Okay, so you might remember that some of the folks running FTX were obsessed with a ginormous 600,000 word Harry Potter fan fic. You might also remember that shortly after Trump took office a border patrol agent was shot and killed. These things would seem to be unrelated, but they're not. See, the folks involved in the shooting of the agent were members of a vegan trans AI worshipping death cult. Their inspiration is/was that same fucking Harry Potter fan fic. It gets even weirder. Behind the Bastards is doing a multi-episode series on the members of the cult (Part two is here, part three will be up on Tuesday.) Members of the cult, and the guy who wrote the fan fic, have connections to lots of the big names in Silicon Valley. You know, Elon, Mark Andreeson, and Sam Altman, to name but a few. All of these people believe that in the very near future we'll create what's known as the Singleton. This is, and I'm not making it up, an AI that will literally be god. Additionally, they think that there's a 50/50 chance that once the Singleton pops into existence, it'll condemn humanity to a literal hell on Earth. If we don't experience hell, then the AI god will create Heaven for us. Now, for complicated reasons (we're talking the kind of thought processes one has when they've taken Jim Morrison levels of psychedelics) they think that we can "prepare the way" for this AI so that it'll give us all Heaven on Earth. The members of the trans vegan AI death cult, however, think that we've screwed up too much already, and the only hope we have of avoiding hell on Earth is to wipe everybody out before Singleton appears. Their reasoning behind this is for convoluted reasons that can only be reached if you've taken a lot more acid than Morrison ever did, and are surrounded by a lot of people who are way, way, out of touch with humanity. We're talking some seriously fucked up shit, and then some.
I've heard of the Singularity. Is "Singleton" a development of that idea? Anyway, AI is not actually intelligent and these people ought to know that.
Singleton is, basically, an expansion of that. To their mind, we won't create an AI that's equal to human intelligence, once we get to a point where an AI is sentient, it'll be smarter than any human can ever be, because reasons. And that'll be the Singleton. The best argument I've heard why we'll never be able to create an AI that's equivalent to human intelligence is that we'll not be able to stuff that AI into a human body where it can experience everything the way we can.
Well, not with that attitude. Maybe this is what Musk wants to fuck off to Mars and be the God-Emperor there. Who knows. As long as we don't attempt a landing on Europa, we're probably good.
The Singleton is sold as a classy whiskey but is god-fucking awful, you could buy cheap supermarket blended 3-yr old shit better than this, and use the difference to crowdfund an assassin to kill whoever shot the pretentious fucking adverts.
So. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is pretty great read IMO. I would recommend giving it a try before you believe the summaries in this article and the pieces it links to, which I find quite inaccurate. The first few installments are sillier than the remainder, the fanfic having started out as pure parody before it became interested in telling its own story, but if you hang in there beyond page 15 or so, you might find yourself having a good time (and laughing long before that). Rationalism, Rationality and the much more esoteric ideas of Basilisk Theory, post-humanism, and so-called effective altruism are all very different things. Rationalism has nothing to do with the movement described, rationality has always connected very different schools of philosophy, and Basilisk Theory is just bonkers. Effective altruism is interesting, IMO, but self-serving and ultimately logically flawed. Post-humanism... frankly, if you take away the Messianic insistence on a one-time singularity, I find it difficult to refute. Who doesn't think that humanity will change as its tools and artificial counterparts continue to change? Finally, wasn't the OP supposed to come back to the shooting of a border patrol agent at some point?
It's 600K words, and over 500 hours as an audiobook. Are you out of your goddamned mind? I realize that compressing things to something that can fit on a bumpersticker is an impossibility with a good number of concepts, but if you're going to ask me to invest nearly half as much time as it would take me to listen to my entire music collection if I never slept, you're gonna have to do more than that. Nobody said that they were the same thing. Which version of "Rationalism" are you talking about? And? Yeah, and? No shit. Problem is, the folks pushing post-humanism see the Messianic insistence as a cornerstone. Sure, but predicting how humanity will change is the issue. Some things are easy. For example, lots of people predicted powered flight before the Wright brothers ever got off the ground, but despite all the predictions that we'd have flying cars by now, they're still not a thing. How's that quote go? You know the one that says something along the lines of how if you asked the average person what they wanted before the automobile was invented, they'd have asked for faster horses? Automation was supposed to mean that people worked fewer hours and made more money. That's certainly not what's happened in the US. YMMV.
Seems I kind of did. I was waiting for someone to reconnect the vegan death cult to the HPMOR/effective altruism movement, but I see now that that attempt is being made in the two other sources linked there. My mistake.
I might be. I read it as it came out, so I didn't face it as a monolith. But for an enjoyable, funny Fantasy read with some interesting philosophical ideas sprinkled in, a LOTR-sized novel isn't an insane format. As with everything else in the world of entertainment, if you're not enjoying it just put the book down -- it's free, so you only lose however much time you want to invest into the attempt. Again, I would suggest giving it a try beyond the first 15 pages, because it changes quite a bit at that point. One thing the sources above misrepresent from my point of view is that HPMOR is not an Ayn Rand-style philosophical treatise masquerading as a novel. It's just a fun Fantasy fanfic for nerds. Making an enjoyable experience shorter is not necessarily a goal. At the same time, the episodic format makes reading small parts more rewarding than in many other cases. I'm not trying to sell you on it, of course -- just saying that if you read a few pages, I think you might find, like me, that these summaries give a very wrong picture of what the book is. It seemed to me that the OP was trying to connect the various ideas quite closely, even though for some of them, the connection is just different people on the same internet forum posting on these different subjects, and for others, it's just the same word ('rationalism') used in different senses in different contexts. And I am extremely gratified that you are interested enough in my views to read my post detailing them. I completely agree.
Okay, but like, Silicon Valley isn’t that big a place*. I’ve met Eliezer Yudkowsky (author of HPMOR) and Sam Altman. I was good friends with the CEO of a very large AI company you’ve probably heard of for a decade before we both got busy with our respective startups. I saw Elon Musk at a cocktail bar after work once. If you’re in tech and try to get out at all, you meet and connect with big names. And me? I’m a nobody. My 2nd degree connections list definitely includes everyone in this story, but that’s going to be true of anyone here who’s had any connection to the Rationalists. Just having connections is unimpressive, is my point. *by design. It’s conventional wisdom that spontaneous connections between people lead to good ideas and their getting executed. It’s why Y Combinator, for instance, doesn’t do remote sessions.
