Pretty much everyone in the word business has noticed that audio and video are kicking writing’s butts in terms of getting an online audience (I am not sure in terms of influencing people in serious jobs). Ivy Astrix mentioned that our dear friends in Berkeley decided that if a camp for wordy bloggers was good, a camp for short-form vloggers would be even better. The camp is about AI doom, but the vlogs don’t have to be. You can live in Berkeley for a month, be paid $2,000, compete for $20,000 in prizes, and hang out with illustrious figures Hereticon alumni like:
- Botez Sisters (professional chess and poker players, one of them is down on the idea that teh men have better genes for chess than women)
- Grimes
- CJ the X
- Aric Floyd
- Liv Boeree
- Quinn Finite who dual-classes in visual social media and sexy social media
- Zoe Curzi
- Rob Miles
- Tor Parsons
- Yud
- Aella
- Nate Soares (the last three in the triangle wing, one presumes)
The marketing mentions “a sprinkling of AI experts” even though Yud’s position on Twitter is that he is not an AI expert. I don’t think Soares or MIles have any relevant credentials or achievements other than social media posts. Another Robert Miles was a University of Hull computer scientist. Edit/ This Miles was doing a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Nottingham ten years ago but does not mention any publications or industry experience and warns “I do have a broader understanding than some, but I also think that most researchers … yeah, most researchers know everything about one thing and a bit about everything else, and I just know a bit about everything, right?”
Some of the slogans sound lighthearted if you don’t know about the phygs and the sexual abuse: “if we’re gonna die we might as well have fun” “sleep is optional, posting is not” “we need better messengers” “31 days of chaos” “the stakes could not be higher”
plzdontkillus is definitely less straight and male than their usual lineup, and some of these people would be interesting to meet or have coffee with, but I would not recommend committing to spend a month with them given all the abuse and negligence in rationalist communities.
The LessWrong crowd don’t seem to be worried that subsidies for streaming video are killing the culture of reading and writing and the rational, reflective, slow forms of thinking which it inculates, I don’t know if they have talked about the need to cooperate with NIMBYs fighting data centers, or if using law to prevent destruction might involve hiring a law team to make OpenAI’s life hell. You can hire a very good lawyer and some paralegals for Yud’s salary.
edit/ added full list of celebrity guests
The marketing mentions “a sprinkling of AI experts” even though Yud’s position on Twitter is that he is not an AI expert.
wait really? He actually said he’s not an expert?
Yes he said that https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1642908341327499264#m
For the record, I never describe myself to the media as an expert / researcher / scientist in Artificial Intelligence; if they give me the option, I say I’m a “decision theorist” / Partially, this is because I think that’s what I most feel like I actually am; notions like the reflective consistency of an agent are arguably decision-theory ones, though it’s forging new ground either way. But also, I feel like it’s a place where it would be easiest to defend, to my own satisfaction, and without a sense that I was even slightly misleading anyone, that I made a big damn contribution on at least the PhD level. / (Of course, sometimes the media doesn’t give me that option, which is very understandable of them; and in that case, I say that I was one of the earliest and founding researchers in the field of AGI alignment. Again, seems perverse to deny that.)
It would obviously be best if Yudkowsky accepted that he has friends who love him even if he is not the smartest boy ever but I doubt he will ever make that leap.
Huh, interesting. Those slogans are also rather “interesting”
”we need better messengers”
Is he realising that showing up to a debate in a sparkly fedora and goggles is not going to make people take him seriously?
I remember him wearing a suit a lot in the 2010s and looking reasonably respectable. He can, he just doesn’t.
Maybe he thinks employing a weirdo facade makes people lower their guard, taking a page from Jimmy Saville.
Isn’t the ability to manipulate people a defining trait of intelligence according to rationalists?
I think Yud is still trying to present himself differently to different audiences (the asinine tweets, the nerdy blog posts, the serious editorials and Old Media appearances, and the vlogs and public debates in a golden fedora). He chose to use his publicity photo in a collared shirt, short beard, and felt fedora for plzdontkillus. He told Kevin Roose that people were trying to make him look more respectable and he was resisting.
Trying to look respectable seems like it would be better strategy for a 47 year old man than pivoting to TikTok.
When I was a PhD student, I had successfully published papers in journals.
I think Yud believes that his two decision theories are very important papers, but he can’t be bothered to get them through peer review and answer the objections which academic philosophers have. Its possible that Aella will get academically published before he does, because a few academics are intrigued by her polls and she can act humble when she sees a benefit. I can imagine her letting a trained psychologist tweak her plans for a poll into something academically defensible and committee-compliant then help her with the analysis in exchange for co-authorship.
This Rob Miles might have a research record or he might have taken one semester on ‘AI’ at some point in his education.
