SneerClub

So... on strategies for explaining to normies, a personal story often grabs people more than dry facts, so you could focus on the narrative of Eliezer trying big idea, failing or giving up, and moving on to bigger ideas before repeating (stock bot to seed AI to AI programming language to AI safety to shut down all AI)? You'll need the wayback machine, but it is a simple narrative with a clear pattern?

Or you could focus on the narrative arc of someone that previously bought into less wrong? I don't volunteer, but maybe someone else would be willing to take that kind of attention?

I took a stab at both approaches here: https://awful.systems/comment/6885617

I usually say the following. I'm paraphrasing a spiel I have delivered in person several times and which seems to get things across.

'there's a kind of decentralized cult called rationalism. they worship rational thinking, have lots of little rituals that are supposed to invoke more rational thinking, and spend a lot of time discussing their versions of angels and demons, which they conceive of as all powerful ai beings.

rationalists aren't really interested in experiments or evidence, because they want to figure everything out with pure reasoning. they consider themselves experts on anything they've thought really hard about. they come up with a lot of apocalypse predictions and theories about race mingling.

silicon valley is saturated with rationalists. most of the people with a lot of money are not rationalists. but VCs and such find rationalists very useful, because they're malleable and will claim with sincerity to be experts on any topic. for example, when AI companies claim to be inventing really intelligent beings, the people they put forward as supporting these claims are rationalists.'

they're racists

I just describe it as "computer scientology, nowhere near as successful as the original".

The other thing is that he's a Thiel project, different but not any more sane than Curtis Yarvin aka Moldbug. So if they heard of moldbug's political theories (which increasingly many people heard about because of, well, them being enacted) it's easy to give a general picture of total fucking insanity funded by thiel money. It doesn't really matter what the particular insanity is, and it matters even less now as the AGI shit hit mainstream entirely bypassing anything Yudkowsky had to say on the subject.

I've been contemplating this, and I agree with most everyone else about leaning heavily into the cult angle and explaining it as a mutant hybrid between Scientology-style UFO religions and Christian dispensationalist Book of Revelation eschatology. The latter may be especially useful in explaining it to USians. My mom (who works in an SV-adjacent job) sent me this Vanity Fair article the other day about Garry Tan grifting his way into non-denominational prosperity gospel Christianity: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/christianity-was-borderline-illegal-in-silicon-valley-now-its-the-new-religion She was wondering if it was "just another fad for these people," and I had to explain no, not really, it is because their AI bullshit is so outlandish that some of them feel the need to pivot back towards something more mainstream to keep growing their following.

I also prefer to highlight Kurzweil's obsession with perpetual exponential growth curves as a central point. That's often what I start with when I'm explaining it all to somebody. It provides the foundation for the bullshit towers that Yudkowsky and friends have erected. And I also think that long-term, the historiography of this stuff will lean more heavily on Kurzweil as a source than Yudkowsky, because Kurzweil is better-organized and professionally published. It'll most likely be the main source in the lower-division undergraduate/AP high school history texts that highlight this stuff as a background trend in the 2010s/2020s. Right now, we live in the peak days of the LessWrong bullshit volcano plume, but ultimately, it will probably be interpreted by the specialized upper-division texts that grow out of peoples' PhD theses.

awful.systems

I think for the Yud variety specifically a good summary is : "Taking all the wrong lessons from science fiction, and building a cult around it’s villains, and celebrating “Rational” villains + a belief in the inevitability of world changing technological progress"

I think starting with Sam Bankman Fried is a solid idea. Relatively informed members of the general public a) know who that guy is, and b) know that he made some really poor decisions. He does not have the silicon valley mystique that attaches itself to some other adherents, I think fewer people will think "well that guy is really smart, why would he be in a cult". Then you can go back and explain EA and LessWrong and Yudkowsky's role in all of this.

@dgerard TESCREAL is structurally an evangelical a-theist religion descended from the 19th century Russian Orthodox christianity of Nikolai Fyodorovitch Fyodorov and in my new book I will—

Nah, forget the book, I've got the attention of the POTUS's ketamine-addled fractional-trillionaire shitposter, get in the car, losers! (Thows brake pedal at puzzled pedestrian)

It's eugenics but as a religious cult for reactionaries

Yud is that creepy nerd from your middle school who wrote disturbing fan fiction, but it wasn't just a phase and now he has the aforementioned cult

I'm trying to imagine how a John Oliver sketch would introduce them. "The kind of nerds who make you think the jocks in '80s movies had a reasonable point got together and sold 'science' and 'rational thinking' as self-help, without truly understanding either, and it got very culty."

I don't think Yud is that hard to explain. He's a science fiction fanboy who never let go of his adolescent delusions of grandeur. He was never successfully disabused from the notion that he's always the smartest person in the room and he didn't pursue high school, let alone college education to give him the expertise to recognize just how difficult his goal is. Blud thinks he's gonna create a superhumanly intelligent machine when he struggles with basic programming tasks.

He's kinda comparable to Elon Musk in a way. Brain uploading and superhuman AI are sort of in the same "cool sci fi tech" category as Mars colonization, brain implants and vactrain gadgetbahns. It's easy to forget that not too many years ago the public's perception of Musk was very different. A lot of people saw him as a cool Tony Stark figure who was finally going to give us our damn flying cars.

Yudkowsky is sometimes good at knowing just a bit more about things than his audience and making it seem like he knows a lot more than he does. The first time I started reading HPMoR I thought the author was an actual theoretical physicist or something and when the story said I could learn everything Harry knows for free on this LessWrong site I though I could learn what it means for something to be "implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian" or what that those "timeless formulations of quantum mechanics" were about. Instead it was just poorly paced essays on bog standard logical fallacies and cognitive biases explained using their weird homegrown terminology.

Also, it's really easy to be convinced of thing when you really want to believe in it. I know personally some very smart and worldly people who have been way too impressed by ChatGPT. Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you're about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.

His fantasies of becoming immortal through having a God AI simulate his mind forever aren't the weird part. Any imaginative 15 year old computer nerd can have those fantasies. The weird parts are that he never grew out of those fantasies and that he managed to make some rich and influential contacts while holding on to his chuunibyō delusions.

Anyone can become a cult leader through the power of buying into your own hype and infinite thielbux.

I usually go with "Scientology for the 21st century". That for most gives just "weird cult", which is close enough for most people.

For those that are into weird cults you get questions about Xenu and such, and can answer "No they are not into Xenu, instead they want to build their god. Out of chatbots". And so on. If they are interested in weird cult shit, and have already accepted that we are talking about weird cults the weirdness isn't a problem. If not, it stops at "Scientology for the 21st century".

@dgerard "carrying coal to Newcastle, for philosophy"

"I wouldn't say there's such a thing as reading *too* much science fiction, but there is such a thing as not reading enough stuff that *isn't* science fiction"

"a cargo cult based on Harry Potter fanfiction; a useful but by no means universally superior way of doing statistics; and the science fiction trope about being in a computer simulation"

"an object lesson in the value of a good old liberal education"

The latest in a chain of cults, after Mormonism, the Victorian-era spiritualist fad, Scientology and new-age “quantum” woo, each using the trappings of the exciting scientific/technological ideas of their time to sell the usual proposition (a totalising belief system that answers* all questions).

So the primary doctrine is basically tech bros rewriting standard millenarian christianity from mythic fantasy into science fiction. But it seems like the founder wants to be a silicon valley influencer more than he wants to be a proper cult leader, meaning that some of the people who take this shit seriously have accumulated absurd amounts of money and power and occasionally the more deranged subgroups will spin off into a proper cult with everything that entails -- including, now, being involved in multiple homicides!

It's pick-me objectivism, only more overtly culty the closer you are to it irl. Imagine scientology if it was organized around AI doomerism and naive utilitarianism while posing as a get-smart-quick scheme.

It's main function (besides getting the early adopters laid) is to provide court philosophers for the technofeudalist billionaire class, while grooming talented young techies into a wide variety of extremist thought both old and new, mostly by fostering contempt of established epistemological authority in the same way Qanons insist people do their own research, i.e. as a euphemism for only paying attention to ingroup approved influencers.

It seems to have both a sexual harassment and a suicide problem, with a lot of irresponsible scientific racism and drug abuse in the mix.

"Rationalism" is to normal logical thinking what blindfolded multi-board speed chess is to tic-tac-toe: you can only see in retrospect how anyone could get there from here. The things which occupy a Rationalist's mind are completely divorced from ordinary concerns like ethics. Nobody would or could have predicted this quantity or quality of lunacy.

Here's my first shot at it:

"Imagine if the stereotypical high-school nerd became a supervillain."

Didn't come up with that simile, but it might fit:

It's like a fleshed out version of a 12 year old thinking "everything would be great if I was in charge, because I'm smart and people are dumb"

Something about people who are too impressed with their own smarts and swap pet theories that make them feel smart.

A few years ago an article by gwern hit the first page of hackernews and idlewords comments do a good job of explaining everything wrong with the rationalist mindset.

How would you first approach explaining this shit past “it can’t be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong”?

This is the question of the moment, isn't it?

I have no answers, but i can say thanks for being a light in the dumbness.

Honestly, a couple hours over some beers might be the only way.