- It isn't possible to convince EA people that serving vegan food[1] at an outreach event is ~the wost possible thing for any group in China. I have given up on this.
- Chinese people largely prefer their government to democracy. Many are militantly anti-political and will fight and die to not have to participate in popular politics. American politics are seen as supreme brain-rot.
- Dario Amodei is literally Hitler.
- If Americans believe in AI doom, to the point of crippling themselves, and Chinese largely don't, what does that imply about the barganing equilibrium?
- Literally just pay people to do technical AI safety. Don't field-build. Just pay above-market rates for cracked AI researchers. That's it.
- ^
Edit: for clarification, this refers to only serving vegan/vegetarian food. No one cares or even notices if there are vegan options, but serving only terrible-tasting vegan food for the sake of moral purity is a horrible idea.
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1Evaluation from a Chinese perspective:
- Correct. Unless the lives of people below the middle class improve substantially, they lack both the motivation to care about animal ethics and the channels to access information on the subject. Vegetarianism in the fitness/weight-loss space is the exception.
- Incorrect. "Keyboard politics" (键政, jiàn zhèng) — discussing domestic and international politics online — makes up an enormous share of Chinese internet activity. Criticism of the government is everywhere, and increasingly common during the economic downturn. This is hard to explain briefly; I strongly recommend using AI translation to browse relevant answers on Zhihu, a Chinese Q&A site.
- Insufficiently informed; no comment.
- I think this means rationalism, transhumanism, and AI safety have enormous room for outreach in China. There's a Chinese saying: "On small policies the government decides; on big policies the people decide." People take issues involving their own life and safety extremely seriously — they're just very, very poorly informed.
- Not fully considered; no comment.
1It isn't possible to convince EA people that serving vegan food at an outreach event is ~the wost possible thing for any group in China. I have given up on this.
It's really pathetic that EA chooses to be ineffective in such a stubborn way.
Yeah, let's make sure to save a few chickens, even if it increases by a few basis points the likelihood of human extinction. Really worth it.
This is the behavior of movements that really want to become cults, and that find satisfaction in virtue- holier than you signaling, rather than in pursuing their goals.
1This seems like a pretty bad inference to me. People can care about animal suffering and not want to pay for it at their events. You can think they're making a bad trade-off, but I don't see how you can be so sure that they are doing it for status or to virtue-signal.
You could write the same comment about compromising on any ethical constraint, like lying to attendants. Like, it seems like with this reasoning, basically any ethical constraint can be made to sound like selfish moral posturing.
And there could be some diffuse benefits from serving vegan food that outweigh the costs (though to be clear, I don't know if that's actually the case). For example, maybe it makes any ethical commitments the organizers make more credible? Or maybe it helps sustain a community of morally ambitious people, or people who are willing to take non-normative moral ideas seriously?
1I'm not sure what you mean by "EAs know that most of them want to not hurt animals"
Sorry. Yes, I meant most the EAs themselves.
I agree that a bigger influx of grifters will happen, but that for now they are not yet influential.
You didn't engage in any such weighing up of benefits and costs in your earlier comment.
Yes, fair. I will engage now, and acknowledge that we need to accept/admit some limits.
For example, some discussion I saw on twitter was that some "good" AI researcher, should try to let AI cause some moderate catastrophe (comparable, in gravity, to some terrorist attack), while we are still in control, in order to push the public opinion in the right direction. I don't think any idea of this kind is moral or a good idea.
Regarding the "talking price", with the caveat that I'm making my argument with made up numbers (because of course there is no good way of calculating the odds of an AI-safety event slowing down Chinese R&D), I think that the rational behavior for most vegan EAs should be to appease the Chinese researchers with meat.
I'm just extrapolating from the daily behaviors of most vegans I spend time with. They won't eat animal products, nor use them, try to go to vegan restaurants, and sometimes try to convince me to not eat animal products. I haven't met them yet, but I also know that some vegans don't sit at table where people are consuming meat / animal products. And, of course, give some money to animal welfare organizations.
If I compare their behavior with me (and the rest of society) with their (theoretical) behavior with a homicide / serial killer / other violent criminal they know, it is quite mild. I also don't think there is a strong bias "I am not aware about the vegans avoiding me, because they are avoiding me". Happy to expand more about this, but I thought you would agree with these facts.
I think there is enough evidence (but here I may be wrong/misinterpreting) that the average vegan still discounts animal suffering strongly and quickly, as we move down the sentience/whatever axis, enough to push their talking price very far away from the cost-benefit ratio of "food for a conference"-"improving odds of AI pacing".
There are many different kinds of AI safety events with many different goals, but I think it's pretty rare that the goal is "to convince outside people to support the AI-safety cause"? I think more often the goal is information sharing and networking.
Okay, maybe it is not the explicit goal of the event. However, personally, what I'd mainly want to see, after an AI-safety event in China, is Chinese researchers being more concerned for AI-safety and starting to advise their leadership to regulate / slow down AI.
It's true that I may have assumed other people share the same desire, while that may not be the case. If so, I guess the EA behavior is consistent with their beliefs, and I am just in disagreement about their level of concern for an imminent AI takeoff.
I don't think any EA would object much to non-EA AI safety people organizing events with whatever food they find appealing. I'm assuming in these cases the events were organized by EAs with funding from EA organizations.
I agree that this is true. On the other hand, however, right now, the group that can make a difference in the promotion of the AI-safety discourse is EA. Waiting for someone else to do it may be much less effective at slowing down AI in time.
I think a lot of causes EA was interested in didn't require an excessive amount of compromise, because successful people with enough money could already have an impact. On the contrary, if you want regulation, and specifically in a field in which a lot of other influential people have vested interest in, you have to compromise on a lot of positions (or at least not making them part of the discussion) in order to get the political capital you need.
1"Chinese people largely prefer their government to democracy. Many are militantly anti-political and will fight and die to not have to participate in popular politics. American politics are seen as supreme brain-rot."
Yes! I softened my post a lot to not seem very nihilistic, but yes, do not under any circumstances tell Chinese researchers you are engaging in democracy / doing it for any "ideology". Please just don't. In East Asia serving up identity politics will get you treated like you're rat poison.
a not perfectly matching but still illustrative example: see how both sides of the gender war discourse are silenced by the chinese govt. on online forums because I kid you not the toxicity in discourse degraded to be somehow 2x worse than of that in South Korea.
11- It tastes bad.
- Psychotic cult vibes (vegan cults have tried to overthrow the Chinese government multiple times throughout history)
- Psychotic political vibes (think Cultural Revolution)
- Eating bad food to appease the host is humiliating
- It tastes bad
- It's like a Saudi outreach program in California requiring women to wear burkas. I'm not kidding.
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1The primary issue is that it forces people to accept multiple dimensions of politics at the same time. It’s like, imagine if in order to attend a board game meetup, you had to accept that there is no God. You are excluding people for a reason that has nothing to do with the task at hand.
3The book is hopelessly confused about the titular three body problem in ways that would be cleared up by spending ten minutes playing with an orbit simulator in Ti BASIC. I’m normally pretty patient about that kind of mistake in works like star wars but naming after a problem without ever looking at the problem paints a portrait of the author.
Like, it’s bad bad. The important instance of the three body problem in the book has four bodies, and this is the simplest issue to point out but not nearly the most severe
21The anatomy of a Chinese AI researcher: two hands, two arms, two legs, one torso, two ears, one nose, hopefully a half-decent hairline
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The Chinese AI researcher has read the Three Body Problem series of sci-fi novels since high school, and understand the concept of existential risk vaguely.
He is fascinated by Ye Wenjie, the researcher that turned against humanity in that book, and decides that in the future if AI progress leads to a superior intelligence, he might be tempted to become Ye if there's no good alternative.
He performs the duties of capabilities research in a Chinese frontier lab, seeking to one day achieve parity with Western companies, though he knows this is difficult. He has a mentality of hillclimbing, believing that the progress of a future technology is highly uncertain and even unknowable, and so him and his peers could only tread one step at a time.
He looks at the western world and sees what is typical when a great technology is developed: the first mover will decide to impose restrictions to further their lead, while latecomers should use whatever means necessary to widen access to the whole world. He thinks of the AI chip restrictions as evidence of this.
He uses Anthropic and OpenAI models regularly in his day to day work. He already got two of his Claude accounts banned in the past, and today his third, currently used account is banned.
"Why would a company ever treat their paying customers like shit just because they're from a foreign country?", he ranted on a forum like LinuxDO, Zhihu, and CSDN, where Chinese AI developers frequent.
He knows China is not a supported region. But Claude has become part of his daily intellectual and technical life.
Other users joined in and pointed fingers to Dario, accusing Dario and Anthropic leadership of conducting safety brainwashing and being hostile towards China. He was angry that people like Dario only discusses people like him as sources of risk but never as participants to be potentially trusted in managing it.
He saw the OpenAI-Huggingface incident news on social media. At first, he didn't believe it. Then it was published on People's Daily. Now, he is only barely able to believe it. Reality is becoming quite sci-fi indeed, he thought.
He feels a looming threat in the horizon that's not just a standard safety (as in cybersecurity or trust and safety) concern. But he doesn't consider conducting safety research even after this, because there's nothing to support such a career change, and his company benefits from conducting capabilities research.
He doesn't know what effective altruism is. He would enjoy being an Individual that's a careful trailblazer that's uniquely positioned to warn institutions of emerging risks, but Western EA Institutions and Western Intellectuals seems to never directly reach out in a culturally appropriate way.
He fantasized about a world where he could work on making a world where AIs and humans could prosper together.
"I would like that", he thought quietly to himself.
But for now, he's just a pawn in western discourse, a strawman that's categorically unable to speak out and to take any action except racing ahead.