cubefox

Karma: 1,884

cubefox May 10, 2025, 5:24 PM
−5 points
3
in reply to: dirk’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
I’m saying that it is a serious accusation, whose consequences are far more impactful (e.g. possible career end) than ones feelings being hurt. So one should be extra careful before making the accusation. In case of Cremieux we know that he is in fact defending an empirical hypothesis, and he has provided an extensive amount of evidence and arguments in its favor (e.g. on his blog). This provides strong reason to think that the accusation of racism is not justified.

cubefox May 10, 2025, 4:54 PM
3 points
1
in reply to: eukaryote’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
These are more or less controversial, but range from not outside the Overton window at all (saying that factory farming is immoral) to being a little outside. But they are by no means “taboo” in the sense that you would face serious social cost for expressing them. Saying “there are heritable statistical group differences in mean IQ” is on a completely different level. People had their careers ended and reputation ruined because of this. In comparison, saying that golf courses should be replaced with apartments carries almost zero personal risk.

My issue is with the specific takes Cremieux has and ways he acts, which are racist, and harmful, and bad.

I think it is defamatory, bad and counter to the spirit of rationalist discourse to accuse someone of racism when they have put forward an empirical hypothesis including evidence to back it up. The term “racist” has an implication of being merely based on an irrational prejudice, which is clearly not the case for Cremieux.

cubefox May 9, 2025, 7:26 PM
5 points
−10
in reply to: whestler’s comment on: whestler’s Shortform
Consider that there are people with high P(doom) who don’t have any depression or anxiety. Emotions are not as much caused by our beliefs as we tend to assume. A therapist might be able to teach more productive thought patterns and behaviors, but they are unlikely to speak with competence on the object level issue of AI doom.

Independently I recommend trying to get a prescription for SSRIs. Most probably won’t help, but some might, and they tend to not have strong side effects in my experience, so trying them doesn’t hurt.

Only problem is that trying different SSRIs can take a very long time: usually you take one for several weeks, nothing happens, the doctor says “up the dosage”, weeks pass, still no effect, and the doctor might increase the dosage again. Only then may they switch you to a different SSRI, and the whole process begins anew. So persistence is required.

cubefox May 9, 2025, 1:45 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: Archimedes’s Shortform

Both labor and compute have been scaled up over the last several years at big AI companies. My understanding is the scaling in compute was more important for algorithmic progress

That may be the case, but I suppose that in the last several years, compute has been scaled up more than labor. (Labor cost is entirely reoccurring, while compute cost is a one-time cost plus a reoccurring electricity cost, and a progress in compute hardware, from smaller integrated circuits, means that compute cost is decreasing over time.) Then obviously that doesn’t necessarily mean that an AI company $A$ with access to $2 x$ FLOP/s compute and $y$ AI researchers has an advantage over a company $B$ with only $x$ FLOP/s compute but $2 y$ researchers.

In fact I think in that sense labor is likely more important than compute for algorithmic progress. And that doesn’t seem so far away from reality, if you model $A$ as a US company with cheaper access to compute and $B$ as a Chinese company with cheaper access to labor (due to lower wages).

cubefox May 8, 2025, 8:51 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: Morpheus’s comment on: Morpheus’s Shortform
I think more posts should be formatted as a nested list. They are especially clear, since indentation ≈ elaboration, which is not visible in continuous text.

cubefox May 7, 2025, 1:31 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: patrik-cihal’s comment on: patrik-cihal’s Shortform
Beliefs? World model?

cubefox May 6, 2025, 11:30 PM
3 points
0
on: It’s ‘Well, actually...’ all the way down
One example: For decades, we ate large amounts of vegetable shortening and margarine made from a chemical process that creates trans fats. Only relatively recently we became sure that trans fats cause heart disease, and restrictions about trans fat contents where put in place in many countries. See this Wikipedia article.

A major problem seems to be that many engineered things we eat every day were invented before rigorous food testing was mandatory. Since retroactively banning all this stuff is not realistic, we have to live with the risk of finding more such cases in the future. Similar things hold for other products, like specialized substances in food packaging, etc.

cubefox May 6, 2025, 6:57 PM
26 points
10
in reply to: Nick_Tarleton’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
There is a strong correlation between someone boycotting a person for saying X and X being outside the Overton window. So a causal link is likely. People rarely boycott people for expressing things they disagree with but which are inside the Overton window.

cubefox May 6, 2025, 4:44 PM
10 points
9
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg

It is also possible that Bob is racist in the sense of successfully working to cause unjust ethnic conflict of some kind, but also Bob only says true things. Bob could selectively emphasize some true propositions and deemphasize others.

Sure, though this is equally possible for the opposite: When Alice is shunning or shaming or cancelling people for expressing or defending a taboo hypothesis, without her explicitly arguing that the hypothesis is false or disfavored by the evidence. In fact, this is usually much easier to do than the former, since defending a taboo hypothesis is attached to a large amount of social and career risk, while attacking a taboo hypothesis is virtually risk-free. Moreover, attacking a taboo hypothesis will likely cause you to get points from virtue signalling.

cubefox May 6, 2025, 9:17 AM
20 points
8
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
I think the following resembles a motte-and-bailey pattern: Bailey: “He is a racist, people may want to explain why racism is terrible.” Motte: “Oh I just meant he argued for the empirical proposition that there are heritable statistical group differences in IQ.” Accusing someone of racism is a massively different matter from saying that he believes there are heritable group differences in IQ. You can check whether a term is value neutral by whether the accused people apply it to themselves, in this case they clearly do not. The term “racist” usually carries the implication or implicature of an attitude that is merely based on an irrational prejudice, not an empirical hypothesis with reference to a significant amount of statistical and other evidence.

cubefox May 6, 2025, 8:23 AM
10 points
1
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
I find already labelling someone who holds an empirical proposition (which is true or false) as “racist” (which is a highly derogatory term, not a value neutral label) is defamatory. The vague hinting about alleged “rumours” here also seems to just serve to make him appear in a bad light.

cubefox May 6, 2025, 8:11 AM
41 points
26
in reply to: eukaryote’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
I find this attitude sad. I think his blog is currently clearly one of the best ones on the Internet. Even if you don’t agree with some of his positions, I take it to be a deeply anti-rational attitude to try to shun or shame people for saying things that are outside the Overton window. Especially when he has clearly proven on his website that he has highly nuanced takes on various other, less controversial, topics. It reminds me of people trying to shame Scott Alexander for daring to step a little outside the Overton window himself.

In my opinion, true rationalists should exactly not react to such takes with “he said something taboo, let’s boycott things where he is involved”. If you disagree with him, a better attitude would be to write a post about one of the articles on his website, concretely indicating and rebutting things where you think he is wrong. Only claiming “I do not think Cremieux meets this standard of care and compassion” is so vague of an accusation that I don’t know whether you even disagree with anything he said. It sounds like low decoupling and tone policing. I wrote more on rationalist discourse involving taboos here.

cubefox May 6, 2025, 2:16 AM
6 points
1
in reply to: satchlj’s comment on: Why I am not a successionist
It seems highly likely that the majority of humans prefer humanity not to be replaced by AI in the foreseeable future. So I don’t think there is that much variance here.

cubefox May 5, 2025, 11:27 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Why I am not a successionist
In a preference utilitarian calculus it does matter which possible preferences actually exist and which don’t. We don’t count hypothetical votes in an election either.

cubefox May 4, 2025, 11:49 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Why I am not a successionist
But from a consistent description doesn’t follow concrete existence. Otherwise an ontological argument could imply the existence of God. And if someone doesn’t exist, their parts don’t exist either. A preference is a part of someone, like an arm or a leg, and they wouldn’t exist. A description could only answer what preference someone would have if they existed. But that’s only a hypothetical preference, not one that exists.

cubefox May 4, 2025, 11:35 PM
−1 points
1
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Why I am not a successionist
You can think of what is good for someone as preferences. And you can think of preferences as being about potentially switching from some state X (where you currently are) to Y. There can be no preferences about switching from X to Y if you don’t exist in X, since there is nobody who would have such a preference. Of course you can have preferences once you exist in Y, e.g. about not switching back to X (not dying). But that only means that switching from Y to X is bad, not that switching from X to Y was good.

cubefox May 4, 2025, 9:53 PM
3 points
1
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Why I am not a successionist
Well, like any preference it could change over time, but “final” is the opposite of “instrumental”, not of “variable”.

You could use the same argument about existing beings against longtermism, but I just don’t think it carves reality at its joints. Your responsibility toward possible beings is no different than your responsibility toward existant beings. You could make things better or worse for either of them and they’d love or hate that if you did.

The important point is: If we don’t let them come into existence then they would not hate that. Merely possible beings don’t exist and therefore have no preference for coming to be. So it isn’t bad if they never get to exist. See here for details.

cubefox May 4, 2025, 8:59 PM
5 points
3
in reply to: Cleo Nardo’s comment on: Why I am not a successionist
If Galaxy-brain Gavin’s theory has serious counterintuitive results, like ignoring the preference of current humans that humanity be not replaced by AI in the future, then Gavin’s theory is not galaxy-brained enough.

cubefox May 4, 2025, 8:52 PM
2 points
−1
on: Why I am not a successionist

Instead, my opposition to AI successionism comes from a preference toward my own kind. This is hardwired in me from biology. I prefer my family members to randomly-sampled people with similar traits. I would certainly not elect to sterilize or kill my family members so that they could be replaced with smarter, kinder, happier people.

I would go further. Most people probably also prefer humans existing in the future to AIs existing in the future. It’s not just about direct personal descendants, but about a preference for our own species continuing to exist.

Is that preference guilty of “speciesism” and therefore immoral? No, it’s just a final preference about what should happen in the future. It’s not immoral, since possible future AIs do not exist yet and as such have no preferences (like coming into existence) which could be violated. So it isn’t bad when we don’t make them exist. This is called the procreation asymmetry.

cubefox May 4, 2025, 8:33 PM
3 points
1
on: Why I am not a successionist
I agree with this. Just one quibble here:

Utilitarianism implies that if we build an AI that successfully maximizes utility/value, we should be ok with it replacing us.

That is true for some forms of utilitarianism (total or average utilitarianism) but not necessarily for some others (person affecting preference utilitarianism). For the reason you outline, I think the latter kind of utilitarianism is correct. Its notion of utility/value incorporates what currently existing people want, and I believe that most humans want that humanity will not be replaced by AI in the future.

One way to think about it: AI succesionism is bad for a similar reason we regard being dead as bad: We don’t want it to happen. We don’t want to die, and we also don’t want humanity to become extinct through sterilization or other means. Perhaps we have these preferences for biological reasons, but it doesn’t matter why: final goals need no justification, they just exist and have moral weight in virtue of existing. The fact that we wouldn’t be around if it (being dead, or humanity being extinct) happens, and that we therefore would not suffer from it, doesn’t invalidate the current weight of our current preferences.