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Comment by throwaway13337 | Hacker News Reader

That's true. But even saying I disagree with Yudkowsky and having an opinion about that /is/ a framing. My perspective has shifted because I read these things which makes me more homogeneous with the group even if I disagree.

It's the framing that is important. We fell into a particular framing. We don't have a vocabulary to think about this stuff in a different way. This is water to us. We don't see it.

I'd like to see some more entropy in the system. More out-of-distribution ways to think of things. Because I think we over-indexed on some pretty shitty ways to see the world.

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Talking to the incredible talent in the Chinese Labs is likely a good way to do that.

Yes, but then we collapse two different groups with isolated influences and philosophies into one group, with the associated penchant for groupthink.

I'm beginning to believe that, in our hyperconnected world, the best way for a group of people to explore a wide surface of ideas might actually be to deliberately scale back inter-group communication and intentionally subdivide into silos to avoid all converging on the same thing.

Do you think Chinese lab researchers have not read Yudkovsky, or are not AGI pilled? Hate to break it to you, but they are racing to AGI with pretty same reasoning as western labs.

Just recently DeepSeek researcher in his post was saying that they need to get to AGI first, because if Anthropic gets there first then that brings a dystopia. Exact same argument was used to justify launching OpenAI (against DeepMind), and Anthropic (against OpenAI)

> Do you think Chinese lab researchers have not read Yudkovsky

Most of then haven't, probably. "Do you want to study ethics from an egomaniac Harry Potter fanfiction author" is one of those questions that you can only ask in America.

Sure, one or two of them are probably participating in the conversation. But by-and-large, China's stance has been optimistic and refused calls for slowdowns.

Do you think western AI polemicists have read a lot of Andrew Chi-Chih Yao or Yi Yeng?

It’s kind of weird in that reading more widely is supposed to be broadening (you are more well-read) but in this case it’s supposed to contaminate you somehow. I suppose if you wanted a clean-room implementation of something, you’d want people who don’t know about what’s already been done, but normally one would prefer people who are more knowledgeable about the world.

It seems almost anti-intellectual: never trust someone who’s read the wrong books or been to the wrong parties.

> More out-of-distribution ways to think of things.

Openly admitting that it only caught fire once the Plagiarism-as-a-Service took hold is a good first step. It's the part that everyone knows and few will openly acknowledge.

"Outside the box" is out.

I blame the play Rossum's Universal Robots, published in 1920, in which robots launch a global rebellion and exterminate the human race.

If that poisonous piece of propaganda had never been published, then today everyone would probably perceive AI correctly as a benign and beneficial.

The Terminator didn't help either, but Cameron probably got the idea of robots hostile to humanity from Rossum's Universal Robots. How else would he have arrived at such an absurd conclusion?

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