Yeah, I did too. But it doesn’t mean we’re, like, hanging out with ‘em

Although perhaps we are excessively online

I think I’m comfortable, even though the aspersion is on me, saying that anyone who can recognize Aella is too chronically online.

The zizians were a national headline and you only need to be plugged into US politics a little bit to know of Curtis yarvin given his influence on Peter thiel, musk, and Vance so I’d give knowledge of them a pass

Edit: I also know of the sanely diagram meme for her so that’s even more evidence. Maybe I should detox off the internet for a bit

> anyone who can recognize Aella is too chronically online.

I dunno, I think a ton of people remember the garden gnomes (I know I do, when I saw the name I was like "nah, can't be", but then I googled lmao)

The argument was fairly specific: there is a groupthink involved, and so the enterprise is suspect.

It’s an excuse not to think, not an argument.

The doomer argument is straightforward: a powerful AI will have goals. If those goals don’t include the welfare of humanity, a sufficiently powerful AI will kill us either by accident, by indifference, or intentionally when we get in its way. Making an AI that includes the welfare of humanity in its goals is incredibly hard.

That’s it. To refute the doomer argument, you can refute any part of that. I notice that none of the people bringing up fanfics, cults, and weirdness are doing that. No, they’re instead trying to convince people that doomers are uncool. Since only cool people can know things, QED.

> a sufficiently powerful AI

We don't have this kind of AI, and (as of right now), unless humans link the AIs we do have up to a bunch of killer robots (i.e. drones) then this is vanishingly unlikely.

Like, any scenario where AI kills us all requires us to give it the tools that it needs to do this (as well as a desire to do this, as right now they just attempt to generate text to solve a problem/question they are posed).

No one is saying we have it, they’re saying they’re building it.

And what mechanism to control these drones, which are autonomous or remote-controlled machines, do you imagine that humans will be able to use, but AI won’t?

And what in the history of the past five years, gives you confidence that not a single human will give the AI the access it needs to do bad things? Incompetence alone is sufficient to kill us, let alone humans that genuinely, or confusedly, want bad things.

It’s reasonable to cast doubt upon the fitness of ideas based on their sources, particularly when the ideas are hard to adjudicate. It reasonable to filter what one engages with partially based on the sources.

It would be foolish to ignore sources.

I agree on complicated ideas, and on facts (because obviously different sources will selectively report facts, even if they’re trying to be fair).

The ideas here are not complicated. The argument is three sentences.

Genestealer cult

The prevalence of LLM-generated text masquerading as otherwise and incorporated into a significant fraction of all published text distinguishes this info-organism from all others.

Can’t have the Euros knowing how dangerous American beaver can be