>This is fun to read and think about, but it's also important to keep in mind that this is very light on evidence and is basically fanfic.
Applicable to much of the rationalist AI risk discourse.
Applicable to much of the rationalist AI risk discourse.
Sequences is like Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, something that ensures real critical thinkers don't feel welcome.
This article contains numerous features that conform to the style guide for lesswrong including: (1) spammy crossposting for SEO (even good sites like arstechnica and phys.org do this today), (2) trigger warnings ("more technical than usual"), (3) random bits of praise for the cult leader (now EY is a "literary critic" but he's going to be a war hero like L. Ron Hubbard one of these days.)
Apocalyptic talk like theirs is dangerous: it's the road to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_gro...
I do appreciate the shout out to structuralism, maybe they have been reading what I've written. Structuralism was a fad that dated to when linguistics was pre-paradigmatic and people thought language was a model for everything else. After Chomsky developed a paradigm for linguistics that turned out to be a disappointment (could be applied to make languages like FORTRAN but couldn't be used to make computers understand language, privileged syntax at the expense of semantics, etc.) the remnants moved on to post-structuralism.
The spectacular success of ChatGPT and transformers in general (e.g. they work for vision too!) has made "language is all you need" seem a much more appealing viewpoint, certainly it is a paradigm which people can use to write a number of papers as well as hot takes, fanfics and other subacademic communications.
1) Paul Graham, the revered founder whose corpus of essays is widely read (and will surely make “real critical thinkers” feel unwelcome)
2) Dang, an enforcer who invisibly hides comments and chastising people for speaking in a way he dislikes
3) Trigger warnings (“this article has a paywall”)
VC talk like HN’s is dangerous: it’s the road to a system that has seen more human rights abuses than almost any other
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism
More seriously, LessWrong is not a cult by pretty much any measure and your comment doesn’t really provide any evidence to say otherwise
I suppose having "steelman" lets you relate it to "strawman" and "weakman" which can be an advantage, but knowing the existing term lets you read the existing literature.
I think this is where steelman is a superset of this, in that it includes the reconstruction definition but also includes making a whole new set of arguments that are entirely unrelated to your own argument or the other person's argument. i.e. Steelmanning can involve coming up with novel arguments for the other side.
> I hesitate to defend AI safety discourse
The rationalist AI risk discourse is not the same thing as AI safety discourse, in any case; it’s a small corner of the larger whole.
Not "Roko Basilisk"-style crap, but things like encoding bias into systems then used for automated law enforcing, employee screening, etc.