I barely know what a rationalist is and my introduction to effective altruism was SBF. And now I’m reading about a modern day Manson family. Can’t forget about Annie Altman.
I agree that it’s not looking good, if all you know is SBF and Zizians. But as far as I know, Annie Altman is not related to either rationalism or effective altruism.
She’s not but to the extent that people put the AI labs in one bucket with LW/EA (TESCREAL or sth), the Annie Altman incident may cause us additional reputational damage.
Ha, that’s a good reminder that other perspectives exist.
Inside the bubble, it feels like a fact that the technology advances, LLMs exist, etc. Agreeing on these things doesn’t make me feel like a part of some group anymore than believing that 2+2=4 does.
But the general public seems to be in deep denial. (Except for artists sometimes complaining that the computers are stealing their jobs, and teachers complaining that kids feed all their homework to LLMs.) So from the outside perspective, anyone not in denial seems like a part of a very specific small group.
That’s basically the idea behind “TESCREAL” (if we ignore the EA part) that all people who believe that one day we might have intelligent robots and fly to the stars and stuff like that must be a part of some sinister conspiracy. Otherwise, why would they have such suspiciously similar beliefs? While from my perspective, it’s like, if you have read sci-fi as a child, none of this sounds surprising. I kinda took it for granted that one day we will have intelligent robots, the only question is the timing, whether it will be 2000 or 2100 or maybe 3000. And the only new thing is that now it seems that 2030 is the answer.
Funny thing is that a short time ago, David Gerard was busy deleting from Wikipedia any mentions of EA being connected to Less Wrong, and now it is popular to go to the opposite extreme and assume that everything is connected (as long as it uses computers, or decision theory, or some other weird stuff).
That’s basically the idea behind “TESCREAL” (if we ignore the EA part) that all people who believe that one day we might have intelligent robots and fly to the stars and stuff like that must be a part of some sinister conspiracy.
Are you saying hat (most) sci-fi authors who take the futures they write about seriously (i.e. “we totally might/will see that kind of stuff in decades/centuries”) are TESCREAL-ists (either in Torres & Gebru sense or in popular imagination)?
My impression is that TESCREAL was more meant to point at some kind of … industrial & philantropic complex?
People who use the term TESCREAL generally don’t realize that science fiction authors often take the futures they write about seriously (if not literally). They will talk about “TESCREALists taking sci-fi books too seriously” without knowing Marvin Minsky, the AI pioneer whose “AI tasked to solve the Riemann hypothesis” thought experiment is effectively the origin of the paperclip-minimizer thought experiment, was the technical consultant for 2001: A Space Odyssey and was considered by Isaac Asimov to be one of the two smartest people he ever met (alongside cosmist Carl Sagan).
To me this seems like a motte-and-bailey situation, where the motte is making true statements about various connections, and the bailey is making a conspiracy theory out of it.
A similar situation in politics is e.g. pointing out that something is “connected to Soros”. Sure, millions of things are: Soros is a billionaire who gives tons of money to lots of organizations and charities; many of them distribute the money further… Like, maybe there is a playground near your house, which was built using money from some city fund, which at some moment has received money from some other fund, which has received money from Soros. So I could make a technically true point that the playground next to your house was built using money from Soros. OK, what does that imply? Rationally speaking, it just says that Soros spends money on lots of various things, some of them trickle down to some local playgrounds; that’s it.
But a person who makes such statement on internet is typically using it to insinuate something. The full tweet will be like: “Yeah, of course Mateusz says X and opposes Y, that’s no surprise for the people who actually know something about him. Even the playground next to his house was built using money from Soros!” And, you know, that kinda makes you an important part of the New World Order, and of course you are “skeptical” about chemtrails, that’s what all people on his payroll would say.
If you know about the “six degrees of separation”, that basically just means that in (some kind of) network, the longer connections you make, the exponentially more nodes you can reach, so at a surprisingly small number of steps you can reach practically everyone. (Maybe the actual number is greater than six, depending on how we define a “friend”. That means that any person, including you or me, is probably within six steps distance from Donald Trump, or Vladimir Putin, or whoever else. If you are directly connected to some international network (such as Less Wrong), the number is probably much lower. There are some Less Wrong readers in Russia, some people in their families very likely work for the Russian government, add two more steps, and you are four degrees of separation away from Putin. What does that mean? Nothing specific. Until one day a journalist decides that he doesn’t like your face for some reason, and he will describe this four-step chain, making you responsible for the latest atrocity in Ukraine in the mainstream narrative. “Mateusz, an online pal of Vanya, a nephew of Ivan the officer of FSB”—if you put it this way, is a typical reader going to believe that this is all just a coincidence and it means nothing?
And in my opinion, TESCREAL is a similar thing. Yes, some parts are connected to others, but the entire thing is blown out of proportions. Like, what the fuck is “cosmism”? It doesn’t even have a proper Wikipedia page, and I have never heard about it before Émile P. Torres decided that it is an important component of… the thing that I am apparently a part of. I can’t even make a coherent objection, because I have no idea what “cosmism” is, but… let’s assume that it is a group of people who have read sci-fi books, and who assume that in future we will fly to stars, have intelligent robots, and that will create many ethical and economical dilemmas; or something like that. What does that mean? Nothing. But let’s go further and assume that dozen “cosmists” actually post on Less Wrong (but for some reason have never mentioned “cosmism” in their posts). I just made that up—but let’s assume that it is true, just to steelman Torres. What would that mean? In my opinion, still nothing. In the world with internet, it makes sense that some of the people who like sci-fi would also find a website about artificial intelligence interesting.
Internet made the world feel really small. Or rather, organized by intellectual interests rather than geographical distances. There are people on my street that I don’t know. There are people on the opposite side of the planet that I do—because we share a hobby. One day, my wife’s mother mentioned that when she listened to some Slovak radio, they were also talking about Scott Alexander. Another day, I found in Slate Star Codex article a reference on intelligence research done by my boss. And yet, my wife’s mother or my former boss could in no reasonable way be considered members of the “TESCREAL”… unless the category becomes so wide that it practically includes all smart educated people in the Western civilization.
Of course, some connections in TESCREAL make a lot of sense. Like, yes, there is a connection between rationalists and effective altruists. You could hardly deny it, when their web forums literally run on two instances of the same software, administered by the same people! (Now that the SBF scandal put EA in a bad light, even Wikipedia freely admits that EA and R actually might have something in common.) But from my perspective, this makes the acronym even less valid, because it kinda suggests that the link between EA and R is comparable to the link between them and C, which to me just sounds absurd. But of course, if we just renamed it to REA, it wouldn’t be so controversial.
So… yeah, technically these things are connected, but sometimes the connection is real and strong, and sometimes it’s just “both of them sound kinda sci-fi to me”. Also, the world is small. What is the “industrial & philanthropic complex”? Doesn’t it include… pretty much everything? I mean, most things are produced by industry, and most non-profits accept donations. Should we consider Bill Gates a part of TESCREAL? He had a software company, and he donated to charities.
We could narrow it down to something like “people influenced by writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander”. But even this is less narrow than in seems—there are thousands, maybe even millions of people who read Scott, or at least are influenced by his writing through friends (and ironically it probably excludes the “cosmists”, maybe, because I still don’t know who they are). So it is wrong to insinuate that this is some small sinister group, when it probably includes half of the Silicon Valley.
What else is there? Historical links to eugenics? Really; who doesn’t have them? People seem to forget that eugenics used to be very popular among progressives before WW2 associated it with Nazis. Threats to environment? There are millions of things outside tech that threaten environment, too. Some people are sexist and racist? If that is supposed to mean anything, one would need to prove that this exceeds the base rates in general population. (Otherwise it reduces to: another link connecting these groups is that they… dramatic music… are made of humans.)
The language of the Wikipedia article also annoys me: “Elon Musk has been described as sympathetic to some TESCREAL ideologies”, “It has also been suggested that Peter Thiel is sympathetic to TESCREAL ideas”, “Sam Altman and much of the OpenAI board has been described as supporting TESCREAL movements”, ” Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky [...] have also been described as leaders of the TESCREAL movement”, “William MacAskill [...] has been described as a TESCREAList”. Does it mean that any of these people actually uses the acronym, or even considers it meaningful? I mean, wouldn’t it be funny if the supposed leaders of a movement didn’t believe that it exists?
So… yeah, technically these things are connected, but sometimes the connection is real and strong, and sometimes it’s just “both of them sound kinda sci-fi to me”.
As far as I remember (may be misremembering), to the extent that their memetic genealogy analysis holds water, there was little bit more common origin than I expected.
But ofc I agree that the entire thing is just an ideological carpet bombing via guilt by (often overblown) association.
What is the “industrial & philanthropic complex”? Doesn’t it include… pretty much everything? I mean, most things are produced by industry, and most non-profits accept donations. Should we consider Bill Gates a part of TESCREAL? He had a software company, and he donated to charities.
I didn’t mean all of industry or all of philanthropy. I was pointing at their perception that there is a cluster of futuristic privileged dudes, fractions constantly bickering, and having some views on AGI, industry-ing and philanthropy-ing.
(Possibly first time in my life I feel like I’m overcharitably steelmanning Torres & Gebru on TESCREAL. Is this even worse than I’m giving them credit for?)
OK, so something like “businessmen who impose their crazy ideas on the world through philanthropy”. (As opposed to businessmen who just want to make money; or philanthropy for the sake of philanthropy without trying to remodel the world according to some ideology.)
Basically Soros, only with Thiel instead of Soros. :)
TBF, Torres denies using it to mean this, instead claiming it refers to some obscure 2010 article by Ben Goertzel alone. This doesn’t seem a very credible excuse, and it has been largely understood by proponents of the theory (like Dave Troy or Céline Keller) to mean Russian cosmism (and consequently that “TESCREAL” is actually a plot by Russian intelligence to re-establish the Soviet Union).
TBF it is fairly striking reading about early Soviet history how many of the Old Bolshevik intelligentsia would have fit right in this community but the whole “Putin is a secret cosmist” crowd is… unhinged.
I barely know what a rationalist is and my introduction to effective altruism was SBF. And now I’m reading about a modern day Manson family. Can’t forget about Annie Altman.
As an outsider looking in, it’s not looking good.
I agree that it’s not looking good, if all you know is SBF and Zizians. But as far as I know, Annie Altman is not related to either rationalism or effective altruism.
She’s not but to the extent that people put the AI labs in one bucket with LW/EA (TESCREAL or sth), the Annie Altman incident may cause us additional reputational damage.
Ha, that’s a good reminder that other perspectives exist.
Inside the bubble, it feels like a fact that the technology advances, LLMs exist, etc. Agreeing on these things doesn’t make me feel like a part of some group anymore than believing that 2+2=4 does.
But the general public seems to be in deep denial. (Except for artists sometimes complaining that the computers are stealing their jobs, and teachers complaining that kids feed all their homework to LLMs.) So from the outside perspective, anyone not in denial seems like a part of a very specific small group.
That’s basically the idea behind “TESCREAL” (if we ignore the EA part) that all people who believe that one day we might have intelligent robots and fly to the stars and stuff like that must be a part of some sinister conspiracy. Otherwise, why would they have such suspiciously similar beliefs? While from my perspective, it’s like, if you have read sci-fi as a child, none of this sounds surprising. I kinda took it for granted that one day we will have intelligent robots, the only question is the timing, whether it will be 2000 or 2100 or maybe 3000. And the only new thing is that now it seems that 2030 is the answer.
Funny thing is that a short time ago, David Gerard was busy deleting from Wikipedia any mentions of EA being connected to Less Wrong, and now it is popular to go to the opposite extreme and assume that everything is connected (as long as it uses computers, or decision theory, or some other weird stuff).
Are you saying hat (most) sci-fi authors who take the futures they write about seriously (i.e. “we totally might/will see that kind of stuff in decades/centuries”) are TESCREAL-ists (either in Torres & Gebru sense or in popular imagination)?
My impression is that TESCREAL was more meant to point at some kind of … industrial & philantropic complex?
People who use the term TESCREAL generally don’t realize that science fiction authors often take the futures they write about seriously (if not literally). They will talk about “TESCREALists taking sci-fi books too seriously” without knowing Marvin Minsky, the AI pioneer whose “AI tasked to solve the Riemann hypothesis” thought experiment is effectively the origin of the paperclip-minimizer thought experiment, was the technical consultant for 2001: A Space Odyssey and was considered by Isaac Asimov to be one of the two smartest people he ever met (alongside cosmist Carl Sagan).
To me this seems like a motte-and-bailey situation, where the motte is making true statements about various connections, and the bailey is making a conspiracy theory out of it.
A similar situation in politics is e.g. pointing out that something is “connected to Soros”. Sure, millions of things are: Soros is a billionaire who gives tons of money to lots of organizations and charities; many of them distribute the money further… Like, maybe there is a playground near your house, which was built using money from some city fund, which at some moment has received money from some other fund, which has received money from Soros. So I could make a technically true point that the playground next to your house was built using money from Soros. OK, what does that imply? Rationally speaking, it just says that Soros spends money on lots of various things, some of them trickle down to some local playgrounds; that’s it.
But a person who makes such statement on internet is typically using it to insinuate something. The full tweet will be like: “Yeah, of course Mateusz says X and opposes Y, that’s no surprise for the people who actually know something about him. Even the playground next to his house was built using money from Soros!” And, you know, that kinda makes you an important part of the New World Order, and of course you are “skeptical” about chemtrails, that’s what all people on his payroll would say.
If you know about the “six degrees of separation”, that basically just means that in (some kind of) network, the longer connections you make, the exponentially more nodes you can reach, so at a surprisingly small number of steps you can reach practically everyone. (Maybe the actual number is greater than six, depending on how we define a “friend”. That means that any person, including you or me, is probably within six steps distance from Donald Trump, or Vladimir Putin, or whoever else. If you are directly connected to some international network (such as Less Wrong), the number is probably much lower. There are some Less Wrong readers in Russia, some people in their families very likely work for the Russian government, add two more steps, and you are four degrees of separation away from Putin. What does that mean? Nothing specific. Until one day a journalist decides that he doesn’t like your face for some reason, and he will describe this four-step chain, making you responsible for the latest atrocity in Ukraine in the mainstream narrative. “Mateusz, an online pal of Vanya, a nephew of Ivan the officer of FSB”—if you put it this way, is a typical reader going to believe that this is all just a coincidence and it means nothing?
And in my opinion, TESCREAL is a similar thing. Yes, some parts are connected to others, but the entire thing is blown out of proportions. Like, what the fuck is “cosmism”? It doesn’t even have a proper Wikipedia page, and I have never heard about it before Émile P. Torres decided that it is an important component of… the thing that I am apparently a part of. I can’t even make a coherent objection, because I have no idea what “cosmism” is, but… let’s assume that it is a group of people who have read sci-fi books, and who assume that in future we will fly to stars, have intelligent robots, and that will create many ethical and economical dilemmas; or something like that. What does that mean? Nothing. But let’s go further and assume that dozen “cosmists” actually post on Less Wrong (but for some reason have never mentioned “cosmism” in their posts). I just made that up—but let’s assume that it is true, just to steelman Torres. What would that mean? In my opinion, still nothing. In the world with internet, it makes sense that some of the people who like sci-fi would also find a website about artificial intelligence interesting.
Internet made the world feel really small. Or rather, organized by intellectual interests rather than geographical distances. There are people on my street that I don’t know. There are people on the opposite side of the planet that I do—because we share a hobby. One day, my wife’s mother mentioned that when she listened to some Slovak radio, they were also talking about Scott Alexander. Another day, I found in Slate Star Codex article a reference on intelligence research done by my boss. And yet, my wife’s mother or my former boss could in no reasonable way be considered members of the “TESCREAL”… unless the category becomes so wide that it practically includes all smart educated people in the Western civilization.
Of course, some connections in TESCREAL make a lot of sense. Like, yes, there is a connection between rationalists and effective altruists. You could hardly deny it, when their web forums literally run on two instances of the same software, administered by the same people! (Now that the SBF scandal put EA in a bad light, even Wikipedia freely admits that EA and R actually might have something in common.) But from my perspective, this makes the acronym even less valid, because it kinda suggests that the link between EA and R is comparable to the link between them and C, which to me just sounds absurd. But of course, if we just renamed it to REA, it wouldn’t be so controversial.
So… yeah, technically these things are connected, but sometimes the connection is real and strong, and sometimes it’s just “both of them sound kinda sci-fi to me”. Also, the world is small. What is the “industrial & philanthropic complex”? Doesn’t it include… pretty much everything? I mean, most things are produced by industry, and most non-profits accept donations. Should we consider Bill Gates a part of TESCREAL? He had a software company, and he donated to charities.
We could narrow it down to something like “people influenced by writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander”. But even this is less narrow than in seems—there are thousands, maybe even millions of people who read Scott, or at least are influenced by his writing through friends (and ironically it probably excludes the “cosmists”, maybe, because I still don’t know who they are). So it is wrong to insinuate that this is some small sinister group, when it probably includes half of the Silicon Valley.
What else is there? Historical links to eugenics? Really; who doesn’t have them? People seem to forget that eugenics used to be very popular among progressives before WW2 associated it with Nazis. Threats to environment? There are millions of things outside tech that threaten environment, too. Some people are sexist and racist? If that is supposed to mean anything, one would need to prove that this exceeds the base rates in general population. (Otherwise it reduces to: another link connecting these groups is that they… dramatic music… are made of humans.)
The language of the Wikipedia article also annoys me: “Elon Musk has been described as sympathetic to some TESCREAL ideologies”, “It has also been suggested that Peter Thiel is sympathetic to TESCREAL ideas”, “Sam Altman and much of the OpenAI board has been described as supporting TESCREAL movements”, ” Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky [...] have also been described as leaders of the TESCREAL movement”, “William MacAskill [...] has been described as a TESCREAList”. Does it mean that any of these people actually uses the acronym, or even considers it meaningful? I mean, wouldn’t it be funny if the supposed leaders of a movement didn’t believe that it exists?
As far as I remember (may be misremembering), to the extent that their memetic genealogy analysis holds water, there was little bit more common origin than I expected.
But ofc I agree that the entire thing is just an ideological carpet bombing via guilt by (often overblown) association.
I didn’t mean all of industry or all of philanthropy. I was pointing at their perception that there is a cluster of futuristic privileged dudes, fractions constantly bickering, and having some views on AGI, industry-ing and philanthropy-ing.
(Possibly first time in my life I feel like I’m overcharitably steelmanning Torres & Gebru on TESCREAL. Is this even worse than I’m giving them credit for?)
OK, so something like “businessmen who impose their crazy ideas on the world through philanthropy”. (As opposed to businessmen who just want to make money; or philanthropy for the sake of philanthropy without trying to remodel the world according to some ideology.)
Basically Soros, only with Thiel instead of Soros. :)
It does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism
TBF, Torres denies using it to mean this, instead claiming it refers to some obscure 2010 article by Ben Goertzel alone. This doesn’t seem a very credible excuse, and it has been largely understood by proponents of the theory (like Dave Troy or Céline Keller) to mean Russian cosmism (and consequently that “TESCREAL” is actually a plot by Russian intelligence to re-establish the Soviet Union).
That is such a bizarre claim to make but admittedly including Cosmism at all is really odd
TBF it is fairly striking reading about early Soviet history how many of the Old Bolshevik intelligentsia would have fit right in this community but the whole “Putin is a secret cosmist” crowd is… unhinged.