I can nod along when I hear and read people talking about the dangers of these technologies and the endgame of their creators; and then suddenly very weird when everyone except me is nodding along that the answer must be similar (but different) technology!
It's as if technologists are stuck in a room of mirrors, unable to imagine a world in which "solutions" don't ultimately just continue to feed technology's increasingly anti-human takeover of everything.
> Technologists don't drive decisions though. The shareholders do.
Yes, but technologists get sniped into identifying and defending them. They're the mouth pieces and the hands. Shareholders by themselves out to add my uniqueness to their assets would just be helpless randos who can't even make eye contact. Think of what "hiding behind screens" does to people, multiply that by infinite and you get shareholders hiding behind technologists.
None of this could exist without the cooperation of technical people. We (as a group) are guilty of building this, and I don't see any genuine reflection or self-awareness or accountability at all from tech people for this.
The LessWrong/“rationality” crowd gwern is part of like to pat themselves on the back for identifying the trend and resulting harms from super intelligent AI going back decades.
And yet, the main tangible contribution emerging from this early recognition (and obsession) was to inspire a lot of brilliant CS/math types and billionaires like Peter Thiel or Jaan Tallinn to build and fund companies like OpenAI and Anthropic which went on to literally create the very thing they were convinced will destroy the world, leading to an ever escalating arms race to “AGI”. Also lots of crypto and a murky web of non-profits doing unclear stuff.
The proximity to money in the Silicon Valley/VC world seems to limit the imagination to founding yet another new tech startup that really, definitely won’t compromise their values and will be different this time.
The LessWrong/"rationality" crowd aren't compromising their values; they just have bad values that lead to negative outcomes, masked by high-minded rhetoric that they themselves only half believe.
It's a popular movement that has wound its way through out society, and the fruits are clear: surveillance capitalism, eugenics, fraud. It's honestly quite impressive how consistently you can look at [recent negative trend] and find someone at the bottom calling themselves a rationalist and claiming the same set of influences.
The fundamental tenet of that set isn't rationalism but the belief that they are superior to the exploitable masses. That does not lead anywhere good.
Even setting that crowd aside, almost every time I see somebody puffed up about how "rational" they are it turns out to involve a vigorous avoidance of the values they're working from.
I know somebody who says that doing debate in high school and college was terrible for him because it trained him to always argue his point but never to question it. For example, at the time he thought of himself as supremely rational even as he'd make a strong case for why he shouldn't quit smoking. It was only much later that he could admit that was his addiction and his ego talking.
Oh wow, that's amazing. The need to be verbally right and perfect no matter the cost is such a curse, so blinding. I hope they all get free of it someday.
Not the OP, but I’m doing a ton of it and it works great. I had to decide what to use for my startup and for a few years I’d stopped using Rails. I considered using full stack node/Typescript/etc but Rails just comes with so much stuff that makes it so easy to build things. Solid Queue is one of those things, my whole data process architecture is based on async jobs and it’s really cool to have something that is native to the platform and has no dependencies beyond Postgres which I’m already using anyway.
Besides his role in Jurassic Park, I will always appreciate Sam Neill’s understated but important role as Borodin, the reliable and loyal First Officer in The Hunt for Red October. His character’s death (a change from the book) added emotional weight to the story.
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