site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27151 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I completely agree with you about EA. My point is that you need to play the game with your own side and try to find likeminded people to support. Running away is a losing move.

Of course you personally not wanting to do that is understandable. But when it comes to what is better to do it requires people who try to create alternative platforms and participate in them.

The genie can not be put back in the bottle. Either they monopolize the genies, or others use them too.

Wel, like I said, it's not just the EAs, it's also the E/Accs that I have a problem with.

As for not being able to put the genie back in the bottle, yeah that's one of my fears, but I don't know if this is already decided. By current demographic trends, the Amish are scheduled to inherit America. AI might very well turn out to be a suicidal technology, and Luddites the only survivors.

There will be no survivors. You think not having a cell signal saves you from a Paperclip Maximizer that's demolishing the biosphere for spare parts? Come the fuck on.

I think the Paperclip Maximizer is a boogeyman, and if AI does cause us to go extinct, it will be in a completely different manner than the AI-safety people predict. Like I said above, this is precisely what drives me up the wall in this conversation.

I do not see how there's any remotely plausible world where AI somehow causes us to go extinct while sparing the Amish. Unless the Amish have some really sick data centers hidden under those barns of theirs.

X, no. X is X. You get an AI that wins, the Amish are just more raw material.

The Amish would do better than city-slickers in a lot of GCRs, though, most obviously nuclear war and pandemics. Non-Amish country bumpkins would do fine in a pandemic, but less so in a nuclear war due to the EMP problem. And it's not implausible that a "failed Skynet" could start a nuclear war and/or spread a "normal" GoFed pandemic before getting destroyed.

The idea that homesteaders/preppers/the Amish might do better in a collapse of the modern world seems reasonable to me. We keep ant farms and shit, maybe the Amish long standing commitments to being low tech make them a safer prospective pet population. I also never understood why turning everything in the light cone into paperclips was so much more plausible than just all the easily available metal or other variations on the, AI with orthogonal values fucks up the world but doesn't actually make it uninhabitable.

We keep ant farms and shit, maybe the Amish long standing commitments to being low tech make them a safer prospective pet population.

That is an incredibly tenuous assumption to say the least!

I also never understood why turning everything in the light cone into paperclips was so much more plausible than just all the easily available metal or other variations on the, AI with orthogonal values fucks up the world but doesn't actually make it uninhabitable.

  1. A Maximizer maximizes, all resources for which the cost of extraction and utilization is less than the benefits of putting it to use will eventually be used, Earth's biosphere is not particularly attractive compared to the resources of the rest of the Universe, but it has the notable property of being right at Ground Zero where a hostile AGI can make use of it. And nothing prevents it from building Von Neumanns to claim the rest while it steadily munches on us.

  2. Acquiring resources and power are convergent goals for an enormously wide range of possible values. You don't even need to be a monomaniacal Utility Maximizer to want more mass and energy to put to good use.

  3. Humans are intelligent entities that can think and plan, and in this particular case, create yet more misaligned AGI, since you have an existence proof they just created one. They need to be eliminated or at least neutralized, the latter being far more likely.

A Maximizer maximizes

I have seen no evidence that explicit maximzers do particularly well in real-world environments. Hell, even in very simple game environments, we find that bags of learned heuristics outperform explicit simulation and tree search over future states in all but the very simplest of cases.

I think utility maximizers are probably anti-natural. Have you considered taking the reward-is-not-the-optimization-target pill?

I'm using "Maximizer" in a looser sense than a strict utility maximizer. The reason is that acquiring power and resources are such highly convergent goals that most entities will look like they're maximizing acquiring them to us, even if they have entirely different terminal goals or sets of heuristics in mind.

Think about it this way, would you disagree with the statement that, for a wide range of ideologies or terminal values seen in humans, the Solar System and then the rest of the galaxy will be either colonized or broken down for resources, given sufficient amounts of time (and technological feasibility, which I think is a reasonable assumption)? Be they communists, ancaps or anything in between, optimization pressure to be efficient in their exploitation will leave them, from the perspective of some alien with a telescope, looking like something attempting to "maximize" the conquest of the light cone.

In a similar manner, I expect a misaligned AGI to be very likely to attempt to seize as much energy and mass as it can, even if it's not strictly optimizing for the same, and that the agents/toy models we've seen are simply not smart enough to pursue such strategies.

I have read that LW post, but I've forgotten what the takeaway was, so I'll give it another read!

More comments

I think it's far less likely that we die at the hands of an unaligned autonomous AI, than we do via standard naked monkey shenanigans, with a non-autonomous AI being a catalyst. Noping out doesn't guarantee survival, but there are plausible scenarios where it results in it.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats