10 million times faster is really a lot—on modern hardware, running SOTA object segmentation models at even 60fps is quite hard, and those are usually much much smaller than the kinds of AIs we would think about in the context of AI risk.
But − 100x faster is totally plausible (especially w/100x the energy consumption!) - and I think the argument still mostly works at that much more conservative speedup.
There’s this general problem of Rationalists splitting into factions and subcults with minor doctrinal differences, each composed of relatively elite members of The Community, each with a narrative of how they’re the real rationalists and the rest are just posers and/or parasites. And, they’re kinda right. Many of the rest are posers, we have a mop problem.
There’s just one problem. All of these groups are wrong. They are in fact only slightly more special than their rival groups think they are. In fact, the criticisms each group makes of the epistemics and practices of other groups are mostly on-point.
Once people have formed a political splinter group, almost anything they write will start to contain a subtle attempt to slip in the doctrine they’re trying to push. With sufficient skill, you can make it hard to pin down where the frame is getting shoved in.
I have at one point or another been personally involved with a quite large fraction of the rationalist subcults. This has made the thread hard to read—I keep feeling a tug of motivation to jump into the fray, to take a position in the jostling for credibility or whatever it is being fought over here, which is then marred by the realization that this will win nothing. Local validity isn’t a cure for wrong questions. The tug of political defensiveness that I feel, and that many commenters are probably also feeling, is sufficient to show that whatever question is being asked here is not the right one.
Seeing my friends behave this way hurts. The defensiveness has at this point gone far enough that it contains outright lies.
I’m stuck with a political alignment because of history and social ties. In terms of political camps, I’ve been part of the Vassarites since 2017. It’s definitely a faction, and its members obviously know this at some level, despite their repeated insistence to me of the contrary over the years.
They’re right about a bunch of stuff, and wrong about a bunch of stuff. Plenty of people in the comments are looking to scapegoat them for trying to take ideas seriously instead of just chilling out and following somebody’s party line. That doesn’t really help anything. When I was in the camp, people doing that locked me in further, made outsiders seem more insane and unreachable, and made public disagreement with my camp feel dangerous in the context of a broader political game where the scapegoaters were more wrong than the Vassarites.
So I’m making a public declaration of not being part of that camp anymore, and leaving it there. I left earlier this year, and have spent much of the time since trying to reorient / understand why I had to leave. I still count them among my closest friends, but I don’t want to be socially liable for the things they say. I don’t want the implicit assumption to be that I’d agree with them or back them up.
I had to edit out several lines from this comment because they would just be used as ammunition against one side or another. The degree of truth-seeking in the discourse is low enough that any specific information has to be given very carefully so it can’t be immediately taken up as a weapon.
This game sucks and I want out.