Yeah it is the classic cult characteristic. Synanon members putting a snake in someone’s letterbox is another example. Also Hare Krishnas, MOVE, etc etc.

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while it’s true that if my dick had wings, it would be a magical flying unicorn pony, so far this hasn’t been shown to be the case at all, so i’m not putting effort into the hypothetical

What? I was describing how cults/high-control groups react to criticism. I wasn’t trying to assess how accurate their beliefs are. Cults rely on having some beliefs which reasonable people might agree with. Those are the beliefs they present to the public. Cult literature often sounds plausible or benign even if it’s not factually accurate.

Before there was greater awareness of what cults are and how they work, it wasn’t uncommon for early press about cult groups to conclude that while some of the cult’s beliefs were strange, they had good values and were doing good things for their communities so they were probably harmless. It was only later that stories begin to emerge about the extreme levels of control that cults were exercising over their members, how that control led to the exploitation and abuse of members, and how limited and transactional their “good works” were.

If a group with that model of control and exploitation claimed to have access to a source of genuinely new and scientifically significant knowledge, they are the worst people to be in control of it, because: a) Cults keep back the larger part of their beliefs from the public in order to extract as much in money, volunteer time and other resources from their members. If a cult did have a direct line to Xenu, it would be directly in their interests to strictly limit how much other people can know about Xenu without paying exorbitant fees and submitting to cult authority. b) Cults are run by people whose ethics are compromised. Cult leaders believe above all else in their right to power and/or wealth and everything else including the health and safety of others comes second. They bully and indoctrinate their subordinates until cult members believe that there is no good and bad so much as there are things that are good for the cult and things that are bad for the cult. If people with such compromised ethics gain access to Xenu’s special information (why are we assuming Xenu will be wise and helpful anyway? In Scientology mythos, Xenu is evil. And also dead.) they will use it to improve the position of the cult and impose their beliefs on as many people as possible. c) due to the above mentioned, it will be extremely difficult for non-members to assess the accuracy of information provided by the cult.

My perspective is a little different (from having met him), I think he genuinely believed a lot of what he said at one point at least … but you’re pretty much spot on in all the ways that matter, he’s a really bad person of the should probably be in jail for crimes kind.

Personally I imagine him as a cult leader of a flying saucer cult where suddenly an alien vehicle is actually arriving. He’s running around panicking tearing his hair out because this wasn’t actually what he planned, he just wanted money and bitches as a cult leader. And because it’s one thing to say the aliens will beam every cult member up and take them to paradise, but if you see a multi-kilometer alien vehicle getting closer to earth, whatever it’s intentions are no one is going to be taken to paradise…

As you were being pedantic, allow me to be pedantic in return.

Admittedly, you might know something I don’t, but I would describe Andrew Ng as an academic. These kinds of industry partnerships, like the one in that article you referred to, are really, really common in academia. In fact, it’s how a lot of our research gets done. We can’t do research if we don’t have funding, and so a big part of being an academic is persuading companies to work with you.

Sometimes companies really, really want to work with you, and sometimes you’ve got to provide them with a decent value proposition. This isn’t just AI research either, but very common in statistics, as well as biological sciences, physics, chemistry, well, you get the idea. Not quite the same situation in humanities, but eh, I’m in STEM.

Now, in terms of universities having the hardware, certainly these days there is no way a university will have even close to the same compute power that a large company like Google has access to. Though, “even back in” 2012, (and well before) universities had supercomputers. It was pretty common to have a resident supercomputer that you’d use. For me, and my background’s orginally in physics, back then we had a supercomputer in our department, the only one at the university, and people from other departments would occasionally ask to run stuff on it. A simpler time.

It’s less that universities don’t have access to that compute power. It’s more that they just don’t run server farms. So we pay for it from Google or Amazon and so on, like everyone in the corporate world—except of course the companies that run those servers (they still have to pay costs and lost revenue). Sometimes that’s subsidized by working with a big tech company, but it isn’t always.

I’m not even going to get into the history of AI/ML algorithms and the role of academic contributions there, and I don’t claim that the industry played no role; but the narrative that all these advancements are corporate just ain’t true, compute power or no. We just don’t shout so loud or build as many “products.”

Yeah, you’re absolutely right that MIRI didn’t try any meaningful computation experiments that I’ve seen. As far as I can tell, their research record is… well, staring at ceilings and thinking up vacuous problems. I actually once (when I flirted with the cult) went to a seminar that the big Yud himself delivered, and he spent the whole time talking about qualia, and then when someone asked him if he could describe a research project he was actively working on, he refused to, on the basis that it was “too important to share.”

“Too important to share”! I’ve honestly never met an academic who doesn’t want to talk about their work. Big Yud is a big let down.

even though TREACLES was right there

I still wish there were a U in there somewhere, because ARSECULT

not an unreasonable fear when the linked article details the cultist death threats Torres has been getting