JDPON Don continues his Long March through the institutions of the imperialist beast, in service to the heroic global working classes!
Mardoniush
joined 5 years ago
I think most people here would consider Singer to be if not openly right wing, at least worryingly adjacent. Rather too close to the beige technocratic Fascism of a Salazar.
I'm not talking about his open comments and I know the FAQ. I'm talking about a couple of letters that came up between him and alt right-neoreaction figures that displayed a lot more sympathy with their views than you might give credit for. I can't find them in a quick search but I'm pressed for time right now so will link later.
My p(doom) for Ai is maybe 5%, my p(dystopiasignificantlyworsethantoday) is substantially higher. We should definitely be looking into it and almost none of the people who should look into it exist in silicon valley.
Look, I know you're arguing in good faith here, but...quite a few of us are very familiar with Big Yud's arguments, and heck, I'm even partially sympathetic to a couple. There is some motivated suspicion here since rationalists and their singularitarian forebears have a habit of going reactionary (Anissimov, Bostrom, SSC, countless others) or having close ties to reactionaries (Thiel, most notably). I see no reason to believe you are like them but do realise a lot of transhumanist arguments are weaponised as right wing stalking horses.
But as someone who has been following and occasionally interacting with him since our Halcyon Youth on the Extropian mailing list, I've learned that
a) Yud can be spectacularly convincing and also spectacularly wrong by his own admission (see early work like "Staring into the Singularity" for this.) so you should cognitively guard against his rhetorical tools.
b) He has a habit of eliding and abstracting concepts so that they appear as a single consistent thing when they are actually several things, while appearing to do the exact opposite. This is most apparent at subjects he is not an expert in, quantum mechanics most notably (I think many worlds is correct, I think his argument for many worlds is bad. I am semi competent at the math of quantum mechanics)
I have specific, nuanced critiques of his main (not entirely invalid) argument on AI doom, but this is generally hard to get across because most of his own supporters don't fully understand it.
Not true, plenty of people who supported the Nazis early on got shanked. Plenty of SPD members and Prussian aristocrats who jumped ship in 1933 prospered and achieved high rank. Until the Red Army rolled into town, anyway.
I assume it's like the "white guy voice" from Sorry to Bother You
"This concept of "Wuv" confuses, and infuriates us!"
by Martin Place fountain "Were you listening to me? Or were you looking at your unsold apes? Well look again."
Honestly for me it's the opposite. If you'd said this was 2022 I'd believe you
It doesn't have to be a lot, and it doesn't have to be traditional org work, but it does have to be something.
Almost everyone can do something material. In fact, I'd say many disabled and homeless people already do more than the average abled poster on this site, but don't consider it socialist activity because it isn't trying to pawn off the local trot newspaper or spending 7 hours kettled by the police.
It's the national bourgoisie ascendent against the international bourgoisie. Trump's favoured businessmen will be given special exemptions while the economy gets gutted and they can pick up the remnants at a steal. meanwhile their international rivals get shafted.
Also they are definitely on a neoreaction trip, it's just that all they've done is reinvented fascism and mixed it with older patronage networks that won't work for a modern economy.