Stereotyping EA’s as “weird”
Yet another mainstream media article maligning EA, Rationalism and promoting the absurd notion that fear of AI is all hype by people who subscribe to a weird philosophy. From the New York Times, which normally is more on the liberal side—I dread to imagine what the right-wing press writes about EA’s.
As usual, no attempt is made to engage with the facts or the arguments, it’s all about stereotyping engineers, EA’s and Rationalists. (see some representative quotes below, boldface is mine).
If we’ve learned anything in the past few years it’s that repetitive communication can beat logic, facts, science and truth in the battle for public opinion. We think our arguments are better, but they’re not playing by the same rules.
Ironically, I don’t believe the author has any particular axe to grind with EA, or that he has more skin in the game than he suggests. But I’m just sick of seeing well-though-out EA arguments being dismissed based on nothing more than a stereotype of the people stating these ideas.
If we want to improve the world, we need to help our ideas become mainstream, and not viewed as the bizarre rantings of some crazy cult.
Does anyone have ideas of how to fight back against these stereotypes?
“The more I study these figures, however, the more convinced I’ve become that something else helps explain this passive dismay: They’re weirder than we realize.”
“For a certain subset of young engineering types in Silicon Valley, these ideas (Rationalism) were immensely attractive. This makes sense, given that they cast young engineering types as the literal saviors of humanity.”
“Rationalists began living in group houses in the Bay Area, where earnest conversations about A.I. safety and reducing cognitive biases mixed freely with polyamory and psychedelics.”
“Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which would go on to attract many millions of dollars in donations, largely from individuals and groups connected to the technology industry who presumably appreciated being cast as heroic figures in a cosmic drama.”
“the Amodei siblings were motivated in part by their concern that OpenAI “didn’t take the alignment problem seriously enough,” a reference to the early Rationalist obsession with aligning superpowerful A.I. to serve human interests.” Presented as if this was an absurd idea …
“In these circles, it’s taken for granted that A.I. capabilities will rapidly accelerate and completely transform the world, and to talk about it in any other way would be considered uninformed. For a Rationalist, the only open question is to what degree their heroic brains, carefully trained in the style glamorized by Mr. Yudkowsky’s “Sequences,” can prevent these transformations from devolving into extinction events.”
“The observation that the most alarmist claims about A.I.’s impact seem to come from the individuals most connected to Rationalism should anger us.”
Opinion | How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now? - The New York Times
I dunno, but I feel like… I dispute your framing? Like, the stereotype is real, and EAs are, on average, weird under most definitions of the term. Some of the weirdness is WEIRDness, so it approximates, even if taken to the limit, standard Western liberal views and beliefs. But most normal people will react with ‘this gives culty, weird vibes’ to a lot of EA beliefs and practices. There’s no helping this or covering it up. One can try to shift the Overton Window in that direction, for example, and yes, one can try to make a more savvy use of the media. But one must choose one’s weirdness points wisely.
I think worries about AI are percolating more widely into mainstream society, even if you get pieces like this from time to time.
My problem is that it seems like ALL the coverage that EA’s get is like this.
I do take your point that EA’s may seem weird, but most of the EA’s I know are mostly weird in a good way—more caring, more focused on helping, more concerned with the victims, … - but we allow all this to be overshadowed by the perceived weirdness of using logic and data to help people more, or by stereotypes based on more controversial ideas like longtermism taken to its logical extreme.
And I’m not worried about its effect on our delicate egos .. I’m worried by how this limits our potential to impact the vital debates of our time. It frustrates me that EA arguments can be dismissed by ad hominem arguments. This article basically says :`”we can ignore those concerns, they only come from those weird EA’s.”
To fight back on that, I would first start to question wether those statements are completely out of the frame or not. There is a bit of truth evidently because EA does not hold the ultimate answer, simply by acknowledging the fact that every opinion exists and won’t stick with the neighbor one.
I think we start to define an opinion as weird if it doesn’t take, or seems to be taking into account everything (else said, it does not provide by itself the answer to any question). We might find ourselves against something having fully understood its concept, but also when we can’t adhere to something we can’t fully encircle. which in my opinion is the case for EA. The philosophy is too young to not dive into possible paradox, argument gaps, things like that, you know. And because it does not have the simple, omniscient and superior answer that a religion can have, there is no reason to start to believe in any of this.
In general, I would consider extremely sketchy to define such a large idea as, well, the ideal. It is stating boldly that what you think should be done is the very best version, and with a little nuage of nuance, at least with the negative effects being at an infimum, of what humanity can achieve, having taken EVERYTHING into account. So when supporting obiously a conviction that isn’t perfect, people will of course point the weakest part of the dialogue. EA might work in a specific era, with a certain kind of people, and (probably) with -very?- limited effects. I guess it will change as soon as something, inside the description of this movement, answers to interrogations we (I) cannot even formulate in the first place but are fundamental. Then some would start to take it seriously. If not, this version of EA simply can’t get understood by a sufficient amount of people.
I would counter that EA / Rationalism is not a set of ideas but a way of thinking, analogous to the scientific method. You can disagree with the ideas that some EA’s or Rationalists have, but you cannot argue that approaching a topic using data and logic and science is flawed. That is just plain wrong.
For years now, we have seen a constant attack on the scientific method, on science itself. And IMHO we have not pushed back correctly, and specifically, we have not pushed back hard enough and bluntly enough.
By trying to be reasonable with people who are not being reasonable, we have only lent credibility to their false ideas. And the result is that the most advanced democracy in the world officially denies climate change and has a Secretary of Health who trusts tictoc influencers more than doctors.
We need to call bullshit on arguments like this. It is bullshit. If you disagree with the conclusion, sure, argue against that based on logic or data. But you don’t get to dismiss it just because the people who reached that conclusion used logic and data and science to reach it. You just don’t. It’s not an “everyone is entitled to their opinion” case—it’s just plain wrong.
We need to be willing to stand behind our conclusions, and call out those who claim to refute them with ad hominem arguments.
To me, these statements don’t seem wrong. Insofar as they are jabs at Rationalism, they seem both warranted and true (maybe the second to last is a bit too gratuitous).
I’m not sure what to think. It feels like EA’s are cool with being seen as weird. And I’m not cool with that, because IMHO it dramatically reduces our potential for impact. This being an example, where arguments which make sense about AI safety get rejected for no reason other than that they come from “Rationalists.”
Ultimately do we want to feel good about ourselves, reassured that we’re right even as everyone else is wrong, or do we actually want to make sure that the right decisions get taken to prevent AI catastrophe?
The rationalist answer is totally receivable. Not need to dive into the facts, you just disagree, because it is a point of view you are not supporting for philosophical reasons. Same thing as rejecting an opinion pictured as “cynical”,”communist” or “liberal”. And yeah, you can think a philosophy is good for you and a group of people but will certainly not extend beyond that limit, so you simply let the others talk about it. Besides, AI is in the article but not every article is about EA in AI or vice-versa, so any other supporter of EA simply might not have an opinion on that, and therefore not give a damn about this article.