AI is going to be very normal and unimpressive or move very slowly, so it is safe, and it would be great if it could move a bit faster
Can you point to examples of e/acc-ish people claiming the “very slowly, so it is safe” part?
I mostly think of e/acc as a backlash against AI safety/x-risk concerns, without trying to form a coherent worldview, either within a single mind, or within an “e/acc” community, which is why you see some “leaders” saying opposite things at different times. This is similar to how various types got radicalized into weird forms of neo-right-wing-ness as a backlash from having bad experiences with (radical) left, Jordan Peterson being perhaps the most recognizable example. Ayn Rand’s strain of libertarianism seems to have this sort of origin as well (albeit this worldview seems much more coherent on the inside, but I haven’t investigated). Reading Timnit Gebru’s Wikipedia page also gave me the impression that her TESCREAL crusade is somewhat motivated by backlash from personal experience.
I don’t know about the numbers of e/accs. It seems to me that it is real, but mostly lives on the internet? A more definitely real strand of thought is successionism (e.g., Rich Sutton) and Land-adjacent stuff.
My impression of e/acc is that it’s taken the effectiveness and execution framework of EA and flipped the sign of the expected value of incredibly powerful AI to being positive, even without significant work on safety. In other words, if you don’t buy AI doom arguments, then I think it’s basically the same thing as EA. Last week I wrote about how I think e/acc and EA are similar to Ayn Rand, but for entirely different reasons—I think the appeal of EA is broader than is acknowledged and that it is often slowly unbundled by those who are exposed to it.
This seems like a Steel Vulcan that hallucinates an intellectually serious opponent that mostly doesn’t exist, or at best is extremely different than the empirical instantiations we actually observe as coalescing around “e/acc.”
ETA: I do think there are nonzero real people with this view, eg the Mechanize folks. But they’re fairly rare and mostly they don’t call themselves e/accs.
It puts itself in direct contrast to EA wrt utility maximization on AGI: “e/acc believes letting the intelligent meta-organism system dynamically adapt by itself to new environmental variables whenever they present themselves… over-regulating technologies suppresses variance and hence slows down progress towards higher utility technologies and advancement of civilization, a contrast to anti-AGI factions of EA”
Is there any evidence at all that they use the effectiveness and execution framework of EA?
I think the “e” in e/acc is 100% about vibes, and it hasn’t even arisen as a question how one would accelerate effectively versus ineffectively, much less how to quantify that.
If you believe as Beff does (see his Substack) that capitalism is a highly intelligent form of organizing civilization, then the effectiveness is just the competition and other dynamics of capitalism as a distributed form of collective decision making that leans towards the most effective means of technological acceleration.
Also, as cesspool (lol) points out, e/acc seems to be philosophically indistinguishable from capitalists trying to make money investing in technological advancements (see “The Techno Optimist Manifesto”). Venture capital has power-law distributed returns which is where the EA idea of “hits-based giving” came from (or is commonly analogized to). If you believe “maximizing profit from technology == maximizing acceleration”, then a16z is the Coefficient Giving of e/acc.
I’m claiming that they were riffing off of the name “EA”, but did not borrow the intellectual framework of EA.
I suspect no one in the whole history of the “e/acc” meme, sat down with a spreadsheet and tried to figure out the most efficient way to maximize acceleration with one’s available resource the way the EAs have tried to figure out how to maximize the altruistic good they can do with their resoruces.
Can you point to examples of e/acc-ish people claiming the “very slowly, so it is safe” part?
I mostly think of e/acc as a backlash against AI safety/x-risk concerns, without trying to form a coherent worldview, either within a single mind, or within an “e/acc” community, which is why you see some “leaders” saying opposite things at different times. This is similar to how various types got radicalized into weird forms of neo-right-wing-ness as a backlash from having bad experiences with (radical) left, Jordan Peterson being perhaps the most recognizable example. Ayn Rand’s strain of libertarianism seems to have this sort of origin as well (albeit this worldview seems much more coherent on the inside, but I haven’t investigated). Reading Timnit Gebru’s Wikipedia page also gave me the impression that her TESCREAL crusade is somewhat motivated by backlash from personal experience.
I don’t know about the numbers of e/accs. It seems to me that it is real, but mostly lives on the internet? A more definitely real strand of thought is successionism (e.g., Rich Sutton) and Land-adjacent stuff.
My impression of e/acc is that it’s taken the effectiveness and execution framework of EA and flipped the sign of the expected value of incredibly powerful AI to being positive, even without significant work on safety. In other words, if you don’t buy AI doom arguments, then I think it’s basically the same thing as EA. Last week I wrote about how I think e/acc and EA are similar to Ayn Rand, but for entirely different reasons—I think the appeal of EA is broader than is acknowledged and that it is often slowly unbundled by those who are exposed to it.
This seems like a Steel Vulcan that hallucinates an intellectually serious opponent that mostly doesn’t exist, or at best is extremely different than the empirical instantiations we actually observe as coalescing around “e/acc.”
ETA: I do think there are nonzero real people with this view, eg the Mechanize folks. But they’re fairly rare and mostly they don’t call themselves e/accs.
The “e/acc manifesto” as I understand it is basically just this substack post: https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets
It puts itself in direct contrast to EA wrt utility maximization on AGI: “e/acc believes letting the intelligent meta-organism system dynamically adapt by itself to new environmental variables whenever they present themselves… over-regulating technologies suppresses variance and hence slows down progress towards higher utility technologies and advancement of civilization, a contrast to anti-AGI factions of EA”
There’s also this lecture titled “e/acc has no theory” (sarcasm).
Is there any evidence at all that they use the effectiveness and execution framework of EA?
I think the “e” in e/acc is 100% about vibes, and it hasn’t even arisen as a question how one would accelerate effectively versus ineffectively, much less how to quantify that.
If you believe as Beff does (see his Substack) that capitalism is a highly intelligent form of organizing civilization, then the effectiveness is just the competition and other dynamics of capitalism as a distributed form of collective decision making that leans towards the most effective means of technological acceleration.
Also, as cesspool (lol) points out, e/acc seems to be philosophically indistinguishable from capitalists trying to make money investing in technological advancements (see “The Techno Optimist Manifesto”). Venture capital has power-law distributed returns which is where the EA idea of “hits-based giving” came from (or is commonly analogized to). If you believe “maximizing profit from technology == maximizing acceleration”, then a16z is the Coefficient Giving of e/acc.
I don’t have source for this on hand, but I think the word ‘e/acc’ is trying to mock ‘E-A’, it rhymes with e-yuck.
Yes, I understand that part.
I’m claiming that they were riffing off of the name “EA”, but did not borrow the intellectual framework of EA.
I suspect no one in the whole history of the “e/acc” meme, sat down with a spreadsheet and tried to figure out the most efficient way to maximize acceleration with one’s available resource the way the EAs have tried to figure out how to maximize the altruistic good they can do with their resoruces.