Student in fundamental and applied mathematics, interested in theoretical computer science and AI alignment
Technoprogressive, biocosmist, rationalist, defensive accelerationist, longtermist
Matrice Jacobine
Karma: 1,413
(Wait, considering Vaniver has commented here too, what comment do you mean, and in what direction do you think the difference is?)
Yeah I see. Cretarei say they don’t want to talk about Ziz again after that, but I see how you could have a broader definition of what “writings about the Irish” mean in the analogy (e.g. discussion of psychology).
I assume prosecutors are waiting for less circumstantial evidence to emerge?
A murder trial could take years and years to fully resolve IIUC.
Ziz and Zajko aren’t charged with murder.
I do not think it is true that the Ziz crew “are still committing crimes” or that “their violence and retaliation is not contained”. I am also not quite sure what you are suggesting with the mention of Snyder. I would point to @AprilSR’s comment here (and subsequent subthread). Slimepriestess isn’t banned, Chase isn’t banned.
@Vaniver do you still hold that “Less Wrong the website should accept letters from murderers in asylums”?
Maybe? Sorry for assuming people weren’t disingenuous trolls trying to derail a very serious topic involving several actual completed murders and suicides for their personal political vendettas.
I’m aware. I was just describing their philosophical worldview to contrast with Ziz’s ‘vegan anarcho-transhumanism’. But the whole point of Holly leaving rationalism and EA to start PauseAI was because she wanted AI x-risk concerns to reach people with all kind of worldviews (beyond the ~left-libertarian utilitarian transhumanism of rationalism and EA), and this has been a successful strategy hence everyone from Bernie Sanders to Ben Bernanke to Steve Bannon being into AI x-risk now.
IDK. The concerns in the footnote of attracting crazy people (even against
hertheir wishes), you are aware that I am concerned about as well due to events last year. But I definitely do not want anyone to feel inhibited from writing and socializing if they are well-meaning and it is good for them. Maybe lettingherthem post personal blogposts but not frontpage posts would be a good compromise? But maybe as mentioned find another adjacent space.
I’m going to research the last two attempts to someone’s life that were related to the topic of ai risk. If it turns out the aspiring assassins were mainly influenced by the writings of Ziz, as opposed some other prominent rationalist, then I’ll get back to you.
Seems extremely implausible to me FTR. Looking at incidents of domestic terrorism against AGI companies, Sam Kirchner (if we’re counting him) was a StopAI guy, so left-wing human-centric anti-transhumanist and close to Torres (admittedly Zajko did praise Torres and quoted such anti-transhumanist stuff too though). Daniel Moreno-Gama was a right-wing (NRxish?) human-centric anti-transhumanist (and racist eugenicist). Amanda Tom and Muhamad Tarik Hussein appear to be generic progressives presumably motivated by near-term ethics concerns, not existential risk (unlike the previous two).
Ironically (with a little amount of bad faith) the one ~criminal activity that I can trace to someone influenced by Ziz is that one of the DOGE guys had an account here where he talked about veganism being necessary prefigurative praxis for a sentience-friendly singularity and praised Ziz when pointed to her in the comments.
To clarify: are you just banning
herthem from making classical LW posts, or also banningherthem from having a personal blog (i.e. treatingherthem similarly as the automatically sorted out LLM slop)?[Edit: btw Gwen I’m she/her-ing out of habit but please feel free to clarify your preferred pronouns!]
Like most macrostrategy-brained cult leaders (e.g. Leverage, Ziz, arguably FTX, etc.) in this space, the answer appear to be some variation of “amass as much power and money as possible and take over the world using AI” e.g. this mail where he pitch a super-secret Epstein-and-Thiel-funded AGI project under Arecebo Observatory.
Lightcone events =/= Lighthaven
Orgs renting Lighthaven space for money get to decide their own safety policies.
I don’t know how much was transitioned from REACH to Lightcone, but he was banned from REACH in late 2018/early 2019, after Kathy Forth’s suicide and Jax Bryk’s call-out thread. (cc @testingthewaters)
A “big if true” react could theoretically make sense on pure literal detonation alone, but, like, the actual connotations of it in the English language are way too snarky for LW norms.
Previous discussion on the EA Forum about Vassar by @fenneko:
Bryk, the rationalist-adjacent writer, says a prominent rationalist once told her condescendingly that she was a “5-year-old in a hot 20-year-old’s body.”
Joseph says he also argued that it was normal for a 12-year-old girl to have sexual relationships with adult men and that such relationships were a noble way of transferring knowledge to a younger generation. Then, she says, he followed her home and insisted on staying over. She says he slept on the floor of her living room and that she felt unsafe until he left in the morning.
This was also Michael Vassar.
I know this because of a line from the TIME article:
“Another woman, who dated the same man [the one who talked about pedophilia with Joseph] several years earlier in a polyamorous relationship, alleges that he had once attempted to put his penis in her mouth while she was sleeping.”
And “the same man” was, of course, Michael Vassar.
Jax talks about other people in public threads, but I think Vassar is the only one whose alleged behavior was illegal physical abuse rather than rudeness or weird vibes.
On the extreme end, five women, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, say men in the community committed sexual assault or misconduct against them [...] Women who reported sexual abuse, either to the police or community mediators, say they were branded as trouble and ostracized while the men were protected.
At least one of these is Vassar (possibly multiple, given how consistent he seems to be).
Vassar has been banned from EA events for many years, and SlateStarCodex meetups for at least a few years.
DoJ files showing Vassar successfully requested to visit Epstein’s private island in 2015: 1, 2, 3
So, I think (haven’t read it in nearly a decade) Superintelligence did do 2 and 5 and push toward 8b has the ideal solution? MIRI and FLI did do 6 (e.g. Stuart Russell on the board, 2015 letter), 7, and eventually 8c obviously. I think that 8a being incoherent, and the main defenders of 1-3 being the ones to actually launch the AI race, was my main point here.
What do you think “coordinate a pause” would have looked like in a pre-AI-race world? Most current pausers (most explicitly FLI) want to pause AI at current rate of capabilities, and even then only the kind of agentic AI capabilities research that tend toward building AGI/ASI, while supporting development of narrow Tool AI. But the person most associated with defending the Tool AI over Agentic AI position in early 2010s LW discourse (@HoldenKarnofsky) is also the one who definitely more than anyone else mentioned here is responsible for the AI race happening at all.
Edit: I think @Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Six Dimensions of Operational Adequacy in AGI Projects, a 2017 MIRI internal document intended as a criticism of the Karnofsky-led OpenPhil/EA approach to AI labs, is, characteristically, the first expression of MIRI’s pro-pause stance. So my conclusion is that the pro-pause stance only really makes sense if there’s already an AI arms race to stand in opposition to. (Mind you, Tomasik talks only of fostering general international cooperation and expecting lower AI risk as a positive flow-through effect.)
Were you a source for the original Rolling Stone article?