greenrd

I don't think he's saying that liking college is a bias. Or rather, he is, but I think he's saying something subtly different (which implies the former): that those who denigrate college, or are "meh" about college, take a "social desirability hit" - they are likely to be seen as either unintelligent manual labourers, or Philistines, or annoying self-taught outliers, or insulting people who have put in the hard work to go to college, or a combination. And therefore young people grow up in such an environment and many of them have a strong belief, in such an environment, that college is a necessity, and don't really consider the evidence dispassionately.

I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that - unlike one of my fellow RationalWiki editors who literally criticised effective altruists for (gasp) paying other people to do stuff for them, which is like the foundation of capitalism and the modern economy (it's also known as division of labour).

Does the CEO of a software company have to know how to code? Does it matter? Maybe the CTO should - maybe - but the CEO?

> 1. Dogmatic adulation of Yudkowski as a "savior" figure.

They're just copying the man himself, who sees himself that way. But before you dismiss that as cultish, be sure you fully understand the problem he's trying to solve and how instrumental he has been to solving it so far (in terms of raising money, convincing people, building a community, knocking down bad arguments, etc.).

> 2. An almost immune response resistance to "practical" approaches to the Friendly AI problem.

What you have to bear in mind is that there are plenty of "practical" approaches to the Friendly AI that are simple, elegant - and wrong. Have some humility and note that if it was that easy, someone would have published a peer-reviewed solution already and that would be that.

> In light of #2, the community's serious consideration of un-testable scenarios like Roko's Basilisk

The community rejected it (with help of a site I contribute to, RationalWiki), and probably would have rejected it faster and more decisively if Yudkowsky hadn't unsuccessfully tried to censor all discussion of it.

> A flavor of authoritarianism, racism and sexism from former founder as Michael Anissimov.

Anissimov is indeed a straight-out fascist, in my view - but that just shows bad judgement on the part of Yudkowsky, that should not be used to tar the entire community with the same brush.

> Critical lack of diversity in backgrounds and approaches to ML/AI, which keeps the thought process fairly insular. For example you never see these people talking/attending AI conferences, and I'm not sure I have ever seen them at the AGI conference. AFAIK also they only publish in-house with liberal internal reference.

They are starting to publish in mainstream venues but most of their output has been online so far. Also, this stuff is hard, it's not like your typical "add another epicycle, cite self again" stuff of a lot of scientific research. And they are not trying to maximise the number of papers they publish, but rather trying to make progress on a specific research agenda. The former objective is not the same as the latter and could even impede the latter.

I used to think that way too. Now I believe they are working on problems which will only become relevant - pulling a figure out of my ass just to put a figure on it - 30 years hence - but in 30 years time, we'll be damned glad that they did, and wish that they'd had more staff and more resources! If we even notice the problem before the world ends, or is saved.

Could you elaborate? "Systems with asymmetric power" presumably refers to the AGI - or does it? Maybe you are referring to the AI box or the utility function design or the "nanny AI" which is meant to contain the AGI? I don't know what "capability in a resource constrained environment" refers to because that could refer to pretty much anything in our universe or any finite universe.

So again I ask, what would you propose we do about it? Criticism leads to boycotts lead to resignations. At what point does it become unacceptable, and unacceptable to whom?

I've heard a lot of people complaining about JIRA and so on, but I've never really understood why they hate it. Sure, it's closed source, but so is GitHub, and people seem to like that (this discussion notwithstanding).

I think there's a big difference between just getting your book printed and getting anyone to read it. It's all about the distribution and marketing.

It's not like Github and Google Code are the only two choices. (Of course, Google Code isn't a choice, as it's shutting down.)

What nonsense are you blathering? Github isn't open source so you can't fork it. Meanwhile there are lots of other GitHub-a-likes out there - Gitlab is only one of them. So if you don't like Gitlab either, there are other choices.

The claim is not that white people are overrepresented because of devious trickery, but because white people are usually doing the hiring and they are often biased, consciously or unconsciously, against non-white people, and women.

It's not something that's exclusive to white people, by the way. Racial and religious nepotism should be resisted wherever and whenever it occurs, in favour of meritocracy.

Again another diversity piece that claims that trans people are somehow "locked out" of tech. I've seen no evidence for this, and in fact some evidence for the opposite - that they're overrepresented. That makes sense, I would expect trans people to find it easier to work as a programmer than say, a construction worker or any kind of customer-facing job.

But trans people are kind of invisible, both (usually) statistically and (sometimes) passing so well that they are not known to be trans. With other minorities the situation is more clear-cut and obvious. I hope at least no-one will pretend that Asians are not overrepresented in Silicon Valley relative to population.

Possibly, but only if people actively choose usernames that remove hints of such things, avoid disclosing their ethnicity or gender, avoid using stereotypical male or female communication patterns... it's a rather unstable equilibrium.

> Just because someone has dark skin doesn't automatically mean they are "black" because black is more of a cultural thing than a race.

What are you trying to say? That sounds incredibly racist. Are you trying to say that someone who has dark skin but "acts white" is not black??

> I think you're saying it's important to have visible role models with the same ethnicity and/or sex, and/or whatever other bodily attribute we're focusing on at the moment. But why would anyone think that unless they already have racist and/or sexist beliefs?

That's a new low in victim-blaming. It's not Hollywood that's racist - it's black people!

> If the only real goal put down on paper is to hire x% black people and y% brown people and reduce z% of white people under some fuzzy equality rubric

I suspect that in GitHub's case, the diversity officer was tasked with defining those goals, on the basis that the straight white male executives would have no clue what the "right" goals should be.

This is very odd. I know universities can be very liberal places, but where did this combination of "mandatory" and "student-run" come from? I'm actually in favour of flattening hierarchies - but not inverting them. Why should students barely out of high school get to dictate the behaviour of teaching assistants who may be up to 40 years their senior? Why should the power relationships be temporarily inverted like that?

What would you propose we do - jail people who call for boycotts? Jail people who criticise corporations?

I'll spell this out very simply: the same laws and social standards that make it OK for you to criticise them, make it OK for them to criticise Mozilla.

Codes of conduct generally act to protect people from racist and sexual harassment, by prohibiting and deterring it. Name one example of racist harassment against white people that a code of conduct hasn't prevented.

tumbleweeds

He was on the wrong side of history, but your last sentence was unnecessary and over-the-top. He wasn't hired as a CEO, he was promoted into it. Before he became CEO, his political donations would not necessarily have been a concern.

The mobile experience for github is not amazing either. It rearranges everything for no apparent reason and makes it harder or impossible to access what I want.

If things ever get that extreme, it's time to whip out the research on race and IQ.

It's like, well, you asked for it.

Subhumans? Your Nazi ideology is showing.

You're missing the point. Imprecise thinking and forgetfulness is not lack of will, it's imprecise thinking and forgetfulness.

But Google's cars can't even merge on the freeway yet, and they need vastly detailed maps which must be kept 100% up to date. (The existing car companies are trying to avoid the latter drawback, but there's no proof that they will be able to achieve this any time soon - it's just an ambition.)

Isn't this because China has had internal migration controls for over 70 years, which are unheard of outside communist countries? Actually I think it's unheard of outside China.

Surely we are sending in the drones precisely because humans are so valuable? The military are ultimately accountable to the voters and the voters don't like American casualties.

And voters are also able to influence humans' economic value, by fiscal expansion, job creation programmes, etc. If they care to.

It could be seen as spiteful, or it could be seen as a compromise. Bear in mind that not all kernel developers have the same views on civility, codes of conducts, etc. and some will not want to lose face by being seen to "capitulate completely to SJWs" (as some of them would probably see it). Arguably it's better to have this kind of compromise than nothing at all.

Consider that someone might have incentives to communicate with a potential client far more nicely than to a person they dislike who probably will never be their client.

You'd think that a site like GitHub would have mandated code review for all commits by now. Especially after that time a few years ago when they managed to accidentally delete all the pull requests in the entire site, or something like that!

Wait, they're a ruby shop, they don't even believe in letting the compiler help you avoid making basic mistakes. dons flame-retardant suit