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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27147 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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I’ll be honest I have come down on the Toner being correct and Altman deserved to be fired side of the coin.

I think if the board had just led with that a lot of people would have agreed. "Leader tries to dismantle the structures that hold him accountable" is a problem that people know very well, and "get rid of leader" is not a controversial solution to that problem.

But in fact the board accused Altman of being a lying liar and then refused to stand behind that accusation, even to the subsequent CEOs.

There's gotta be something else going on.

I mentioned this deep in the guts of some other thread, but everyone is modeling this race wrong and buying into the kayfabe too much. Your mental model of this race should consist of a bunch of sinister scheming wizards gazing into their scrying orbs and hissing "Ultimate power must be MINE ALONE at any cost!" Everything else is varying degrees of prevarication and misdirection.

Some of these necromancers want to crush their enemies, get rich, normal shit like that. Others want to create god, or become god, or uplift kangaroos to sentience so they can marry one, or god knows what. Point is, the safetyists never stood a chance. At best they're pawns to be swept aside when they become inconvenient. If ultimate godlike power is on the table, there was never going to be anything but a mad scramble for it.

I mean I think at least some of the people involved on the are quite clear that their goal is a "gameboard-flipping" act which results in world which is permanently safe from anyone who could destroy it. Probably by seizing ultimate power.

I don't think sufficiently godlike power for world domination (as in "gaining control of the world without destroying almost everything of value") is actually on the table though.

Point is, the safetyists never stood a chance. At best they're pawns to be swept aside when they become inconvenient.

Oh, here I was, thinking I'm agreeing with you. No, they're the necromancers hissing "ultimate power must be mine alone".

Yeah the safetyists IMO are also mostly evil sorcerers. They just have better marketing lines.

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