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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Technocratic fetishization of getting Really Serious People In Charge is tiresome once you see enough of it in the fossil record.

I did not mean what I said specifically as a slight against our current rulers, but rather as a general reproach of human rationality. In the end, it's just far far easier for present-day people to imagine that future people will show concern for something, than it is for anyone in the present day to do anything differently. The former is cheap and scores lots of social points; the latter, expensive.

I think it's embarrassing when Yud condescends to monke… people with that rhetoric, though I can see how identifying with his posture can make one feel wiser. He strawmans personally disliked opinions on very nontrivial questions like complexity, emergence, economic equilibria, mechanistic account of development of AI goals, optimization processes, risk tradeoffs, game theory, international treaties etc… to support a stilted predefined conclusion that relies more on intuition about tropes in irony-poisoned Anglo-Japanese millenial fiction.

I have seen his Twitter replies. I do not think it is good for him to be as arrogant and condescending as he is, but I understand.