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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

For some reason the bit that stuck out to me in a wild ride of an article was the guy who believed a super-intelligence was a threat to humans but distanced himself from veganism as if that was crazy part of the AI-doom sex cult that he disagreed with.

a) because veganism seems as exotic to me as someone doing CrossFit

b) the very obvious parallels of a more intelligent creature torturing and killing large numbers of other creatures for relatively little benefit.

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They also downplay global warming, nuclear war, wealth inequality, and in general anything other, less cool people they didn't want to identify with thought was important.

If they had thought, yeah, "the majority is more or less right about what the big issues are", there wouldn't be enough room to construe themselves as uniquely intelligent.

Who are these "they" you're talking about?

If your answer is EA or rats then a simple Google search will just show you that it's not true?

I'm yet to see evidence they are weighing global warming they way it IMO should be weighted relatively to eg AI risk. I get it, it's not cool.

Compare the number of posts of some EA-adjacent public people talking about AI and talking about this. Or what measure should we choose?

Label them what you want. I'll go with EAs if you insist.

Sure, they're not entirely monolithic. There's room for "EA, but vegan", "EA, but global warming still matters", maybe even "EA, but vaguely socialist". As I keep saying, the core belief is that they're special because of their intellectual superiority, anything else is negotiable.

No, what you said what that "They also downplay global warming, nuclear war, wealth inequality" which is just a flat out lie

Not all of them downplay all of these, but yeah, most of them do. They may have one or two areas of dissent (for EA as a self-identity-building project, do you see why that is to be expected?), but there is a core of beliefs. Yudkowsky's. And he's downplayed all of these.

I read it more like a conformist performative veganism. I think the implication is that this group treats veganism and all of these beliefs as a kind of shibboleth, an in-group marker for which conformity is expected. The immedaite "feeling" associated with a cult is the feeling of "high control", cf. https://www.google.com/search?q=high+control+group

I read it that EA practices (incl. veganism), beliefs, "rantionalism", and doomerism are all aspects of the high control environment

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