“I realize that the tone of this post may come off as very cynical. ”
I actually thought the tone of your post was very optimistic and exciting, that is until you ended it ironically by saying “since this is too cynical, let me lighten it up a bit by reminding everyone here that life is hilariously short and you’ll all die so you better enjoy it!”
I do not agree that talking about the greatest sadness in life somehow is a positive nice happy thing, despite people’s attempts to twist it in that direction. (“You only can appreciate things that are limited!”)
I believe aging is an illness and should be fought against not just accepted as a encourage you to “have fun” and experiment with “innocent-looking gummies”.
But to end on a /not mean/ note, this was a really great post (up until the “Enjoy Yourself” subheading) and I very much liked the amalgation of links you found and separately went to go read a lot of those articles. Was very close to saving this in my favorite articles collection due to how well cultivated the quotes and articles in the first bit were.
This kind of post scares away the person who will be the key person in the AI safety field if we define “key person” as the genius main driver behind solving it, not the loudest person. Which is rather unfortunate, because that person is likely to read this post at some point.
I don’t believe this post has any “dignity”, whatever weird obscure definition dignity has been given now. It’s more like flailing around in death throes while pointing fingers and lauding yourself than it is a solemn battle stance against an oncoming impossible enemy.
For context, I’m not some Eliezer hater, I’m a young person doing an ML masters currently who just got into this space and within the past week have become a huge fan of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s earlier work while simultaneously very disappointed in the recent, fruitless, output.