skeptical_lurker

• skeptical_lurker 28 Oct 2017 11:50 UTC

  2 points

  on: Feed­back on LW 2.0

  I haven’t posted on LW for a while now, but af­ter post­ing to LW2.0 I got banned (till 2021) very quickly. My posts were also deleted. I was not told why I was banned, al­though I as­sume it was be­cause I en­tered a fake email (I was an­noyed that the new site re­quired an email and not just a user­name). I asked why I got banned, and re­ceived no re­sponse.

  Well, I’m sorry for us­ing a fake email. I wasn’t try­ing to spam, or sock­pup­pet or any­thing, but I think a 3 year ban with­out any sort of warn­ing or ex­pla­na­tion seems a lit­tle ex­ces­sive. I’m happy to provide an email that works if re­quired. I also con­sid­ered set­ting up a new ac­count with a real email, but I don’t want it to seem like I’m sock­pup­pet­ting.

• skeptical_lurker 12 Apr 2017 20:28 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: denimalpaca's comment on: Open thread, Apr. 10 - Apr. 16, 2017

  Face­book is full of bul­lshit be­cause it is far quicker to share some­thing then to fact-check it, not that any­one cares about facts any­way. A viral alarmist meme with no ba­sis in truth will be shared more then a bor­ing, bal­anced view that doesn’t go all out to fight the other tribe.

  But Face­book has always been full of bul­lshit and no-one cared un­til af­ter the US elec­tion when ev­ery­one de­cided to pin Trump’s vic­tory on fake news. So its pretty clear that good episte­mol­ogy is not the gen­uine con­cern here.

  Not that I’m say­ing that Face­book is worse then any other so­cial me­dia—the prob­lem isn’t Face­book, the prob­lem is hu­man na­ture.

• skeptical_lurker 12 Apr 2017 20:21 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: madhatter's comment on: Open thread, Apr. 10 - Apr. 16, 2017

  I’ve just been skim­ming the wiki page on Rus­sian in­volve­ment in the US elec­tion.

  Se­cureWorks stated that the ac­tor group was op­er­at­ing from Rus­sia on be­half of the Rus­sian gov­ern­ment with “mod­er­ate” con­fi­dence level

  The other claims seem to just be that there was Rus­sian pro­pa­ganda. If pro­pa­ganda and pos­si­ble spy­ing counts as “war” then we will always be at war, be­cause there is always pro­pa­ganda (as if the US doesn’t do the same thing!). The par­allels with 1984 go with­out say­ing, but I re­ally think that the risk of to­tal­i­tar­i­anism isn’t Trump, its peo­ple over­re­act­ing to Trump.

  Also, there are similar alle­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion be­tween Clin­ton and Saudi Ara­bia.

• skeptical_lurker 10 Mar 2017 12:46 UTC

  1 point

  on: Against Belief-Labels

  I gen­er­ally agree, but...

  Ge­orge is a Perfect Bayesian Ra­tion­al­ist, and has re­cently come to the con­clu­sion that ev­ery­thing Albert Ca­mus says is cor­rect with a prob­a­bil­ity of greater than 0.99999. Since his re­al­iza­tion, Ge­orge has called him­self an ab­sur­dist.

  One prob­lem here could be that it might not the case that all be­liefs and po­si­tions can be de­ter­mined by Bayesian Ra­tion­al­ism. Does ab­sur­dism have an ob­jec­tive truth value? Per­haps not. Poli­ti­cal po­si­tions, to give an ex­am­ple, seem to cor­re­late more with per­son­al­ity traits than with in­tel­li­gence: Ein­stein and Von Neu­mann are widely re­garded as two of the smartest peo­ple in the 20th cen­tury, and yet Ein­stein cam­paigned for nu­clear disar­ma­ment, while Von Neu­mann cam­paigned to pre­emp­tivly nuke the USSR.

  “I’m a re­pub­li­can.” might not mean “I have ra­tio­nally de­cided that re­pub­li­can­ism is the best philos­o­phy” it might mean “I have high enough ‘aver­sion to dan­ger’ to want boarder con­trols and high mil­i­tary spend­ing, low enough ‘ope­ness to ex­pe­rience’ to be un­com­fortable with un­con­ven­tional lifestyles, and am ra­tio­nal enough to re­al­ise that free mar­kets are more effi­cient”

  Or it might mean some­thing else. Either way, say­ing “I’m a re­pub­li­can.” gives ob­ject-level in­for­ma­tion quickly with­out go­ing into the meta-level un­der­pin­nings to your be­liefs.

• skeptical_lurker 9 Mar 2017 21:50 UTC

  1 point

  on: Open Thread, March. 6 - March 12, 2017

  I said a few weeks back that I would pub­li­cally pre­com­mit to go­ing a week with­out poli­tics. Well, I par­tially suc­ceeded, in that I did start read­ing for ex­am­ple an SSC ar­ti­cle on poli­tics be­cause it popped up in my RSS feed, but I stopped when I re­mem­bered that I was ig­nor­ing poli­tics. The main thing is I man­aged to avoid any long time­wast­ing ses­sions of read­ing about poli­tics on the net. And I think this has par­tially bro­ken some bad habits of com­pul­sive web brows­ing I was de­vel­op­ing.

  So next I think I shall avoid all stupid poli­tics for a month. No face­book or red­dit, but per­haps one rea­son­ably short and high-qual­ity ar­ti­cle on poli­tics per day. Speak­ing of which, can any­one recom­mend any short, in­tel­li­gent, ra­tio­nal writ­ings on fem­i­nism for in­stance? My av­er­age ex­po­sure to anti-fem­i­nist thought is fairly in­tel­li­gent, while my av­er­age ex­po­sure to pro-fem­i­nist thought is “How can any­one dis­agree with me? Don’t they re­al­ise that their opinions are just wrong? Women can be fire­fighters and viking war­riors! BTW, could you open this jar for me, I’m not strong enough.” And this im­bal­ance is not good from a ra­tio­nal­ist POV. I am es­pe­cially in­ter­ested whether fem­i­nists have tack­led the ar­gu­ment that if fem­i­nists have fewer chil­dren, then all the genes that pre­dis­pose one to be­ing fem­i­nist (and to any­thing else that cor­rlates) will be se­lected against. I mean, this isn’t a con­cern for peo­ple who think that the sin­gu­lar­ity is near(tm) or who don’t care what hap­pens a few gen­er­a­tions in the fu­ture, but I doubt ei­ther of these ap­ply to many fem­i­nists, or peo­ple in gen­eral.

• skeptical_lurker 23 Feb 2017 0:25 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: gjm's comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 20 - Feb 26, 2017

  The im­pres­sion I have—though of course I don’t know what your friends have been say­ing—is that the burn-their-houses-down brigade are much more up­set about the kinda-fas­cist sort of right than the kinda-liber­tar­ian sort of right. Of course even if I’m right about that that doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily re­duce the sense of aliena­tion; your aliefs needn’t match your be­liefs.

  Ex­cept that I don’t think liber­tar­ian is in­com­pat­i­ble with boarder con­trols—in­deed, liber­tar­i­ans are gen­er­ally en­thu­si­as­tic about prop­erty rights, and con­trol­ling im­mi­gra­tion is no differ­ent to lock­ing your front door and vet­ting po­ten­tial house­mates.

  I’m not say­ing that the boarder con­trols should be based around skin colour, but the defi­ni­tion of ‘Nazi’ seems to have ex­panded to any­one who be­lieves in any form of boarder con­trol.

  Agree about first half; not fully con­vinced about sec­ond half. As you pointed out your­self, it’s not that long ago that we had ac­tual Nazis and Stal­inists in power in Europe, and bad though early-21st-cen­tury poli­tics is it doesn’t seem like it’s got there just yet.

  I cer­tainly agree that globally its not as bad as 1930-1990. Nev­er­the­less, things seem to have got dra­mat­i­cally worse in the last decade—in my per­sonal ex­pe­rience it used to be that peo­ple could agree to dis­agree, now most poli­ti­cal opinions seem to be in lock­step, al­most like a cult. More gen­er­ally, I re­mem­ber peo­ple crit­i­cis­ing Bush, but now there are very in­tel­li­gent peo­ple, even the head of CFAR, say­ing that Trump could be the end of democ­racy. Either they are cor­rect, in which case that is ob­vi­ously a cause for con­cern, or they are wrong and a lot of very smart peo­ple, inc ra­tio­nal­ists, are ut­terly mind­kil­led.

• skeptical_lurker 22 Feb 2017 20:53 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: satt's comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 20 - Feb 26, 2017

  You see, its one thing to ad­vo­cate vi­o­lence against a literal Neo-Nazi, but ad­vo­cat­ing vi­o­lence against any­one who ad­vo­cates re­duc­ing im­mi­gra­tion, well, that shows a lot more liberal tribe loy­alty. So much holier than thou.

  Ad­di­tion­ally, this com­ment was made IRL, pos­si­bly within earshot a per­son they were ad­vo­cat­ing vi­o­lence against.

• skeptical_lurker 22 Feb 2017 18:07 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Viliam's comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 20 - Feb 26, 2017

  I think peo­ple cluster into left and right be­cause those are the tribes. How­ever, it can be over­sim­plis­tic and I agree that there are many po­ten­tial di­rec­tions left and right progress can take—in­deed, if a few more Is­lamic ter­ror­ists shoot up gay bars there could be a lot of LBGTs defect­ing to right-na­tion­al­ism.

• skeptical_lurker 22 Feb 2017 17:47 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: gjm's comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 20 - Feb 26, 2017

  I think com­mu­nist be­liefs, vi­o­lent or not, are on the rise largely due to young an­gry peo­ple be­ing too young to re­mem­ber the cold war. Some friends and ac­quain­tances from mul­ti­ple dis­con­nected freind­ship groups are com­mu­nists, and too many of these ad­vo­cate vi­o­lence, al­though I think that they are still a tiny minor­ity over­all. I think the situ­a­tion is, as you put it, “this per­son is bro­ken”.

  I’m not at all wor­ried about ac­tu­ally be­ing the vic­tim of poli­ti­cally-mo­ti­vated phys­i­cal vi­o­lence or of ri­ots/​rev­olu­tions etc in the near fu­ture. What wor­ries me is gen­eral poli­ti­cal po­lari­sa­tion lead­ing to a situ­a­tion where blue and red tribes hate each other and can­not in­ter­act, where poli­tics is re­duced to see­ing who can shout ‘racist’ or ‘cuck’ loud­est. My poli­ti­cal be­liefs have be­come in­creas­ingly right-wing, in a clas­si­cally liberal sense as op­posed to fas­cist, and it alienates me when friends ad­vo­cate burn­ing some­one’s house down be­cause they hold be­liefs which are ac­tu­ally similar, per­haps even left of, mine. I’m not wor­ried about them ac­tu­ally burn­ing my house down, it’s just alienat­ing on prin­ci­ple, and for fear of so­cial ex­clu­sion.

  WRT his­tor­i­cal pe­ri­ods of poli­ti­cal in­sta­bil­ity, I agree that such pe­ri­ods are in­fre­quent, and given that we have seen the re­sults of both Nazism and com­mu­nism, I think it un­likely that those ide­olo­gies will gain power. But OTOH we are go­ing to see cer­tain events that are to­tally un­prece­dented in his­tory, largely be­cause of tech­nol­ogy. We are already see­ing lev­els of mi­gra­tion that I think ex­ceeds any­thing in the past (due to bet­ter trans­port), which is lead­ing to a rise in na­tion­al­ism, and soon it is pos­si­ble that we will see far more dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies such as hu­man ge­netic en­g­ineer­ing, large num­bers of jobs be­ing au­to­mated away, mass au­to­mated surveillance, and fi­nally FAI. If safely nav­i­gat­ing the prob­lems these tech­nolo­gies pose re­quires a par­tially poli­ti­cal solu­tion, then we need sane poli­tics. And yet poli­ti­cal dis­course has sunk to the point where poli­ti­cal can­di­dates are de­bat­ing the size of their ‘hands’ and whether frogs are racist. Obama’s ad­vi­sor seemed to think that the dan­ger of AGI is that it might be pro­grammed by white male autists.

  We do not have the level of poli­ti­cal san­ity nec­es­sary to deal with dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies and its get­ting worse. Nick Bostrom thinks that ge­net­i­cally en­g­ineered IQ boosts of 100 points+ in a sin­gle gen­er­a­tion might be pos­si­ble, and soon. Nazism and com­mu­nism are un­likely now, but how would so­ciety re­act to hu­man ge­net­i­cally en­g­ineer­ing? Many would try to ban it. Some would try to tax it. Coun­tries where it was ille­gal might suffer mas­sively re­duced eco­nomic growth com­pared to those where it was al­lowed. Inequal­ity might sky­rocket. I’m not try­ing to sug­gest that we will speci­fi­cally end up with ‘Gat­taca’ or ‘Deux Ex: Mankind di­vided’ or any of the other spe­cific sci­ence fic­tion ex­plo­ra­tions of these pos­si­bil­ities, I’m say­ing that I don’t know what will hap­pen and poli­ti­cal ex­trem­ism/​vi­o­lence is cer­tainly a pos­si­bil­ity and it doesn’t help if ex­trem­ism is in­creas­ing any­way!

• skeptical_lurker 22 Feb 2017 13:31 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: username2's comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 20 - Feb 26, 2017

  “The sim­plest ex­pla­na­tion is prob­a­bly cor­rect” is true when we have a suffi­cient num­ber of facts in front of us to make in­fer­ence. In most things in life this is the case, but hu­man be­havi­our is com­plex enough to make that not gen­er­ally true.

  How­ever, I would say that even when deal­ing with high com­plex­ity and un­cer­tainty, the sim­plest ex­pla­na­tion is still usu­ally the most prob­a­ble hy­potho­sis, even if it has <50% prob­a­bil­ity.

• skeptical_lurker 22 Feb 2017 13:28 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: gjm's comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 20 - Feb 26, 2017

  The things I pre­vi­ously men­tioned such as “Or that there is >50% prob­a­bil­ity that Brexit will liter­ally lead to a neo nazi state in the UK within 10 years?” are mostly po­si­tions ex­pressed by freinds. The group this per­son joined was ad­vo­cat­ing vi­o­lent com­mu­nist rev­olu­tion and the mur­der of en­e­mies of the peo­ple (as in it was an ex­plic­itly com­mu­nist group, not a anti-Trump group that had been hi­jacked by com­mu­nists), and so can­not be seen as a re­ac­tion to Trump or Brexit.

  But, in the more gen­eral case, there are a lot of peo­ple, a lot of cen­ter­al­ists, who are op­posed to Trump/​Brexit. So peo­ple do not need to join forces with ex­trem­ists to fight them.

  (It’s not as if the rhetoric of the less-pleas­ant parts of the poli­ti­cal right is any nicer or more sen­si­ble than that of the less-pleas­ant parts of the poli­ti­cal left. In­tel­li­gent ed­u­cated friendly right-lean­ing folk can find them­selves with some re­gret­table—dare I say de­plorable? -- bed­fel­lows too.)

  I agree with that, but I think that there is a differ­ence in be­havi­our due to the fact that the left has been win­ning in all ar­eas with the pos­si­ble ex­cep­tion of eco­nomics for the last 50 years or more, but sud­denly there have been some un­ex­pected rightist vic­to­ries. Firstly, this means that the left ex­pects to be push­ing back the right, and there is a gen­eral as­sump­tion that, for in­stance, rightists must dis­avow and sever all ties with white na­tion­al­ists but the left can freely as­so­ci­ate with ex­trem­ists.

  Se­condly, given that the right has sud­denly man­aged to win some vic­to­ries, might the pre­vi­ous con­stant left­ward march of his­tory change, at least in some ar­eas? In the same way that fem­i­nism and gay rights has made con­stant progress for the last 50 years, might na­tion­al­ism make con­stant progress for the next 50 years?

  I don’t know how much of the left are con­sid­er­ing that as a pos­si­bil­ity, but I can un­der­stand that they might be ter­rified and lash­ing out while they still have the abil­ity to.

  So yes, the right are not more sen­si­ble or nicer in gen­eral, its just that right now the left have a greater abil­ity to jus­tify vi­o­lence. If that changes, then we might live in in­ter­est­ing times.

• skeptical_lurker 22 Feb 2017 13:00 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: satt's comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 20 - Feb 26, 2017

  Well, in one com­ment a friend was ad­vo­cat­ing vi­o­lence against per­haps the most right wing 10-15% of the pop­u­la­tion.

• skeptical_lurker 22 Feb 2017 12:58 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: math's comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 20 - Feb 26, 2017

  No, but I’m not un­der the illu­sion that I can cur­rently make any sig­nifi­cant con­tri­bu­tion to chang­ing poli­tics—its cer­tainly not my area of com­par­a­tive ad­van­tage, but I could at least leave the coun­try if things did start to get that bad. There would be fairly ob­vi­ous warn­ing signs that would not re­quire a close watch on cur­rent events.

• skeptical_lurker 21 Feb 2017 3:26 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: username2's comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 20 - Feb 26, 2017

  ‘Overuse of Oc­cam’s Ra­zor?’

  Any­way, I know that psy­chol­ogy is com­plex and the ex­pla­na­tions I come up with are only my best hy­poth­e­sis, not one that I would nec­es­sar­ily have >50% con­fi­dence in—I should have made that clear. Still, I have trou­ble think­ing of other ex­pla­na­tions for why in­tel­li­gent, ed­u­cated, friendly peo­ple claim to be­lieve that about 50% − 95% of the pop­u­la­tion are evil?

  Or that most old peo­ple de­liber­ately vote for bad things be­cause why should they care if they are go­ing to die soon any­way?

  Or that there is >50% prob­a­bil­ity that Brexit will liter­ally lead to a neo nazi state in the UK within 10 years?

  Or that the best way to defend democ­racy in the USA is to as­sas­si­nate Trump and Pence… de­spite the fact that they were demo­crat­i­cally elected and that the sym­pa­thy vote would push the USA far more to the right?

  Or that some­one would at­tempt to prove to me that a poli­ti­cal party are evil, by show­ing me a meme say­ing that they are evil, as if mess­ing about with pho­to­shop con­fers truth, and then be un­able to provide a sin­gle non-meme-based ar­gu­ment to sup­port this as­ser­tion?

  I mean, these be­liefs are so crazy that if only one per­son were ex­press­ing these opinions I might worry that they are show­ing the early warn­ing signs of some form of clini­cal para­noia. But its wide­spread, among peo­ple who oth­er­wise seem func­tional.

• skeptical_lurker 21 Feb 2017 1:54 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: username2's comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 20 - Feb 26, 2017

  All good points, in the gen­eral case—I my­self fre­quently read about things I dis­agree with. How­ever...

  Even in cases that ap­pear to be clear cut fear or vi­o­lence mon­ger­ing it may be that they joined the group to have its mes­sages in their news feed for aware­ness, be­cause they re­fuse to flinch from the prob­lem.

  That is more of a LW thing. Most nor­mal peo­ple don’t act like this, and the per­son I was think­ing of cer­tainly doesn’t. Poli­tics is about wav­ing the flag for your tribe, and try­ing to ac­tu­ally un­der­stand the other tribe’s point of view is like wav­ing the en­emy flag—trea­son! To show that they are loyal, many peo­ple seem to be adopt­ing the max­i­mally un­char­i­ta­bly point of view, or at least they are in the last few years.

  Of course, its also pos­si­ble that that is why some peo­ple are ad­vo­cat­ing vi­o­lence—they wouldn’t re­ally want vi­o­lence, and they cer­tainly wouldn’t per­son­ally as­sault some­one, but they ad­vo­cate vi­o­lence be­cause it shows more tribal loy­alty then just ad­vo­cat­ing peace­ful protest.

• skeptical_lurker 20 Feb 2017 22:08 UTC

  7 points

  on: Open Thread, Feb. 20 - Feb 26, 2017

  I think about poli­tics far too much. Its de­press­ing, both in terms of out­comes and in terms of how bad the av­er­age poli­ti­cal ar­gu­ment is. It makes me para­noid and alienated if peo­ple I know join face­book groups that ad­vo­cate poli­ti­cal vi­o­lence/​mur­der/​kil­ling all the ku­laks, al­though to be fair its pos­si­ble that those peo­ple have only read one or two posts and missed the vi­o­lent ones. But most of all its fun­da­men­tally pretty pointless be­cause I have no de­sire to get in­volved in poli­tics and I’m sure that wrt any ad­van­tages in terms of helping me to bet­ter un­der­stand hu­man na­ture, I’ve already picked all the low hang­ing fruit.

  So any­way, I’m start­ing by com­mit­ting to ig­nore all poli­tics for a week (un­less some­thing re­ally earth-shat­ter­ing hap­pens). I’ll post again in a week to say whether I stuck to it, and if I didn’t, please down­vote me to oblivion.

  Oh, and re­ply­ing to replies to this post are ex­cepted from this rule.

• skeptical_lurker 15 Dec 2016 2:53 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Lumifer's comment on: Tra­di­tions and Ra­tion­al­ity.

  Ex­cept some peo­ple do sleep with strangers with­out charg­ing money.

• skeptical_lurker 14 Dec 2016 13:04 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: bogus's comment on: Open thread, Dec. 12 - Dec. 18, 2016

  I too would like a more paci­fist pres­i­dent, but re­al­is­ti­cally nei­ther the liber­tar­i­ans or the greens were go­ing to win. But this is more be­cause of the huge amount of money spent on the mil­i­tary. A con­ven­tional war would be bad, but I don’t see that it would be dis­as­trous. NATO would eas­ily beat Rus­sia, and I’m not sure who would win in a Chi­nese in­va­sion of Taiwan, but it would be over quickly—the de­ci­sive fac­tor is largely naval, and naval bat­tles are over quickly. Nei­ther coun­try can de­ploy a large frac­tion of their army against the other as they are con­strained by the num­ber of troop ships and the dis­tance in­volved.

  As for bomb­ing mid­dle east­ern coun­tries, well that’s been go­ing on since 2001 and will prob­a­bly con­tinue for the fore­see­able fu­ture, re­gard­less of who wins in 2020.

• skeptical_lurker 13 Dec 2016 23:08 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Viliam's comment on: Tra­di­tions and Ra­tion­al­ity.

  For the rest of us, it’s a bit more com­pli­cated. It could be poli­ti­cally difficult to dis­cuss, be­cause male sex­u­al­ity is nowa­days usu­ally shamed or dis­missed as “pa­tri­archy”, but the short ver­sion is that many men have a prefer­ence for things that in the an­cient evolu­tion­ary en­vi­ron­ment would be ev­i­dence that the child is biolog­i­cally theirs… and let’s just say that a his­tory of sex with strangers for money feels like an ev­i­dence in the op­po­site di­rec­tion.

  But, if some men have a poli­ti­cally in­cor­rect prefer­ence for vir­gins, how is a his­tory of whor­e­ing any differ­ent from a his­tory of ca­sual sex?

• skeptical_lurker 13 Dec 2016 22:39 UTC

  8 points

  on: Open thread, Dec. 12 - Dec. 18, 2016

  There’s been a lot of dis­cus­sion about Trump. But I think the ac­tual most im­por­tant as­pect is one that I havn’t seen dis­cussed in any depth any­where—there seems to be spec­u­la­tion that Peter Theil will be ad­vise Trump on tech is­sues.

  The pres­i­dent’s (un­offi­cial?) tech­nol­ogy ad­vi­sor will be some­one who has donated to miri/​open ai/​life ex­ten­sion. This is great news, and I would ar­gue far more im­por­tant than any other fac­tor ex­cept nu­clear war. This comes at a time when AI risk seems to be start­ing go main­stream, when Obama has had dis­cus­sions on AI risk (that he did not seem to un­der­stand).

  So, I’d like to see dis­cus­sion on what this could lead to, whether there is a pos­si­bil­ity that the US gov­ern­ment might start fund­ing life ex­ten­sion/​AI risk re­search. One fac­tor that does seem a lit­tle wor­ry­ing is that, with any other pres­i­dent, I might be won­der­ing whether MIRI might be able to ap­ply for gov­ern­ment fund­ing or re­ceive offi­cial recog­ni­tion or be in­cor­po­rated into a gov­ern­ment body in some way. (does the US gov­ern­ment do that sort of thing?) But given the hor­rific things that EY has said about Trump and the Borderer-de­scended peo­ple who voted for him, I doubt that’s pos­si­ble any­more.

  Oh well. I sup­pose there are other peo­ple who can be pointed to as ex­perts on AI risk—Bostrom for in­stance—al­though he isn’t a US cit­i­zen.