You can cherry pick examples of doomers being right and wrong. There have been doomers about nuclear war, wrong so far. About various religious apocalypses, wrong wrong wrong. Overpopulation and famine, wrong-oh! 

Homosexuality hasn’t legitimated bestiality or pedophilia, in fact we have perhaps a more vigorous anti-pedophile movement now than ever before - I saw a guy on a motorcycle on the freeway a month or two ago whose sweatshirt read “kill your local pedophile” on the back. In the past, mass rape in the wake of war and marital rape was normal and expected worldwide, or we weren’t even equipped with the moral frame and language to condemn it.

We have little evidence TV et al destroyed people’s ability to read so much as gave them many alternatives to it. Anki makes it easier than ever before to memorize poems, should you choose to.

Were people in the past specifically worried about the dissolution of the marriage format, or were they worried about certain healthy and fulfilling relational dynamics for which “marriage” was a convenient label? Unclear, and that’s a lot of difficult history to hash out if you were to try. And if the latter; then are we so sure things haven’t improved? The past appears to be full of thoroughly toxic marriages, as well as prematurely dead spouses.

I could go on, but I don’t think there’s a point. This post is implicitly about AI doomers, and it’s trying to score points lazily by this weird sort of “our team has always been right, doesn’t that seem intuitively correct to you?” anecdotalism. This is the sort of thing an AI enthusiast could easily point to as an example of bad doomer criticism of AI accelerationism that may inappropriately increase their confidence, even as it appears to be intended to do for the doomers. Sigh.

Every holder of a controversial opinion ought to be able to answer “who is your best critic?” with the name of a person they’d endorse listening to at length.

Better I think would be to talk about a few of the points from the book that you thought were most important. This shows you understood the book and which bits might be most interesting to your interlocutor. 

I work in medical research and know many healthcare practitioners. They often share anonymized stories about their patients and higher level summaries of patterns they see across their patient population or in their institution.

I couldn’t learn to be a doctor from these occasional stories, but I understand the intimate details of their work much better than I would from articles, especially the social side.

For example, my geneticist friend’s complaints about companies selling unregulated genetic tests helped me understand why doctors are so much more conservative than researchers when it comes to new and unregulated medical tech. Researchers see developing new tests as innovation, doctors as often injecting more noise and confusion into an already overwhelming system.

That was a crucial insight for me as a biomedical researcher thinking about how to make a clinical impact. 

Communities like HN and some subreddits that have a mind meld culture are wonderful resources. I bookmark those comment sections for technologies I’m considering using or ideas about how to code, and consider the comment section a critical component of the post they’re discussing.

I am about 2/3 median income for a full time year round worker in the USA, though I assume median for reasonable definitions of “the west” is lower than for the USA.

To put things in perspective, you can look up putative prices for McDonald's in India at mcdonadsprices.com, claimed to be current as of January 8, 2024. The McSaver Chicken Kebab Burger Meal with Whole Wheat Bun is listed at 214.30 rupees, or $2.44. For a person with a monthly income of 5,000 rupees, this meal costs about 4% of their monthly salary.

For me, a PhD student, 4% of my monthly salary is about $143. So eating at McDonald's is essentially the equivalent of fine, upscale dining for the average person, and it makes sense that it would be nice inside since only the relative rich can afford to eat there.

Maybe it’s not the algorithm that sucks, but the interface - specifically that it conflates algorithm training with content consumption. Perhaps the main page should not update on your clicks, just show content. A separate interface should be used to pick content you want to see more or less of.

It might be worth getting more explicit about vN’s exact argumentative steps and see if it’s really as ironclad as you think.

Humans have a finite amount of time to occupy the universe. In principle, control systems for nuclear weapons can be engineered to be arbitrarily reliable. The logic of MAD says that nuclear powers will not conduct a nuclear exchange. This line of argument suggests there is no deductive logical reason why nuclear war is inevitable between two nuclear powers. If we have such a war, it may be due to theoretically preventable failures, such as flawed systems. The existence of a possible reason a nuclear exchange might occur without a first strike is far from compelling justification to do one.