Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no. If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high. The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

Eliezer joins the trend of condemning “political” violence with confidence on the far end of the dunning-kruger curve: lesswrong.com/…/only-law-can-prevent-extinction I’ve already mocked this attitude down thread and in the previous weekly thread, so I’ll keep my mockery to a few highlights… He’s admitting nuke the data centers is in fact violence! It would be beneath my dignity as a childhood reader of Heinlein and Orwell to pretend that this is not an invocation of force. But then drawing a special case around it. 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. I don’t think Eliezer has checked the news if he think the US government carries out violence in predictable and fairly avoidable ways! Venezuela! The entire lead up to Iran consisted of ripping up Obama’s attempts at treaties and trying to obtain regime change through surprise assassination! Also, if the stop AI doomers used some clever cryptography scheme to make their policy of property destruction (and assassination) sufficiently predictable and avoidable would that count as “Lawful” in Eliezers book. If he kept up with the DnD/Pathfinder source material, he would know Achaekek’s assassins are actually Lawful Evil The ASI problem is not like this. If you shut down 5% of AI research today, humanity does not experience 5% fewer casualties. We end up 100% dead after slightly more time. His practical argument against non-state-sanctioned violence is that we need a total ban (and thus the authority of state driving it), because otherwise someone with 8 GPUs in a basement could invent strong AGI and doom us all. This is a dumb argument, because even most AI doomers acknowledge you need a lot of computational power to make the AGI God. And (violently) slowing down AGI might buy time for another sort of solution. Statistics show that civil movements with nonviolent doctrines are more successful at attaining their stated goals Sources cited: 0 One of the comments also pisses me off: Which reminds me about another point: I suspect that “bomb data centers” meme causal story was not somebody lying, but somebody recalling by memory without a thought that such serious allegation maybe is worthy to actually look up it and not rely on unreliable memory. “Drone strike the data centers even if starts nuclear war” is the exact argument Eliezer made and that we mocked. It is the rationalists that have tried to soften it by eliding over the exact details.

eliezer misses that (as used in 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

Yeah both non-violence and pure terrorism are communication forms at the root. I remember reading long ago that the Rote Armee Fraktion’s master plan was: commit horrific acts of violence against pillars of the community / rob banks to get money said acts would unleash a repressive wave of violence from the state the proletariat would see this repressive wave, wake up, and cause the revolution It kinda stopped at stage 2, because the BRD’s security services were a bit less ex-Nazi than they expected, and also there was basically no proletariat. Also the Southern police chief who correctly deduced that mass arrests were what the civil rights activists wanted, got the go-ahead from neighboring county jails, and then politely and non-violently arrested everyone protesting and spread them out over a wider area, thus preventing the media-friendly repression that was the goal.