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That's fair, this is an intellectual space rife with people who have complicated beliefs, so generalizing has to be merely instrumental.
That said I think it is an accurate model of politically relevant doomerism. The revealed preferences of Yuddites is to get paid by the establishment to make sure the tech doesn't rock the boat and respects the right moral fads. If they really wanted to just avoid doom at any cost, they'd be engaging in a lot more terrorism.
It's the same argument Linkola deploys against the NGO environmentalist movement: if you really think that the world is going to end if a given problem isn't solved, and you're not willing to discard bourgeois morality to solve the problem, then you are either a terrible person by your own standards, or actually value bourgeois morality more than you do solving the problem.
I’m coming to this discussion late, but this assumes that discarding bourgeois morality will be better at achieving your goals, when we see from BLM and Extinction Rebellion that domestic terrorism can have its own counterproductive backlash. How do we know they aren’t entirely willing to give up bourgeois morality, they just don’t see it as conducive to their cause?
It doesn't assume. Linkola actually builds the argument, convincingly in my opinion, that if radical change is required to solve the problem, as conceptualized by ecologists, that change is incompatible with democracy, equality and the like. Most people cannot be convinced peacefully to act against their objective interest in the name of ideas they do not share.
ER and BLM are exactly the sort of people criticized here. When your idea of eco-terror is vandalizing paintings to call out people doing nothing, you're not a terrorist, you're a clown.
Serious radical eco-terrorists would destroy infrastructure, kill politicians, coup countries, sabotage on a large scale and generally plot to make industrial society impossible.
In many ways, Houthis and Covid are better at this than the NGOs who say they are doing it and that's entirely by accident.
Good points. So why are the eco extremists risking jail time for mere clownery rather than bona fide terrorism on the level of the Houthis?
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I feel like this is unfair. The hardcore Yuddites are not on the Trust & Safety teams at big LLM companies. However, I agree that there are tons of "AI safety" people who've chosen lucrative corporate jobs whose output feeds into the political-correctness machine. But at least they get to know what's going on that way and have at least potentially minor influence. The alternative is... be a full-time protester with little resources, clout, or up-to-date knowledge?
The hardcore Yuddites were pissed at those teams using the word "Safety" for a category that included sometimes-reading-naughty-words risk as a central problem and existential risk as an afterthought at most. Some were pissed enough to rename their own philosophy from "AI Safety" to "AI Notkilleveryoneism" just because being stuck with a stupid-sounding neologism is a cheap price to pay to have a word that can't be so completely hijacked again.
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