TechTakes

eliezer misses that (as used in decolonization/civil rights era) nonviolence is effectively a sophisticated propaganda strategy that takes existing injustices and violence and uses it to bait opponent into attacking you, all while your own people take photos and show to entire world carefully crafted messaging that appeals to general public conscience. the messaging part is extremely important in this. there's no fucking way this could work for him because his cause is comprehensible only to those who already buy his cult messaging as ground truth. he's in just for the moral superiority of being nonviolent. he's never gonna get it because comprehending it requires touching grass

But it’s the sort of force that’s meant to be predictable, predicted, avoidable, and avoided. And that is a true large difference between lawful and unlawful force.

Remember the cartoon of the bombs being dropped on people and the people going 'I hear the next bombs will be sent by a woman', this but 'with lawful force'.

This feels somehow tied to the whole "agentic" thing I've ranged about previously. Like, individual acts of violence are strictly destructive because the people doing it aren't sufficiently "agentic" to change things, even though American history is full of cases where (usually racist) vigilante violence had a huge impact on people's decision-making. But when the government does it it's different because people in government got there by proving their agency and ability to actually impact the world. Like, it feels almost like he's offended that the NPCs might try and do something as drastic as killing someone without GM permission.

Meanwhile in reality, people legitimately do feel like they don't have a lot of options to protect themselves from the real harms this industry is doing, to say nothing of the people who buy his line about the oncoming class-K end-of-life scenario. Anger is an appropriate response to the circumstances we find ourselves in, and in a nation that has been quietly cultivating a culture of heroic violence for decades we shouldn't be surprised to see people trying to inflict that fear and rage upon the outside world.

I've never understood how these things are simultaneously gaining their abilities based on statistical analysis of all kinds of random writings online including social media, fanfic, reddit, etc. but also are simultaneously supposed to end up as experts rather than a much faster and more agreeable dumbass. Like, the training data may include all the great works of literature, all the scrapable scientific studies and textbooks they could steal, and so on. But it also included every moron who ever shared conspiracy theories on Twitter, every confident-sounding business idiot on LinkedIn, and every stupid word that Scott or Yud ever wrote. Surely the bullshit has to exceed the expertise by raw volume, and if they took the time and energy to curate it out the way they would need to to correct that they wouldn't be left with a large enough sample to actually scale off of.

Basically, either I'm dramatically misunderstanding something or the best we can hope for is the Average Joe on Reddit, who may not be a complete dumbass but definitely isn't a team of PhDs.

"Cursed spaghetti"

🤌

Maybe it's just because I'm rolling back through Age of Mythology, but I died laughing at "it's like the centaur, Helen"

Sweden is an interesting example because they pioneered the let-it-rip approach to COVID. That was less disastrous than it could have been but not great even in a country with a lot of detached housing and nuclear families. https://kevinmd.com/2025/01/swedens-controversial-covid-19-strategy-lessons-from-higher-mortality-rates.html I would not have recommended putting children in daycare without strict indoor-air-quality standards between 2020 and 2024.

They do have consequences! Crowded schools and preschools and daycare spread all kinds of dangerous infectious diseases and there are consequences of getting them. With the arrival of COVID and the decline in vaccination risks are rising.

'Getting sick builds resistance' is another of the folk medicine beliefs which we in the infection control community have been fighting since 2020. Some diseases are milder the second or third time, but generally you want to get as few infectious diseases as possible.

the worst kind of violence, the sort against people like me

all those other deaths? those aren't violence

The Zvi post really pisses me off for continuing to normalize Eliezer's comments (in a way that misrepresents the problems with them).

This happened quite a bit around Eliezer’s op-ed in Time in particular, usually in highly bad faith, and this continues even now, equating calls for government to enforce rules to threats of violence, and there are a number of other past cases with similar sets of facts.

Eliezer called for the government to drone strike data centers, even of foreign governments not signatories to international agreements, and even if doing so risked starting nuclear war.

Pacifism is at least a consistent position, but instead rationalists like Zvi want to simultaneously disown the radical actions, but legitimizes the US's shit show of a foreign policy.

Another thing that pisses me off is the ahistorical claim by rationalist that such actions are ineffective and unlikely to succeed. Asymmetric warfare and terrorist tactics have obtained success many times in history! The kkk successfully used terrorism to repress a population for a century. The black panthers got gun control passed in California and put pressure on political leaders to accept the more peaceful branch of the civil rights movement. The IRA got the Good Friday agreement. The US revolution! All the empires that have withdrawn from Afghanistan!

Overall though... I guess this is a case of two wrongs making a sorta right. They are dangerously wrong about AI doom, but at least they are also wrong about direct action and so usually won't take the actions implied by their beliefs. (But they are still, completely predictably, inspiring stochastic terrorists).

You've reminded me about the whole edifice of Qanon lore where they would try to combine 4chan (and later even sketchier sites like 8chan) hints with whatever Trump was posting at the moment to decode secret knowledge about stuff like when the military tribunals executing all the democrats would be.

Anyway, in Eliezer's case, I kind of get the feeling the lesswrong rationalists have somewhat moved on from him? They are still excessively deferential to him, but the vibe I get from hate-browsing lesswrong is that the majority of the rationalists there put much lower odds on AI doom? (It's hard to tell exactly because Eliezer has avoided committing to timelines or hard probabilities on AI doom despite all his talk about putting probabilities on everything in the sequences). Lesswrong occasionally references his tweets but not that often. Like I think sneerclub actually references them more often?