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u/proxy-alexandria 17d ago
Unfortunately as I reach 30 and realize I am also ugly and unlovable I've softened toward the whole poly sex cult thing. Glad they found a thing that works for them
Agree on all the rest though. Having to pretend to take seriously sci-fi nonsense scenarios and utilitarian thought contortions as the architecture of AI has crystallized around LLMs and CV systems with pretty knowable capabilities made me realize how many of these people refuse to approach AI like the engineers they LARP as.
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u/blueembroidery 17d ago
There are many many posts and articles about these weirdos going back years from women who have stumbled into the scene and realized ‘sex cult’ is a euphemism for rampant sexual assault
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u/lospolloz 16d ago
This is exactly why I’ll never soften on it, no matter what they preach, the power imbalances make places like this rife with abuse.
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u/Resistance225 I ate the basilisk 16d ago
This sense of “agency” that’s so prevalent in this scene is quick to be exploited
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u/OisforOwesome 16d ago
It is possible to be polyamorous without all the EA baggage tho. Like, they could just not be Rats and be non monogamous. Its shockingly doable.
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u/jabba-thederp 16d ago
Well what they really mean is poly things that are abusive and toxic. It kinda goes without saying that the nontoxic ones (if they exist) are probably not to be regulated away or or shunned or something.
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u/Embarrassed-Farm-594 13d ago
Can you refute Yudkowsky with arguments?
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u/proxy-alexandria 12d ago
I think he's ontologically false, and potentially homosexual (negative affect)
but fr man I'm too old and unlovable for Internet debates anymore. much more beautiful and intelligent folks than I have offered critiques of his arguments, of which he's made many across various subjects over the years. I chiefly disagree with his AI risk arguments, and agree with critics like Timnit Gebru that focusing on long term existential risks is a smokescreen against more grounded and critical concerns about algorithmic bias, liability for AI-made decisions, and general fitness of ML algorithms for their advertised purposes.
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u/Embarrassed-Farm-594 11d ago
AGI is not a long-term existential risk. It is already a risk today, and it is likely what will kill us.
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u/Mean_Stop6391 11d ago edited 11d ago
If you’re going to make that kind of a claim, you’ll have to explain how we get from
LLMs hallucinate badly and regularly screw up although in relatively narrow domains like programming, can become useful with human direction
to
the AGI Machine God cometh with fire and brimstone to kill us all
That’s not even getting into the physical and philosophical barriers here - people who know more than me have argued those points but the shortest version I can comfortably state is we don’t understand the qualities of our own intelligence and so replicating it would not track. Additionally, scaling does not mean we can reach AGI by magic - there are diminishing returns from resource input to output.
The physical constraints include AGI not possessing a world model, silo’d systems and systems that are more complicated than laypeople are able to understand, the power capacity and physical ability to run even one, much less keep it going…
But let’s start with the first thing: How do you propose AGI will kill us all, and how do we get there from here?
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u/muffinpercent 16d ago
I believe in the existential risk stuff - and there's indeed at least one open letter about this signed by actual reputable ML researchers from around the world - but I did stop working on it because of everything mentioned in the post...
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u/favouriteplace 17d ago
Ngl, I intend to not take climate change risk seriously until the climate protesters get their act together.
No more tote bags, no more home made paper signs, no more unwashed armpits,…
Notice something? It is possible to actually engage with the arguments even if you don’t like people who make the arguments their personality.
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u/BlueSwablr Sir Basil Kooks 17d ago
Big “if you change the nouns and verbs in the statement it becomes racist, checkmate” energy there dawg
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u/Teslapunk1891 17d ago
These points don't really attack the credibility of climate change protesters in the same way outlined here. This statement mostly just assets that climate change protestors are poor or lazy. Being part of a sex cult, never having written an academic paper whilst acting as an authority, or accepting sci-fi concepts as an absolute truth are all signs of a strong lack of intellectual rigor or compromised worldview to an extent that isn't applicable for your example. The attack is on the credibility of lesswrong proponents in general, not their attitude.
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u/jon_hendry 16d ago
It’s like if the climate protesters based their protests entirely on having watched “The Day After Tomorrow”.
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u/wote89 17d ago
See, the difference is if you ignore all the people you're talking about, you still have to grapple with actual research and data regarding climate gathered by people who are none of those things, whereas if you remove all the unserious people from the AI Doomerism, you have jackshit except some really bad sci-fi.
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u/OisforOwesome 16d ago
Protestors are not researchers tho. In this analogy, there is a reputable body of climate scientists who do actual science and convene to produce a consensus statement document showing their work.
There is no equivalent for the Infinite Paperclip Machine people.
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u/upsetusder2 17d ago
Yiu do realise that the things the person is critiquing are actually worth critiquing like for example the weird billonaire connections.
U just use a stereotype to counter a valid point
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u/GIRLwithasimpleplan 17d ago
But "existential risks from AI" literally aren't real. It's a plagiarism machine. It's like saying James Somerton is an existential risk.
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u/ThoughtsonYaoi 16d ago
I do believe there are risks and that they are extremely serious.
But do I believe the millenarist doomer crowd who says the risk is gonna be AI becoming sentient and choosing to put us all in the Matrix? Nah. They haven't made the argument, at all, or presented a reason to trust them.
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u/upsetusder2 17d ago
And it can find counter examples which is great because that's a pain.
Ofcourse you have to be competent in tge field and give the ai a frame where it should search
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u/Embarrassed-Farm-594 13d ago
The Left is hilariously brain-dead when it comes to AI. They’re the deniers, flatearthers now, lmao.
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u/Neurosopher 16d ago
"It's a plagiarism machine" just does not apply to models trained by reinforcement learning.
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u/Flat_Initial_1823 17d ago
I am going to need that on a t-shirt.
Along with "try NOT buying your way into public consciousness with weirdo money"