Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexgieg | Hacker News Reader

There are better ways to make this criticism. The main problem I see with this is that it's basically a long ad hominem, followed by some valid concerns about market concentration at the end.

Remove all the ad hominem and what remains is two paragraphs long. Valid ones, though.

View on HN

I am not a big fan of ad hominem in general, but when the argument essentially is "you should surrender control to these people over major parts of society/economy because they are better than you and if you don't everybody dies" then it's appropriate to ask who are those people that are supposed to be our philosopher-kings?

AI safety advocates do not typically demand to be given personal political power, only for a set of preferred policies to be enacted, like anyone advocating for any political cause.

The question is who will be enacting and controlling those policies. Somebody like METR? That's the people. And yes, every regulatory body has these dangers - but the amount of control demanded for this body is quite unusual - it's full veto right over the whole industry.

I’m trying really hard to avoid the snark. History provides ample examples and reasons to be deeply suspicious of movements that presented themselves as merely pursuing a program or cause - but that in practice turned out to be about control of political office

Do you mind excerpting the valid two paragraphs?

That was a figure of speech. It boils down to the fact that, by asking for laws mandating AI research to slow down, the incumbent Big AI firms get regulatory capture and cartel power, which might be the real motivation underlying the apocalyptic language (follow the money and all that).

the sex cult is the sensationalist draw. you don't get readers paying attention in our current content economy if you don't have something salacious

which is also to say - I found it very funny and enjoyable to read and it illustrates how much of dorky little echo chamber that group is. this whole idea that you can become some Spock-like, logic-driven creature in spite of our biological wiring fundamentally opposing this seems to underlay all of this. and the fact that they're all orbiting around one 'cool poly girl' and 'visionary dude' is hilariously similar to the kinds of very formerly-WASPy-and-now-just-WASy hetero polycules that I, in my more youthful and adventurous days, hung out with (and quickly departed after getting icky vibes). like down to the fashion choice and need to constantly prove how smart they each were at all times (do they, too, get really high and put on some anime with way too much fan-service and proceed to have orgies? one wonders)

those are the types of people who always end up actually having the worst coping skills because they can't even admit that they might be emotionally-driven sometimes, or that they have emotions at all that they might need to develop the cognitive skills to deal with in a pro-social way. or they get called out enough that they finally read a little about therapy and just end up weaponizing psycho-therapeutic language for their own ends (instead of, say, practicing the skills, doing the workbooks, developing insight)

which is how your anxieties might lead you to believe that the sky could fall at any moment (and thus the whole nuclear war and the 'don't trust bust us!!' bit)

I think the part that is annoying me the most is that one of these dorky little polycules has somehow found their way to the levers of power and are just mashing all the buttons and dialing all the knobs. these are honestly the last people on Earth that I'd trust with having any kind of influence

> the sex cult is the sensationalist draw. you don't get readers paying attention in our current content economy if you don't have something salacious

Nerds used to be shamed for not having enough sex, now they are being shamed for having too much sex. When will they finally learn to have the average amount of sex, so that the public discourse can finally switch to something else?

They could try just being normal. There's a middle between being unfuckable and hosting rape gangbangs with 40 people. This article actually does a great job describing how the gross, unfuckable nerds are now the ones pushing all of this poly sex cult stuff.

it's also possible to have healthy, non-hierarchical poly relationships. many queer people do it with triads, quads, etc. most of the hetero poly people I met and were icked out by functioned as extremely hierarchical in practice (but they would love to tell you about how they were relationship anarachists or whatever) with a couple at the center and one of the partners being the one that pursued having a lot of other partners while there was hidden pressure for the other to also engage in the practice so they didn't seem patriarchal or toxic (a cruel irony, in retrospect)

that said, my observations have a sample size of like... four couples maybe? (they're indistinguishable from one another now). but the dynamics I saw were four for four which seemed good enough for me at the time to dip out of that scene

One might also argue this is more mainstream in some cultures, and it's just not talked about. In countries such as Japan or France it's not uncommon to have a mistress (or male equivalent) but also having a primary family. That's hierarchical polyamory with uh, less steps.

certainly less calendaring and meeting invites, I'm sure. I did meet a couple of people who identified as non-monogamous well after I had met my very monogamous partner (whom I love deeply and am happily monogamous for) who seemed very cool and were equally put off by the polyamorists they had interacted with. but they were truly diamonds in the rough, at least in my major metropolitan city, and not a single one of them was hetero or close to being a WASP so you're probably right about the cultural tidbit

I think there's a bit of a difference between having a mistress and hosting an implied consent gangbang party for dozens of people.

lol I certainly think so and thankfully my wife agrees with me there.

I was just pointing out that there's a bit more than meets the eye when it coems to the spectrum of monogamy.

Yes, we know that monogamous societies are always imperfect, as people are imperfect, and it's common to violate the norms to some measure. But there's a difference between occasional violation of the norm and complete blatant rejection of it. As the joke goes, "yes, some pee in the pool, but you're doing it from the diving board!".

The other thing that annoys me is that there are plenty of folks in the AI safety space who do not think very highly (at least now) of Yudkowsky. One of the comments I saw recently on a Substack article talked about how Yudkowsky has "beclowned" himself by not updating some of his earlier theories given how LLMs function.

So it's pretty annoying that this article is trying to paint everyone who cares about AI safety is in a "sex cult". There are lots of folks who are genuinely concerned about risks. If anything I discounted a lot of the AI safety folks because I thought they were not seeing the underlying limitations in LLMs. That may still be the case, but agents keep breaking through what I thought were limits on their behavior.

If anything, I don't understand at all the folks who think ASI is on the horizon (< 10 years) but think everything will be hunky dory and easy to control once we actually do build superintelligence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com