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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36053 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I know this breaks Scott’s world model where nerds are always good, and jocks always bad, but they, along with Stalin and Hitler and plenty of others who accrued power by pushing ideologies, were all a lot closer to nerds than jocks, winning power via their essays and public speaking, and they also killed hundreds of millions of people—because intelligence is the most dangerous thing in the universe.

This strikes me as a strawman of Aaronson's views. I think he's well aware that the woke people he resents for trying to destroy his life lean towards the "nerd" end of the traditional nerd-joke spectrum. This isn't about literal nerds and jocks: It's about intellectualism and rationality, vs things that oppose them. Being sucked into a particular ideology, even one that claims to elevate science and reason or that sounds academic, but actually actively opposes truth-seeking by force, doesn't put you on Scott's side. Hiding your lack of understanding with pretentious wordplay is, I think, something most of us can agree to oppose, and I think that's what he's writing against: Destroying something you don't understand because you fear the truth.

And then carries that ahistoric wrongness into being completely anti-human because his values boil down to intelligence=morality=superiority

Personally, my eyes went a little wide when I saw him say that he would take a 2% chance of the world ending to learn the answer to the big questions. But this also seems like a bit of a strawman. He's focusing on the upside: What we could perhaps learn from an AI smarter than we are? I think he is legitimately concerned about existential risk to humanity.

This isn't about literal nerds and jocks: It's about intellectualism and rationality, vs things that oppose them.

Unfortunately, the example he used was literally about him being a bullied nerd until the age of 15 when he got out of high school, and the jock-types who bullied him. So he's the one made it jocks vs. nerds.

That is an example, yes. It doesn't mean that all of the people he opposes are literal jocks in the sense of playing sports.

It's a meaningless number. He could have made it any small percentage. It's not something he will ever have to decide, or something that can be determined, or in which an expected value can be calculated. It's like the Pascal wager. This a problem with AI/rationality in general, compared to something like the 'hard sciences' or math. None of this stuff can ever be made precise. It's just a lot of hand-waving . This is unavoidable when dealing with hypotheticals in the distant future but it makes it hard to stay grounded in reality too.

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