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Hello Mottizens, long time lurker, first time top-level commenter. I think I understand the rules, if I haven't absorbed them by lurking over the last 9 or so months. As ai x-risk enters the politicosphere, I hope we can consider discussion of the topic as on-topic for the thread.
I've been thinking about the upper echelons of the x-risk bourgeois- in particular, the polyamory. Your Aella, your Eliezer, your MIRI heads, the ouroboric relationships in the community, and watching the social drek that's been demonstrated by following their various Twitter accounts. I've been wondering. Aella is a sex worker, and she is clearly being treated like shit by Eliezer. For a man who believes doom is coming, having a kid seems, at this point, frankly illogical.
With all the money EY has picked up from MIRI etc, I would probably fuck off to some tropical islands, or if EY is such a japanophile, to Japan.
But: Why does Aella tolerate his bullshit on Twitter ?
My theory, therefore, is that Aella has so much dirt on those people that she could singlehandedly doom any prospects of a bunch of the lesswrongian bay area stemcels from seeing the light of day for the next ten years. You simply don't host consentual-non-consent parties without picking up some piles of dirt. Whether they're our redpillers who think rape should be legal, or just lonely rich dudes who just need someone to fuck but don't know how to go to Vegas and get escorts.
You don't host sex parties without eventually picking some really terrible, skeevy shit. And I think she realizes this. And I also think she realizes that these are the kind of people with enough money, that if they wanted her gone, she's gone. As such, it's my belief that Aella is stuck in a hell of her own making. If the bubble pops, things will get nasty.
As such, my theory is that Aella is tolerating Yud, and the other rationalists, because she's scared for her life. If she were to tell EY "no, you're being a creep... and also endangering the entire x-risk movement", (which, as an aside, I don't think he himself believes in, based on his behavior) she's going to get replaced as the sex gatekeeper for the rich, sex-starved stembros. And so, perhaps, her attempt to have a kid is her bid at retiring and moving to fade off into obscurity?
And so, when she (imo, inevitably, some time in the next few years if her hail mary to disappear off the map before her body expires and they no longer want her) explodes, we'll have another article in TIME, or The Guardian or whatever other woke news reporter can get their hands on first. If/when that happens, we can kiss the pretenses of x-risk concern out the window, as the final curtains get pulled.
Thoughts? Holes in logic? Did I assume too much?
Maybe you said too little? I was very confused by this post until I saw your comment below adding context. But even then, your question is a bit confusing--"if you believe in X-risk, why have a child" is a non sequitur (at best, I think). You pack a lot of antagonism into a pretty small space, too--I don't think Eliezer or Aella are likely to spend much time around here, but either (A) you are in their social orbit and so you're assuming too much about what your audience actually knows and agrees upon, or (B) you are not in their social orbit, and are drawing various unflattering conclusions about their lives and motivations from dubious parasocial sources like Twitter.
"If you believe in X-risk, why have a child" might be a question worth discussing, assuming you provide at minimum some detailed discussion of the argument behind the question, but then the Eliezer/Aella stuff is not the focus and thus should not consume the bulk of your post. On the other hand, there are surely reasonable discussions to be had about Eliezer and/or Aella, but then you'd need to be quite a bit more charitable toward them.
Hopefully that helps.
Fair enough, though...
The core, or the crux of my concern was "does Eliezer" - who is going out in the public spaces, and thus entering the political sphere "himself, believe in AI risk as a threat to the human race," and what evidence I would use to determine that, and this was some of the things that came to mind when I made the post. Part of the reason I thought highlighting the cringe was important was because if you enter the political sphere, it is a wild miscalculation in order to not assume that your public image- mannerisms, diction, behaviors matters.
If I can't evaluate that aspect, that seems to me like it's cutting off an entire line of reasoning.
Edit: Okay, rereading my post, i focused a bit too much on Aella herself, rather than Eliezer, so I failed on my own metric.
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I wouldn’t describe their relationship as “[Aella] being treated like shit by Eliezer.” They both have very contractual views on relationships. Aella gets the credibility of being closely associated with the rationalist movement, and Eliezer gets… we’ll he’s certainly getting something.
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The Motte does not need salacious gossip about real people or accusations without the thinnest shred of evidence. Though, I honestly can't figure out if your post breaks any rules.
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While AI risk is on topic, I don't think relationship drama about internet celebrities is. I don't much care about EY or Aella's personal lives or relationships or whatever drama goes on between them or whatever other individuals, unless it has a direct tie in to tangible work on AI risk or other projects, or is being related to an interesting aspect of the broader culture war. This just reads like a soap opera script, I don't think I care.
There is no topic for the culture war roundup. I mean I agree I don’t particularly want to read about this, but that’s why we have a collapse thread function.
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The yud/aella kids tweet was, either mostly or entirely, a joke. One Aella was fine with, and one much tamer than many Aella polls
The post is weird enough I can't tell if it's bait, but none of the claims make sense. It's like the people who go 'supply chain failures! industrial civilization is about to collapse!!' after they read about a few instances of 'lithium prices will be 25% higher this quarter', you're taking minor details and filling in a twisted conspiracy, when any broader appreciation of either public rationalist twitter personas or history and economics makes it obviously incoherent
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Are these two sentences connected? Do they have a kid together? Not sure I understand what you're getting at otherwise
One of those moments where the throughline in the logic got lost in the process of putting it down through the keyboard. They were intended to be independent statements, with a bit of glue to connect the former to the latter.
Eliezer is currently (publicly) propositioning Aella (a very public and outspoken sexworker in the lesswrong-o-sphere), to have a kid. And the way he is doing it is brazen and socially-painful for everyone with an ounce of self-awareness.
If you believe that the ai is coming to kill everyone, why would you have a kid?
TL;DR:
Yeah, EY is trying to get Aella to have a kid. Just, in a way that makes me question whether he actually, truly believes in x-risk. And in a way that I doubt Aella appreciates.
Why wouldn’t you want to have a kid? I don’t get the logic here. Are the first 5-10 years of life net-negative? I guess it’s evidence that Eliezer’s P(doom) is less that 99%, but this seems consistent with his P(doom) being 90%. Even if the GPU clusters get JDAM’d, someone has to figure out alignment eventually. Why not try selective breeding?
I suppose that depends on his timelines. If he really thinks we're dead in 20-30 years, then the logic of having a kid makes a lot more sense. Kids add immense variety and experience to life that you don't get without them. If you have a median doom target of 6-10 years then I don't see why you'd have a kid. The last thing a kid needs are parents who are constantly freaking out about how the world is ending.
IMO, the kids need stable homes with both parents present and there to care about them and properly pass on their values, and it just seems, to me, like parents who are constantly worried about how we're all dead in ten years might not make the best home for a kid to grow up healthy and adjusted in.
And I suppose I'm assuming that Eliezer has enough self-awareness to realize this and thus, if his timelines were short, he would choose not to.
The way people act when they believe they are going to die soon is not that different from how they act normally.
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If I understand correctly, the idea is that one Tweeter is putting up with another Tweeter because they are afraid that the other Tweeter will hire assassins to kill them.
Twitter is worse than I thought!
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Honestly these people are all just awkward social losers; there’s nothing deep going on there beyond the gross horniness of the high school band bus that makes outsiders cringe when they see it.
It’s in observing this crowd that I’m thankful that I’m good looking/social and upper middle class, rather than ugly/awkward and rich. Imagine having to pay someone, directly or implicitly, for companionship. What a sad life.
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