was the existential risk of the 60s-80s. This animated film frightened the life out of a generation of kids.
Now I'm reading "eh, nuclear war isn't that bad, sure it will kill a lot of people but not everyone, it will not be the end of civilisation much less humanity, and even nuclear winter was over-exaggerated".
What changed about nuclear bombs in the meantime? Nothing, so far as I can see, but the attitude around that risk has changed. Now it's climate change that is the existential risk of our time. AI can just take its place in the queue of "This time for sure, says Chicken Little" about the sky falling.
Nuclear risk is actually one of the EA Big Four - AI, Bio risk, Climate change, and Nuclear war. I have met far more people in EA that actually care about nuclear war than anywhere else.
The reason AI is getting more salience is because it's perceived as more neglected which is one of the key criteria of an EA cause area. Nuclear war is mainstream and nobody wants it, so it isn't as neglected as the other areas.
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I'd like to note, though, that when I asked this question from the perspective you've mentioned, I got at least one reply to the effect of "you could still be boned." Nuclear war might not end all human civilization immediately, but even post-Cold-War media still tended to portray the post-nuclear world as pretty bleak even if there were still some people alive (after all, in such a world, the living might envy the dead). That is to say, even today, nuclear war could get pretty bad, we just have reasons/copium to believe the possibility space also contains scenarios that aren't "rubble and deserts everywhere."
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Your argument goes like 'society was wrong and people lied about nuclear war, and used that to manipulate people - so that must be what's happening now'. Which ... sure, that can happen - it constantly happens - but the reason people even have a desire to avoid x-risks is because it is important to avoid disasters when disasters exist, and disasters sometimes exist.
This is like saying - "you're worried about high crime? people in the 1900s were worried about racialized crime destroying society, and they were wrong, and racist. Therefore crime doesn't matter". You can't write off the entire idea of 'bad thing happening' because people misuse the idea!
What I'm saying is, this is not my first rodeo. If all the x-risks that were sure-fire guaranteed gonna happen as prognosticated over the course of my life had even one of them happen, we'd be disposed of by now.
So "Oh no AI is gonna doom us unless!" talk is nothing special. "But AI is different" - yeah, well, so were nuclear weapons. It's not AI that is the risk, it's humans. We are the greatest threat to ourselves.
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I did too. They all were considered possible, likely or certain by millions of geniuses in their day (except the silly ones, of course). They all had a reason why this time it was for real. They all happened, for some definition of "happen", and they all did not result in the end of the world, humanity, life or anything else so dire. I'm sure AI is dangerous. I'm sure we'll have some colossal fuckups with it that will probably damage something important. When this happens, the frenzy will begin in earnest. Timelines will be settled on, politics will change, a solution will be found, and we will learn to live with it, as we have with nuclear weapons.
Whichever generation of asshole eschatologists alive at the time will write a million books saying they averted the apocalypse. Ten seconds later, it will be something else, and everyone will forget about it. The End of the World is dead, long live the End of the World.
Maybe I'm wrong. Tell you what, if the world ends due to AI, I'll give you a million dollars.
Have you read any yud or lesswrong writing on AI safety? They put a lot of effort into addressing the exact concerns you've laid out, in a way that you don't seem to acknowledge. But leaving that - why though? Why will the competent people find a solution? It's clear how we are able to find a solution to, e.g. nuclear weapons, religious conflict, etc. But AI will be - it's argued - not a simple mechanism we can intelligence and coordinate around, but smart on its own. As a random example - what is the political solution to "AIs now control the global economy"? The AIs are going to be the one "finding solutions", not "human politicians". You can't psychologize your way around a gun to your head, and no amount of "you're just scared its ok the grownups will handle it" will physically prevent the complexity of AI!
Yes, yes, very smart people disagree with me. Your argument is to handwave me at the vast canon of AI scribbling? I've read the big ones, and they are as unconvincing as they are hysterical. It's a very specific style, one I recognize well from my upbringing in a millennial faith-healing cult. It all sounds very convincing, if you haven't been down this road before.
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Well, no one else is taking the issues seriously.
Stuart Russell wrote a whole book.
And what came of it?
-Marx
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The answer seems obvious: instead of taking someone's word for or against ai xrisk being a thing, the arguments for it have to be evaluated on their merits, and you can decide for yourself whether it is something to be concerned about based on that.
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My personal guidance has long been that faith in individuals (and small groups) is almost always misplaced. Faith in principles can do pretty well, but IRL humans are quite fallible and rarely live up to our expectations. There is no living person whose word I would treat as sacrosanct without a willingness to do my own research.
IMO nobody has satisfactorily explained why AI risk outweighs, say, the existential risk of an extinction event by anthropogenic (nuclear war or catastrophic ecological disaster) or other (asteroid, supervolcano, nearby supernova). I don't think we have good handles on the relative magnitudes of risk on these. At some point you're really just acting on your priors.
Many people within EA are also not convinced that AI risk outweighs all other risks. This is more of a strawman that gets heaped on EA because the most visible EA detractors latch onto the wackiest part of the movement.
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Humans 'took over the planet' and displaced billions of other animals just by being smarter. Why wouldn't AI agents do the same? Our intelligence relates to physical mechanisms somehow, and computers are a much faster and more efficient way of implementing similar things, so why wouldn't computers be able to do so better? Look how rapidly technology is integrated into human life and the economy, won't that just continue to accelerate as it has over the past 300 years? What does a human do, what happens to the economy, when complex AI interactions drive more and more of it?
There's some debate on that, there's a competing theory that we "took over the planet" because we had language and could thus learn from events that we ourselves did not witness.
Transformers and large neural nets generally are universal ML system that can do moderately-intelligent tasks like create images, play games, optimize all sorts of real-world tasks, and also understand language. Human intelligence is similar - use and understanding of language depends and is made of general intelligence. If dogs could talk, they wouldn't be smarter. And - they can talk, sort of, they have verbal and body-language signals that mean things, they just can't do larger-scale things with that.
This feels like affirming the consequent/assuming the conclusion.
If dogs could talk would they need to be smarter? How much rougher would the lions' life be if the Buffalos and Gazelles could collude?
yes, dogs can't play sports (even if they had the right physical form factor) or compose music as well as humans despite neither requiring language. buffalos can communicate, and do, the ability to understand complex communications wold require intelligence, and even if they had that minimal intelligence that doesn't get them to toolmaking, let alone physics or military planning. is this a bit?
No, because it seems equally clear that intelligence doesn't get you that far on it's own.
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I feel like we actually DO have a pretty good handle on these existential risks. Definitely we can model the likelihood of extinction level asteroids and supernovas. The base rate here is very low, and we're improving our odds by tracking asteroids. Supervolcanoes are not extinction level events.
Nuclear war or ecological disaster seem unlikely to be extinction level events. Nuclear weapons are just not powerful enough, although they could potentially reduce the population by a lot. Global warming is centuries away from being an existential concern.
Rogue AI on the other hand has the potential to kill all humans. We can argue about whether the chances are 1% or 99%. And we can argue about whether it will happen in 10 years or 50 years. But if we're drafting talent in the NBA draft of extinction events, AI gets drafted #1, and it's not even close. It combines high likelihood in the near-term with the potential to kill ALL humans, not just 5% of them or whatever.
Yeah, but that's not the Drowning Child, is it? They charity-mugged everyone with that nugget from Singer: if you saw a child drowning right now, in front of your very own eyes, wouldn't you save it? What kind of heartless monster would not? And so if you accept that you should save the drowning child, then you must accept that you should save the children who will die without malaria nets.
I know the malaria nets projects have now got more money than they know what to do with, so it's not hypocritical for EA to move to a new good cause. But it is hypocritical to move to a cause where the advice now is "Forget about that drowning child, if you jump into the pond you might catch a cold and be home from work sick and then your contribution to stopping AI from paperclipping us all will be lost for that valuable period of a week! Sure, we don't know if the AI is coming in ten or fifty years, and the kid is drowning right now, but imagine all the kids in fifty years time instead!"
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There are people who also argue that it will happen "never". Anyway I'd say this is a threat in similar ballpark as "being invaded by alien species". What is a chance that humanity's technological progress woke up some Von Neumann probe from some ancient civilization somewhere in Oort cloud which is now ramping up self-replication capacities and building up an invasion spacefleet set to destroy Earth? Existence of such probes throughout the galaxy could definitely be one answer for Fermi paradox, whatever the chance you assign to such a possibility multiply it with existential threat and you are Pascal mugged toward giving it a lot of thought.
But similarly to the AI problem, it is hard to conceive what to do about it. Maybe not search for ancient civilization by Active SETI and maybe increase manufacturing of nuclear rockets capable of targeting things on our orbit?
Going back to AI, I have yet to see any material results of the supposed "friendly AI" research. We do not even know what technology will lead to such an AI which means it may be hard or even impossible to imbue it with certain morality. Not to even talk if EA people and affiliated researchers are the best people for that job given their own morality. In fact if one is as serious as you are here about it, probably the best course of action would be to go full Terminator 2 and assassinate all leading AI researchers and bomb all the research laboratories with hope that we will eventually land upon some form of AI Inquisition type government banning all research into the area under severe penalties. Of course this looks too crazy even for AI types, but it would be logical conclusion here.
Well they're not serious thinkers, are they? Where is the law of physics that says it's impossible to make a rogue AI? Even if such a law did exist, never is a very strong word. I'd be cautious before saying we would 'never' find some way around thermodynamics, the most solid foundation we have. Who knows what could be achieved 500,000 years after the Scientific Revolution? We're only 300 or so years in, there may be a few revolutions to come.
It's outrageously silly to say 'never' when we have so many questions still unanswered, when AI is advancing at such a rapid pace.
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I almost put aliens in my comment. The threat from extraterrestrials is similar to AI in that it is difficult to quantify but at the same time the potential damage is 100% extinction. And since, in either case, we have no base rate we have to make assumptions of likelihood from first principles. This is what some people have difficultly accepting, probably the same type who weren't worried about nuclear weapons in the 1940s.
I also agree that there is not much that can be done. Although actively trying to get aliens to find us does seem uniquely stupid. I guess I just get frustrated when people conflate "minor" threats such as climate change or supervolcanoes with things that are much more serious.
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I mean, huge amounts of talent and capital are being poured into building AGI, and we know it's physically possible (because human brains exist). So to be sure that it'll never happen seems like a stretch.
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Not really. At least we know those other things are actually within the realm of possibility. We have no reason to even believe (yet) we can invent an AI that could kill us all, let alone one that would. AI risk is just not worth taking seriously at this point in time.
It seems important to consider before you create something that could (because if you wait it might be too late).
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I don't see why FTX should really change your views there. SBF is just one person and doesn't define the movement. Fraud existed before FTX and will exist after it.
The bigger question is why you should have any faith in the EA movement to begin with. I would argue you shouldn't. I certainly don't. Their arguments are IMO naive and the millenarian fervor certainly doesn't give them a veneer of respectability. I mean, they're patting themselves on the back for rediscovering charity. Wow, congratulations, that concept has only been around for a few thousand years. As far as I'm concerned EA is just a honeypot for self-important status-seekers trying to feel good about belonging to a cause. They're this generation's flower children.
I largely agree with your criticisms, but my impression is that most mainstream charities maintain a cultivated ignorance about their actual impact. I don't think much of our ability to define or measure the things we care about achieving, but at least EAs are pushing for a norm of trying to do so.
Yeah, if you're measuring "Did Curtains For The Congo really do any benefit for the people there with their fundraising campaign to send soft furnishings to Kinshasa?" you can certainly set up a norm of defining and measuring.
But AI is now the same kind of "we don't what effect, if any, our efforts will have or if we're even trying the right approach, but we believe passionately in this cause so we are determined to throw money, time and effort at it" case as the traditional charities they twitted for not being very effective. They may be right to be concerned, and what they are doing might be right - or the completely wrong approach and they are looking the wrong way while the real threat is coming from a different direction. We'll only find out in 10-50 years. But never mind that we have no way of defining or measuring if this is effective, think of the risk! Pour all your money and energy into it!
I agree with your framing of the difficulty of measuring progress on AI risk, and I think most EAs would as well. They would say that we should still try to measure such progress, or at least recognize that most of our efforts will probably go to waste because we can't, as you point out.
I think most EAs would say that even though we know we're going to waste most of the time, money, and energy we put into AI risk (because it's so hard to measure) it's still worthwhile. So I don't think this is an instance of hypocrisy, just an instance where plan A doesn't work.
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I'm not sure what you're suggesting. If Sequoia and others are willing to invest hundreds of millions of their own money into FTX, why should someone receiving charity expect to be able to do better due diligence? Why should they try? "Existential Risk" specifically refers to humanity's existence, not any particular replaceable entity that might go under.
yeah this. doing diligence is hard enough with a public company. it's way, way harder with a private one
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Maxine Waters and Patrick McHenry will be in charge of the house committee for FTX.
He's going to get away with all of it. Fuuuuck dude. This is hard to stomach.
See here - huh? Why? The mainstream/cathedral/dems have been plenty harsh on ftx. It's not like madoff didn't donate to politicans, and if the dems/govt were as corrupt as that would imply the US would've descended into third-world chaos decades ago, as every large corporation that committed massive fraud, causing economic stagnation, would be rewarded.
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Maybe the Republicans will do it again when they're in charge of the House in a couple of months, and I bet Maxine Waters won't figure prominently in that effort.
Also, no, I think the ultimate accountability will be the criminal courts, and failing that, civil courts.
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No he won't. Now that he is broke and his reputation and company is gone, there is nothing to gain by protecting him. Throwing him under the bus the politically expedient move now.
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Honestly the only thing interesting in the whole thing is FTX had 24 engineers and supposedly their tech was very good. While fb and twitter are at a different scale it still likely means they have an extraordinary amount of too many people.
The rest is just a tale as old as time. Idiots bought into a Ponzi scheme.
From what I read, there is good reason to believe this isn’t true
https://milkyeggs.com/?p=175
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regular people who had money on FTX were not part of the scheme but still lost.
I will be honest I don’t care about those people. I don’t care if people investing in a Ponzi get rich scheme like bitcoin lose money. Satoshi and me are basically the same tribe but what crypto has become is just a pyramid scheme not the libertarian fantasy.
Doesn’t libertarianism lead to pyramid schemes, though? It’s all voluntary. Lula Roe hasn’t violated the NAP.
Why insert the state and have it prohibit companies from basing their staffing model on having 99% of their workforce as independent contractors, the supermajority of which don’t end up taking home the equivalent of minimum wage for the amount of time they put in?
I guess your point is there is no one to protect someone from themselves. To that I agree and as I said I have no sympathy for people losing to a Ponzi scheme.
Maybe libertarians leads to more Ponzi schemes. I’ve become more of a state capacity libertarian but I still don’t feel like crypto is anything like the founders dreams.
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Keep in mind this is the guy who oversaw Enron's dissolution, so it's not like he's new to corporate malfeasance shitshows.
Yeah, and he still said "I never saw anything like this". I think he was used to, even in corporate hokey-pokey, if they were cooking the books they at least kept books. FTX etc. had a mess where nobody was keeping track of anything, so they probably simply lost money by sheer stupid carelessness and not deliberate fraud in some instances. They can't even figure out how many people worked/are working/were working there, since there wasn't proper records kept. Any hog, dog or divil could be a disgruntled employee who hacked those missing millions.
I swear, you have to be really smart to be this dumb. This all reads like the very worst strawman of the rationalist/rationalist-adjacent/EA Bay Area types. They thought they were too cool for school, and that learning off some game theory and some problems about one-boxing strategy meant they didn't have to do boring old traditional usual corporate and business stuff. They were making millions with cutting-edge finance of the future! They were smarter than the average bear! They had thrown out conventional social morality around relationships and all that jazz, they were building the new model of community, why have tedious stuff like "have to have an expenses claims system in place" when you can have kewl fun emojis instead?
Honestly, I'm reading the Chapter 11 filing and you wouldn't let a bunch of six year olds in a kindergarten carry on like this. How the ever-living purple people eating fuck did this selection get people anxious to hand over billions to them????
In future this Bahamas luxury compound of idiocy is going to be what I point to when responding to "legalise drugs! nootropics are fun and healthy! what harm does it do anyone to hack their brains?" talk.
I bet a movie is already in the works. Reminds me of Rogue Trader, or War Dogs or similar films.
Young dodgy maverick gets into $industry and makes bank by not playing by the rules until things spiral out of control. The hedonistic lifestyle and law eventually catch up to him. Audience feels good that Icarus is punished for his audacity. The End.
Edit: Just saw Tanista beat me to it. You just know Hollywood is already on this.
I haven't watched a Hollywood movie in ages, but if they make one about this, I'll make a point of watching it.
I just hope they don't try to romanticise any of this shit (e.g. Bankman-Fried was just a guy who wanted to do good but went down the wrong path).
I want sweaty, chubby nerd Bankman-Fried slapping on stimulant patches and downing nootropics while playing League of Legends in his beanbag seat while he's supposed to be keeping track of where the hell the payments are coming in, and giving permission via "personalised emoji" to some mook in chat asking can they have half a mil to do shit without even knowing if this mook actually works for him or not because nobody knows who works where.
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This whole thing is almost too perfect.
I don't know how to describe it other than I can almost feel the beats in Adam Mackay's inevitable film with every new headline.
TIL that the man who wrote and directed The Big Short also wrote and directed Anchorman
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Casting suggestions? Who is "Hollywood ugly" enough for the Caroline Ellison part? Ordinarily I'd pick Tatiana Maslany for the "quirky oddball smart girl" part (as distinct from the "manic pixie dream girl" which is, or was, Zooey Deschanel) but she's too pretty for this role. You need someone who is the female version of a chinless wonder, but I don't know any actresses who look like that.
Suggestions for Bankman-Fried and his unfortunate friends/unindicted co-conspirators 'Gary' Wang and Nishad Singh and Ryan Salame, who haven't appeared in any photos over the stories in the media so far as I can see, also welcome!
If America Ferrera can be Ugly Betty I don't think this is a problem.
PS. maybe she can just reprise the role.
Oh, that's a good suggestion!
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Josh Gad for SBF
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I don't think she's ugly so much as just goofy looking, but my first thought was to put Maisie Williams in some BCGs
Maisie is good too, but a bit too pretty. Though I guess they could ugly her down for it. Caroline Ellison is plain; she has thin, fine hair which she really should cut shorter, her face is small and underdeveloped, she has a not very tall, average body (she's not fat but she's not curvy in the hourglass lingerie model style) and those glasses are not doing her any favours for the shape of her face. She's not ugly but she is plain.
Bad take IMO, but I’m a sucker for girls with long hair.
Long hair suits thicker hair. When your hair is as fine as hers, it ends up looking stringy as here. Cutting it shorter (even shoulder-length) lets it 'thicken' up and would go better with her shape of face. She would look a lot better with this kind of styling.
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I do feel bad judging her on her looks, because outside of "Okay Sam, my on/off boyfriend, you want me to be in charge of a trading firm? That you basically use for shuffling money around like a three card trick? Despite the fact that my sum total of experience is 'worked my first and only job to date in a quant firm for six months'? And all I have to do is sign off on whatever you tell me to sign off on? Sounds great!", she may be a nice and even smart person.
But I think most people are wondering about "This guy was allegedly worth billions and this is the type of woman he was dating?" when it comes to her. I mean, I can understand why they would be in a relationship before the whole "making billions upon billions" thing took off, but in general you then dump the first wife and upgrade to a hotter, younger, trophy piece of arm candy. Maybe Bankman-Fried just didn't know that many women, but I'm sure there were plenty of hot Bahamian women who would have been delighted to date a rich guy. It does look like they all just stayed in their own little bubble in the compound, which is part of the entire downfall.
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Might have something to do with it being public knowledge now that she's already into freaky shit?
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I confess that I might be misremembering but wasn't Bankman-Fried associated with the whole "external loci of control" and "free will is a myth" branch of rationalism/decision theory? I seem to remember something about that from one of the old SSC link round-ups.
If so I'd be surprised if he did accept any responsibility.Edit: NM found it, Looks like I was confusing Bankman-Fried with Barbara Fried but if I'm reading Wikipedia correctly I think this might actually be his mother.
https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blame-moral-responsibility-philosophy-law/
You're claiming rationalism thinks that philosophical debates about "free will" are meaningful and have relevance to assigning personal responsibility? By "rationalism" meaning LessWrong people? I don't believe you. And sure enough, I searched on LessWrong and found that not only does Eliezer Yudkowsky not agree with those like Barbara Fried, in 2008 he called it so trivial that it served as a "practice question" for aspiring rationalists, then later elaborated on his solution at further length.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/free-will
It's not like this is even restricted to one of the more obscure "sequences", I've seen "Dissolving the Question" cited elsewhere. Look, I'm sure there's people on /r/badphilosophy who would mock the arrogance of thinking you have easily dissolved a famous philosophical dilemma, and that would be annoying in its own way. But at least it would display at least some surface-level engagement with what was said. Grouping LessWrong in with a philosopher arguing that some inane sophistry about "free will" means we should adopt her preferred criminal-justice policy positions reflects an incredible lack of understanding of what they believe and how they think. Barbara Fried is engaging in the exact sort of thing that makes LessWrong people have such a poor opinion on the health of philosophy as a field.
To be fair, there was some [discussion about separating where internal and external locus of controls are accurate, which misses the point of the entire term. But it also was a tiny subdiscussion which none of the big movers and shakers spoke on, and which was not highly upvoted or supported.
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No, I'm claiming that even if rationalists dismiss debates about free will as irrelevant, such debates are in fact relevant, and that there is a non-trivial portion of rationalists/EA activists who believe in external loci of control and act on that belief. I am implying that regardless of what Rationalists might classify as relevant or irrelevant that the beliefs of Bankman-Fried's mother might have had something to do with his observed behavior. and I am suggesting that the "strawman characterization" of utilitarianism as promoting sociopathic behavior is not made out of straw at all.
We shall know them by their fruits.
I don't think this is a good understanding of what LessWrong thought means when it considers the 'question' of free will 'solved.' And at the risk of saying Read The Sequences, there a Sequence Post on exactly that.
I have read it and to be blunt it rings a bit hollow when taken in the context of the wider corpus, and the general popularity of guys like Singer and Watts. As I've maintained for years now, I suspect that the so called "AI Alignment Problem" has much more to do with fundamental issues with rationalist/utilitarian mindset than it does with anything intrinsic to intelligence artificial or otherwise.
Yes, we've had this discussion recently, and I don't think you made a particularly compelling argument. And I think that just hand-waving that a core part of the rationalist text specifically says the failure mode you warn about is obviously something clearly and obviously wrong with references to Singer and Watts (wut?) manages to be even less compelling.
Yes we have, and I don't think you made a particularly compelling argument either.
As before, I will say that my take is similar to that of @IprayIam,
ilforte@DaseindustriesLtd and others. The problem with utilitarianism is that a utilitarian cannot credibly commit to cooperate in any multi-agent game because their prime directive is to throw you under the bus/trolley the moment the they think that doing so might increase global utility.I will freely admit that I am the crayon-eating retard of the bunch, and so I don't expect you to find my arguments particularly compelling, but I have yet to see you or anyone else offer a proper counter-argument to the above. It just gets dismissed as a strawman or a "that would never happen in practice", which I don't buy.
That's a fairer critique of utilitarianism in general, and while a lot of both Sequence-era and modern rationalist thought has been focused on solving problems related to it (most famously Parfit's Hitchhiker, but it underlies the strict version of Newcomb's Problem and some related matters that aren't as obviously tied to honesty), there's a reasonable complaint that even if you're running off a 'better' decision theory, outside of thought experiments it's really hard to prove it.
And then there's the reasonable rejoinder that the same issues exist for other foundations of morality : there's no way to prove that a deontologist's virtue of honesty doesn't have an asterisk for 'unless under duress' or 'unless I really want otherwise' or some other exception.
If you're interested in that discussion, we can have it. I've actually got mixed feelings on a lot of it!
But this isn't particularly related to FTX, or to your misunderstanding of what locus of control means, et cetera, or even that in terms of being dismissed because it would never happen in practice, that We've Seen The Skulls here to the point where Yudkowsky spent (too much, imo) time and focus on it!
FTX isn't someone throwing people under the bus the second they think it might increase global (or even personal!) utility; they're garden-variety scammers who caught the car they were chasing, and then fell off at sixty miles an hour. They donated more to their personal funds than they did to outreach, and hell, they spent more on a concussionball stadium endorsement than any individual grant. And that's the numbers if they'd managed to hold onto the bumper another few months: as is, they're extremely likely to end up in jail, with their (claimed) cause discredited, and many of the individual charities they said they were going to donate to broken.
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For what it's worth, I do not endorse the "external locus of control" attack on Lesswrong. I am not familiar with the scholarship of Barbara Fried, but (going by the abstracts) @gattsuru and @sodiummuffin aren't shitting you when they say this isn't what Eliezer and his followers preach.
There is a strain of no-free-will demagoguery associated in academia with certain progressive political propositions; it's very loosely related to Consequentialist ethical theories (only in the sense of the corollary «well, we'll have to increase the odds of behaviors we like without much hope to shame people into them») and Utilitarian moral philosophy, and perfectly independent from the newfangled Singerian Rationalist/Effective Altruist cluster. If Barbara Fried also agrees with Singer, she arrives at that through some path not advised by Lesswrong sequences.
There are many different sets of people and many traditions in the group you distrust and lump together, and they have differences in their beliefs on many dimensions which are invisible in the sketch a disinterested layman can observe at a glance.
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Yes, it's his mother.
Somehow I'm not surprised. This is why culture matters people.
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I wonder if Mrs. Fried applies that logic to badthinkers, or just murderers and rapists.
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I had always wondered what would happen if you hooked up 4chan boys with tumblr girls. It turns out that it creates an autism singularity with the power to destroy global financial markets. Allegedly there’s a sex tape set to be released tomorrow. A week ago I would have dismissed this as utter horseshit, but at this point I wouldn’t be surprised. We know their cybersecurity was godawful, so if a sex tape exists, it’s getting leaked.
I precommit to the sex tape not being real, although I'll certainly post it on rdrama if it is. TheMotte prediction markets when?
My money is on Sam being the only one who has to face criminal charges. Ellison is going to take the Thielbucks and we’ll start seeing Dark Caroline show up at backroom Bay Area parties with Curtis Yarvin.
EDIT: Holy shit, I got scooped by Forbes. I swear I didn’t read that article before posting this.
I'm loving all the recent Forbes pieces on this entire steaming mess. They are so bitter that they were slapping all these jabronis on their "Thirty Under 30" lists before the ugly truth came out, so now they're getting their revenge 🤣
EDIT: Yes, I'm a bitch. But I love this snippet from the link in the Forbes article to a Sequoia piece titled "Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex—And Maybe You Should Too" (ROFL about that, it aged like milk didn't it?)
The same MacAskill I was informed didn't have kids because they would distract from the work he was doing for the good of the world? Like - giving advice to fraudsters, Will? Yeah, great decision making there, friend!
EDIT EDIT Yes, I'm a bitch Part Deux: The amount of Schadenfreude I am getting from the names of all the Great and the Good being dropped in that Sequoia piece who are now going to have the splashes of the mud spattered on Bankman-Fried ending up on their faces is off the charts. The boot-licking adulation is gold, especially the 'precocious kid' bit which is a standard in "I became an atheist at a young age because I was smart enough to figure out how dumb religion was even as a kid" stories, this time round abortion:
Phew! Good job he didn't, like, come to a different opinion on abortion than his friends, family and peers, huh? He might have been subjected to ostracism and shunning for badthinking and denial of what is a human right! How very convenient that he logicked his way to the conclusion he had been brought up in!
I gotta stop rolling around the floor so much, the floorboards are gonna give out under the convulsions of laughter I'm experiencing here.
Oh man, that Sequoia piece is pure gold, gold, I'm telling you!
Photo here of her in that costume, which if this is your notion of "sultry" then good God you are even more vanilla than I am, and I live under a rock
BorfRebus, plainly you are not the only one whose monkey hindbrain went "yes".
Wow, those stodgy old banks with their red tape and distrust of crypto, putting the brakes on the good FTX could do! Lucky the EA community was there to be behind Sam all the way and get around them, huh?
If I was anyone named in this piece, or anything to do with EA, I'd be fleeing to Bolivia right now, because this does tie Bankman-Fried in tight with the EA community despite all the distancing they've been trying to do, and it makes the movement sound like the most cultish, dodgy set you could hope to meet.
Should have been looking in the mirror when it came to shady outfits, Nishad!
Oh, gosh. Oh gosh oh gosh oh gosh.
As they say, comment would be superfluous.
The main point here, to be serious for a moment, is how the jargon is the same rationalist/rationalist-adjacent sort of talk I've seen discussed on here and the other SSC-sites. Bankman-Fried at least absorbed enough to be able to sling it, and it's hard to say how much he meant or believed it. "Not at all" seems to be the current take by people who, naturally, desperately want to disassociate themselves and their movements from anything to do with him.
But it's a failure mode that needs to be addressed. This guy talked all the talk, then turned out to be dodgy as hell. And he seems to truly have believed and operated on all the risk calculation, utility calculation, game theory, prisoner's dilemma scenarios everyone else is talking about and recommending as guides.
It's easy to No True Scotsman Bankman-Fried. But what if he was a Scotsman? And what if it turns out all the fancy jargon about seizing risk is not, in fact, the winning way to operate? What if we stodgy types with our rules and regulations and red tape are, in fact, correct?
EDIT: Okay, returning to "just how far up Bankman-Fried's backside can this reporter fit his head?" times, the excited admiration of what is (at best) extremely rude behaviour from Bankman-Fried does a Thelma and Louise drive off the cliff:
Wait for it....
Are you impressed? Wow, so impressive!
Does this behaviour convince our Star Reporter, one Adam Fisher, that Bankman-Fried is, in fact, talking out of his ass? You be the judge!
Let's hope for his sake that Mr. Fisher did not sink every cent he possessed into FTX trades, else he'll be working till he's eighty to clear off his debts 🤣
Yeah the article is pretty bad. Good thing it was memoryholed so few people will find it heh...
On the other hand SBF must have some insane charisma to be able to get all these people in line. I mean lord, I know some people that are charismatic but it sounds like he is next level. Despite being kinda ugly.
Yeah, I can't figure it out simply by how he looks in photos, but he must be something special in real life so that even when he is being rude (or autistic, take your pick) about avoiding eye contact and playing games while supposedly talking to you, people who should know better because they're dealing with guys who are trying to sell them on get-rich-quick-schemes for years just fall down at his feet in adoration.
On "The Top Ten List Of Things I Regret Writing" in the future for Adam Fisher, this Sequoia article is going to take the Numbers 1-5 slots.
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I don't believe there is a sex tape, and if there is, I very much do not want to see it. Apologies to all concerned, but Caroline and Sam are not the most attractive looking people in the world.
I haven't seen many sex tapes, but judging by how bad the thumbnails and screenshots usually look I dunno that people are watching them for attractive people with good camera work. Think it's more like how people (other than furries) share Bugs Bunny x Elmer Fudd porn: "lmao look at this shit, it's that guy/chick from X"
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Don't kinkshame please. There are people out there who think ugly people are just the sexiest. This tape will absolutely make their month.
Different people have different 'pinions;
Some like apples and some like inions.
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I precommit not to watch the sex tape, nor discuss Bankman's intimate life, beyond what has been said, unless it has clear relation to the central issue.
Bankman's actions, for all their clown world texture, have been serious and highly damaging to a large proportion of people I care about, and he (together with Kelsey Piper and other do-gooders) keeps doing damage and saving the face of the project I believe has largely motivated his actions, which is to say, EA-directed centralized «global governance». It may be that he'll be deemed a hero in the timeline where they succeed. And even if this accusation is unfounded, he is not a kid but a major scoundrel.
I refuse to let this devolve into a parasocial relationship with wacky awkward «polyamorous» autistic microblogging celebrities.
Was the relationship between Justinian and Theodora irrelevant? Of course it’s relevant. The top two figures responsible for this whole fiasco were in a sexual relationship with one another (and possibly others). That matters. It affects incentives. It affects decision making. One of the criticisms of EA is that it’s just a front for nerds to get laid. The fact that the people involved may in fact have been nerds just trying to get laid is a factor that must be taken into account for a proper analysis.
Theodora was a hell of a lot more competent (and allegedly more attractive) than what this lot got up to. I don't think Caroline Ellison actually did much more than "Okay Sam, you want me to sign off on the billion dollar 'loan' to you? Sure thing!" since the bankruptcy filing by John J. Ray is clear that Bankman-Fried was the guy in ultimate control of everything (and boy is Mr. Ray not one bit impressed by Bankman-Fried's comments as reported in Vox):
I don't imagine Theodora did a lot of "Oh Justinian, whatever you want is fine with me" in ruling the empire.
Everyone seems to be dismissing the idea that Caroline had any influence on Sam. Is it because people think she’s ugly? No one wants to admit it, but she is in fact “nerd hot”. I don’t want to start unironic normies-will-never-understand-the-thrill-of-pinning-the-weaselposting, but I will if I have to.
I am ashamed to say I understand that reference.
Whatever influence she had on Sam, it does not seem to have extended to stopping him from doing what he was doing, or objecting to it, or leaving the entire project. We don't know all the facts, and what part Ellison and others played is going to be very important. But she was, in name at least, CEO of Alameda Research. She seems to have gone along with being a catspaw for him:
While Bankman-Fried exercised ultimate control and only a few people were permitted to do things along with him, that still leaves a lot of "Why did you do things this way? Why didn't you have structures in place? Did you know what was going on? How could you not know, given the tight links between your firm and FTX?" for her to answer.
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I don't dispute the situation is bad, but this is the usual hyperbole that the media loves to eat up. He has a very important and presumably high paying role, and it's in his interest to exaggerate or play-up the extent of the problem.
FTX was $8 billion in the hole and customers fleeing and reputation irreparably tarnished. No one was going to plug that hole.
Absolutely not, so he's either delusional or trying to float some kind of dodge for responsibility. I lean towards delusional, actually, since this seems like the reaction of a character who engages in fraud and betrayal of trust and is a swindler; they're never guilty, it was just bad luck and bad timing and they could have made it all okay if only other people hadn't let them down.
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