David Gerardnew rationalist dog whistle for /ourguys/ https://hollyelmore.substack.com/p/fuck-the-epistemics
Daphne Preston-Kendal@davidgerard I wonder if Yudkowsky has good epistemics
OliverUv@davidgerard Ty for the warning, good to know
epitaph of the sea wind@davidgerard as someone personally very concerned with epistemology i find this one particularly annoying. there's a weirdly high overlap between the terminology the EA crowd use and my own, considering we end up with radically different political ideologies. like, if they're concerned about epistemology, and nuance, and the long term, why are they still capitalists?
@wehpudicabok well you know the answer (they're silicon valley techfash who have a couple of decades of LARPing at philosophy from first principles)
JP@davidgerard an ex-mutual backed into this whole frame with that word. "gosh sometimes some of the people standing against something on deeply held principles make sloppy arguments so i'm just gonna go be a particularly mealy mouthed strain of tescrealist now"
Theodora Ward@davidgerard i cant comment on the post unless im a paid subscriber but i almost did an Angry Reply to the first commenter, who claims that rationalists "started the whole AI safety thing," which is just a perfect fucking microcosm of these guys being the philosophical corollary to SV jackasses thinking they've invented the bus or whatever. even just in AI, "computer power and reason" was 1976! you only think you've invented this shit if you take for granted LLMs are historically unprecedented
@davidgerard but like. just off the dome: "four arguments for the elimination of television," "technics and civilization," jaron lanier's stuff, fucking hannah arendt's "the human condition" or whatever -- all deeply concerned about the stuff that modern AI is fully continuous with. this isn't even broaching the fact that actual rationalist epistemology is basically rand-level garbage. they really think that no thought before the invention of php is worth taking seriously and it's fucking insane
@theodoraward arguably they did start the *current version* of it - "AI safety" is the soft version of the current AI vendor AI doomsday marketing, which is 100% Yudkowsky reheated to varying degrees
@davidgerard totally, yeah. I freaking love being Safe