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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

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Zack Davis doesn't like NYT's Cade Metz comparison of rationalism to religion (www.lesswrong.com)

submitted 19 hours ago by TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

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Excerpt:

ZMD: Yeah, that was actually my second question here. I was a little bit disappointed by the article, but the audio commentary was kind of worse. You open the audio commentary with:

"We have arrived at a moment when many in Silicon Valley are saying that artificial intelligence will soon match the powers of the human brain, even though we have no hard evidence that will happen. It's an argument based on faith."

End quote. And just, these people have written hundreds of thousands of words carefully arguing why they think powerful AI is possible and plausibly coming soon.

CM: That's an argument.

ZMD: Right.

CM: It's an argument.

ZMD: Right.

CM: We don't know how to get there.

ZMD: Right.

CM: We do not—we don't know—

ZMD: But do you understand the difference between "uncertain probabilistic argument" and "leap of faith"? Like these are different things.

CM: I didn't say that. People need to understand that we don't know how to get there. There are trend lines that people see. There are arguments that people make. But we don't know how to get there. And people are saying it's going to happen in a year or two, when they don't know how to get there. There's a gap.

ZMD: Yes.

CM: And boiling this down in straightforward language for people, that's my job.

ZMD: Yeah, so I think we agree that we don't know how to get there. There are these arguments, and, you know, you might disagree with those arguments, and that's fine. You might quote relevant experts who disagree, and that's fine. You might think these people are being dishonest or self-deluding, and that's fine. But to call it "an argument based on faith" is different from those three things. What is your response to that?

CM: I've given my response.

ZMD: It doesn't seem like a very ...

CM: We're just saying the same thing.

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 11 hours ago

ZMD: […] What is the word "near-religious" doing in that sentence? You could have just cut the word and just said, "their concerns about AI", and it would be a perfectly informative sentence.

CM: My job is to explain to people what is going on. These are laypeople. They don't necessarily have any experience with the tech industry or with your community or with what's going on here. You have to make a lot of decisions in order to do that, right? The job is to take information from lots and lots and lots of people who each bring something to the article, and then you consolidate that into a piece that tries to convey all that information. If you write a article about Google, Google is not necessarily going to agree with every word in the article.

ZMD: Right, I definitely understand that part.

What’s fun is that ZMD doesn’t understand how someone could boil down the entire worldview of the rats from millions of words to just “near religious”, not only at the conceptual level of it being culty but also just on the level of efficiency of language.