> this piece of slop
Citation needed. Or maybe we need to update the title of that children's book for internet arguments: Everyone Who Disagrees With Me Is Slop.
The Yud post you linked is not slop, either. It's not LLM-generated, nor is it insincere. But I do have to point out: He's the one who is slinging the tsunami of words here, not Alexander Campbell.
If the only people that reach your conclusion are ones that don't actually subscribe to the philosophy, then it doesn't matter, because no one is actually acting on those conclusions.
And if we want to hold people responsible because others pervert their ideas, then we have to accept that Jesus Christ was a horrific, evil person for preaching "Love thy Neighbor"; just look at the crusades that were somehow the "rational conclusion" of that philosophy!
What an odd thing to say right after young Mr. Moreno-Gama reached that conclusion and did subscribe to the philosophy, when it does matter, because he did actually act on those conclusions.
How odd to introduce a hypothetical that amounts to, "what if this philosophy didn't ever lead to violence?", right after it did.
Or are you trying to pull a No True Scotsman on me here?
You have to understand basic statistics: is this group actually more dangerous than average? Do rationalists kill more than non-rationalists?
Or is the rational conclusion of non-rationalists also violence?
My point is, why would you be talking about a counterfactual world where people did not attempt to kill for this philosophy? Why would you be entertaining a categorical claim like, "the only people that reach your conclusion are ones that don't actually subscribe to the philosophy", when that claim is manifestly violated by a violent act just a few short days ago? How is it inconceivable to you that someone might read the dire doomer rhetoric in the way that Moreno-Gama did?
The only way you could write something like that is if your head is in the sand. I am willing to entertain your relativism, your base rate logic, your analogy to Jesus, sure, obviously there's some merit to that line of argument... but first you need to please pull your head out of the sand.
We can only talk about base rates if you stop trying to invalidate the data.
No, I am saying that Yudkowsky's views are straightforwardly compatible with bedrock principles of liberalism, and the author of the piece fails to acknowledge that compatibility or grapple with them himself. It's not about "rationalism" or who is "allowed" to speculate.
I called it slop because it says false things that have the hallmark of LLM style, e.g.
> The Sequences build the liturgy: a small caste of correct thinkers, epistemically and morally superior, whose rationality entitles them to govern what the rest of humanity is allowed to build. It’s not a safety movement. It’s a priesthood with an origin story written in fanfiction.
That's just because LLMs were likely trained on a decade plus of human-generated Medium, Substack, Quora, and LinkedIn post slop.