I guess this goes in the opposite direction of Richard Ngo’s point about how this represents an escalation in memetic warfare between AI safety and accelerationism. Now I feel kinda bad for essentially manufacturing ammunition for that.
Can you elaborate on the downsides from your perspective? It’s very important to me that we survive, which implies winning, which involves fighting, which requires good ammunition.
The alternative seems to me to be that we survive without winning, or win without fighting, or fight without ammunition, and each of those sounds less viable. It may be the case that successionism remains such an extremely distasteful ideology that simply not engaging with it is an effective strategy. But I wouldn’t bet too strongly on that, given that this ideology is still being platformed by large podcasts, and is intellectually tolerated on sites like LessWrong.
Even phrases like “stop trying to murder our children, you sick freaks” are hostile and less intellectually satisfying, but I would be hard pressed to make an argument for why they don’t have a place in the public discourse.
In the absence of other perspectives on downsides, I would like to mention that blunt memes that are catchy phrases can lead to polarization.
Perhaps better “ammunition” would be silent memes that are building blogs of working institutions—when I buy a loaf of bread, there is no catchy phrase “buy our bread, it contains no anthrax” said by anyone anywhere anytime ever… yet the silent implication is true, I will, in fact, not get any anthrax with my bread. And the bigger picture implied by that silly example is an egregore of the boring institutions of the civilization that I rely upon for my own safety every day, the existence of which implies the existence of memeplexes that encode for it, but there is no implication of memes in the form of catchy English phrases.
It might well be the case that a fight of catchy phrases is a game created by a memeplex that favours successionism phenotype—what if LLMs are better at generating words and images than building and maintaining humane institutions..?
I really like this thinking… I might write a top level post inspired by this thread but some notes:
“can lead to polarization” hides some important complexity. Which memes lead to polarization? Do some memes do it less? Do some lead to unification? Can we measure that? If we could find and deploy memes that lead both to more correct thinking about AGI and to healing political divides that would be peachy.
Not all memes are phrases. Not all memes are in words. What are the other memes and how much should we be paying attention to their effects and how to effect them?
There are specific people we want to influence, specifically, the people causing AGI to happen. They exist in a complex social structure influenced by political and market structures which are in turn influenced by other more general populations. So a meme being successful with specific groups may be more important than it’s success with others. Unfortunately, this is a very complicated thing to try to understand or influence.
Related to asymetric weapons, we would ideally not be engaging in memetic warfare but instead finding ways to end memetic warfare and heal mass discourse… but it should be noted that that is an ambitious goal outside of ensuring AI does not kill everyone, and so a (careful) forked approach is probably desirable.
Edit: Additionally, inspired by Richard_Ngo’s comment, thought should probably be given to attacks on correct AGI thinking and proactively promoting memes which defend against them.
Can you elaborate on the downsides from your perspective? It’s very important to me that we survive, which implies winning, which involves fighting, which requires good ammunition.
The alternative seems to me to be that we survive without winning, or win without fighting, or fight without ammunition, and each of those sounds less viable. It may be the case that successionism remains such an extremely distasteful ideology that simply not engaging with it is an effective strategy. But I wouldn’t bet too strongly on that, given that this ideology is still being platformed by large podcasts, and is intellectually tolerated on sites like LessWrong.
Even phrases like “stop trying to murder our children, you sick freaks” are hostile and less intellectually satisfying, but I would be hard pressed to make an argument for why they don’t have a place in the public discourse.
In the absence of other perspectives on downsides, I would like to mention that blunt memes that are catchy phrases can lead to polarization.
Perhaps better “ammunition” would be silent memes that are building blogs of working institutions—when I buy a loaf of bread, there is no catchy phrase “buy our bread, it contains no anthrax” said by anyone anywhere anytime ever… yet the silent implication is true, I will, in fact, not get any anthrax with my bread. And the bigger picture implied by that silly example is an egregore of the boring institutions of the civilization that I rely upon for my own safety every day, the existence of which implies the existence of memeplexes that encode for it, but there is no implication of memes in the form of catchy English phrases.
It might well be the case that a fight of catchy phrases is a game created by a memeplex that favours successionism phenotype—what if LLMs are better at generating words and images than building and maintaining humane institutions..?
I really like this thinking… I might write a top level post inspired by this thread but some notes:
“can lead to polarization” hides some important complexity. Which memes lead to polarization? Do some memes do it less? Do some lead to unification? Can we measure that? If we could find and deploy memes that lead both to more correct thinking about AGI and to healing political divides that would be peachy.
Not all memes are phrases. Not all memes are in words. What are the other memes and how much should we be paying attention to their effects and how to effect them?
There are specific people we want to influence, specifically, the people causing AGI to happen. They exist in a complex social structure influenced by political and market structures which are in turn influenced by other more general populations. So a meme being successful with specific groups may be more important than it’s success with others. Unfortunately, this is a very complicated thing to try to understand or influence.
Related to asymetric weapons, we would ideally not be engaging in memetic warfare but instead finding ways to end memetic warfare and heal mass discourse… but it should be noted that that is an ambitious goal outside of ensuring AI does not kill everyone, and so a (careful) forked approach is probably desirable.
Edit: Additionally, inspired by Richard_Ngo’s comment, thought should probably be given to attacks on correct AGI thinking and proactively promoting memes which defend against them.