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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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bad for overall messaging

I very much disagree with that. Generally, I am very much in favor of treating your audience like people capable of following your own thought processes.

If Big Yud is worried about x-risk from ASI, he should say that he is worried about that.

One should generally try to make arguments one believes, not deploy arguments as soldiers to defeat an enemy. (In the rate case where the inferential distance can not be bridged, you should at least try to make your arguments as factually close as possible. If there is a radiation disaster on the far side of the river, don't tell the neolithic tribe that there is a lion on the far side of the river, claim it is evil spirits at least.)

I think you have a disagreement about what aspects of AI are most likely to cause problems/x-risk with other doomers. This is fine, but don't complain that they are not having the same message as you have.

In the rate case where the inferential distance can not be bridged, you should at least try to make your arguments as factually close as possible.

Yes, this is the smarter way of describing my concern.

I do get the arguments as soldiers concern, but my concern is that a lot of x-risk messaging falls into a trap of being too absurd to be believed, too sci-fi to be taken seriously, especially when there's lower-level harms that could be described, are more likely to occur, and would be easier to communicate. Like... if GPT 3 is useful, GPT 5 is dangerous but going badly would still be recoverable, and GPT 10 is extinction-level threat, I'm not suggesting to completely ignore or stay quiet about GPT-10 concerns, just that GPT 5 concerns should be easier to communicate and provide a better base to build on.

It doesn't help that I suspect most people would refuse to take Altman and Andreessen style accelerationists seriously or literally, that they don't really want to create a machine god, that no one is that insane. So effective messaging efforts get hemmed in from both sides, in a sense.

I think you have a disagreement about what aspects of AI are most likely to cause problems/x-risk with other doomers.

Possibly. But I still think it's a prioritization/timeliness concern. I am concerned about x-risk, I just think that the current capabilities are theoretically dangerous (though not existentially so) and way more legible to normies. SocialAI comes to mind, Replika, that sort of thing. Maybe there's enough techo-optimist-libertarianism among other doomers to think this stuff is okay?