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..?
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..?