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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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To give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he could ask those questions but avoids them to try to keep it humanities focused. No less painful to listen to.

Oh that's way too charitable towards him, I think he really wanted to go as technically deep as he was able, given that this is about AI and he views AI as part of his region of expertise. At least the crypto-dudes on the bankless podcast asked Eliezer their own naive but sincere questions, they knew they were out of their depth and didn't try to somehow pretend at expertise. But Lex insistently tries to steer the conversation towards "deep topics", and for him this means bringing up Love, Consciousness, The Human Condition, etc.

I think he's trying to imitate Old Esteemed Physicists, who after a lifetime of deep technical contributions spend a few minutes or a small book talking about Beauty and Love, but with Lex it just perpetually feels unearned.

Yeah, perhaps it's too charitable. I'm remembering him absolutely flubbing the Earth in a jar thought experiment and wanted to shake him. I would've said "right, step one, scour their internet and learn as much as we possibly can about them without any chance of arousing suspicion. step two, figure out if there's any risk they'd destroy us and under what conditions. step three, if we're at an unacceptable risk, figure out how to take over their civilization and either hold them hostage or destroy them first. boom done. okay, are we on the same page Yud? great, now here's why I think this thought experiment sucks..."

Also that discussion on steelmanning. How did that go so off the rails.

I can't believe I still have another hour to go.

He didn't even acquit himself smoothly, either.

It actually read to me like he was aware that if he made any honest statements in response it would potentially lead to some blowback ("popular podcaster casually discussing how he'd genocide a whole planet") or controversy and his safety systems deployed to completely derail that line of questioning.

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