I described my feelings about human extinction elsewhere.
However, unlike the median commenter on this topic, you seem to grant that e/acc exclusion is actually a real thing that actually happens. That is
I think the desire to exclude e/accs is mainly because of their attitude that human extinction is acceptable or even desirable,
is a strange thing to say if there was not, in fact, an actual desire among LW party hosts in Berkeley. So inasmuch as my doubts about the truth of this have been raised by other respondents, would you mind clarifying
Would you describe yourself as familiar with the scene at all? You seem to imply that you doubt that e/acc exclusion is an actual thing, but is that based on your experience with the scene?
I'm not suggesting that you're wrong to doubt it (if anything I was most likely wrong to believe it), I just want to clarify what info I can take from your doubt.
This is a good point, but I don't intuitively see that it's particularly strong evidence that it must be unusual. I would expect an event like this to have more explicit rules than the average party.
This seems like good evidence and I don't think you would make it up.
I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that Beff & co are exaggerating/full-of-it/otherwise-inaccurate.
Possibly the Aella thing was an anomaly, but also the thing that they actually really wanted to go to, and they're inaccurately (although not necessarily dishonestly) assuming it to be more widespread than it actually is.
Would you describe yourself as plugged into the LW party scene in Berkeley?
I wrote a long reply to your points, but ultimately decided it was a derail to original topic. I'll PM you just for fun though.
I don't think there's anything misleading about that. Building AI that kills everyone means you never get to build the immortality-granting AI.
I didn't say it wasn't sensible. I said describing it that way was misleading.
If your short-term goal is in fact to decelerate the development of AI, describing this as "accelerating the development of Friendly AI" is misleading, or at least confused. What you're actually doing is trying to mitigate X-risk. In part you are doing this in the hopes that you survive to build Friendly AI. This makes sense except for the part where you call it "acceleration."
Incidentally, people don't seem to say "Friendly AI" anymore. What's up with that?
Thanks, this is extremely helpful. Having a clearer definition of how e/acc is understood to LW makes this much easier to think about.
Just for fun, I'll quibble: I would add to my list of e/acc heresies
Related to previous: Those who think that the wrong human having power over other humans is the thing we need to worry about.
Insofar as I genuinely believe that to some extent, various actors are trying to take advantage of sincerely-held beliefs by LWers in the importance of decel-until-alignment to craft rules which benefit them and their short-term interests in money and power. This is bad, but also people do this sort of thing in our society all the time so you need to have perspective and recognize that it's not the literal end of the world. I don't know if I would say it's the thing we need to worry about, but it's more likely to cause harm now, whereas AGI is not.
Those like Beff Jezos, who think human extinction is an acceptable outcome.
I'd say it was an acceptable risk, and one that we're running anyway. It's reasonable to increase the risk slightly in the short run to reduce it in the long run. Is there an outcome with human extinction which I would also consider good? That's kind of hard to say. Like I think Neanderthal extinction was an acceptable outcome. So clearly "all humans are extinct and now there are only posthumans" is acceptable, for some values of posthuman. I dunno, It's all extremely academic and taking it too seriously feels silly.
Also
at least a Victorian NRC would be bad since they would decel the things that eventually made nuclear reactors possible
I think you misunderstood what I was getting at. The reason I object to a Victorian NRC is not that I want to avoid decelerating atomic physics (I don't even know if I ought to expect that). I object because it's quixotic. Or just plain silly. There are no nuclear reactors! What are you people in HMNRC even doing all day? Theorycrafting reporting standards for SCRAM incidents? How sure are you that you actually, you know, need to do that?
I think it counts. And while it's not the typical LW party, do you really think that prohibition says nothing about the scene? That seems like an odd opinion to me.
Yes, I meant specifically the Bay Area scene, since that's the only part of the LW community that's accused of excluding e/acc-ers.
It's interesting and relevant if you can say that in the NYC scene, this sort of thing is unheard of, and that you're familiar enough with that scene to say so, but it isn't 100% on point.