Richard Ngo (rationalist circle-jerker and former employee of DeepMind and OpenAI) has finally identified the key problem that AI safety people won’t address: it won’t engage honestly with taboos.
More specifically, AI safety people are failing to acknowledge how much brown people suck. And if AI people can’t acknowledge controversial and obvious truths such as this, what’s going to happen with their LLMs?
Even Scoot, the bravest of the brave truth-tellers, is so fearful of being tarred a racist that he covers his actual beliefs about black people in jokes and irony.
From the replies:
But every man under the age of 30 that I’ve ever met at Lighthaven, that I’ve had the opportunity to speak with privately, has completely and totally integrated IQ differences into their ontology.
The entirety of Lighthaven needs locker insertion
talking about “their ontology” like it’s a mtg deck. “i’m bringing in extra racism from the sideboard”
Also I realize the word often get’s used fuzzilly that way even in general, but I suspect what they mean is epistemology not ontology.
Clearly one of the lesser intellectual crimes in this nazi manifesto, but the way rationalists use “ontology” to mean basically “core set of beliefs” irks me so much!! Though on the upside it leads to awe-inspiring metaphysical horror turns of phrase such as “update one’s ontology”.
Ngo has been playing footsie with race science since as long as I have been skimming LW.
The irony is that in any “normal” space (i.e. not Stormfront) he would have been booted out toot sweet for being a racist. On LW, he’s tolerated, even celebrated, but apparently not enough for his liking. It’s not enough that he can spew race science unopposed by any meaningful reaction, everyone else has to take his position.
Edit
the piece he authored 6 months ago and references here is a doozy too
one comment visible by default
The overwhelming majority of successful civilizations throughout history have been nation-states, at least to some degree, which should be addressed in some capacity by any argument claiming that it’s a suboptimal way to organize a society.
uh… the Roman Empire was a nation-state? Holy Roman Empire? (ok not as good an example) Ottoman Empire? Basically all of India pre-Brits?
A huge part of the French Revolution was the codification of France as “The Nation” of French people, not as the weird personifciation of the king. But somehow I suspect that bringing up the French Republic won’t be hugely popular in this crowd.
/s The United Kingdom of England and Scotland, the Principality of Wales, the subject territory of Ireland (Let alone Normandy and Gascony) were famously lacking in linguistic, religious, and cultural differences back when they were a great power. /s
I feel like the answer to the first is “name one”. He can’t mean any Chinese dynasty, the Mongols, any of the Islamic caliphates, the UK, France. Maybe he means Bronze Age Egypt? They kept hiring all the Nubians they could get though.
pretty sure they’re thinking of a Reich of some sort…
I have bad news for them about how German Austrians felt when suddenly their bosses were all Preuße.
Wasn’t the Anschluss greeted with rapture by many Austrians? Ofc they thought they’d be runnign the show there afterwards…
Many liked the idea in theory (the Führer was Austrian after all). They pretty quickly found that a Tiroler was not the same as a Prussian at all. Its easier to feel part of an imagined community than to actually work with people all over that community.
bloody polish-lithuanian commonwealth for fuck’s sake.
Russian empire…
entirely through forced acquisition and, with notable exception of finland until late XIX century, with very aggressive russification policy.
austro-hungary (i.e post 1848) is a better example.
plus, russian empire has a huge tradition of genocide as imperial policy (including, but not limited to, circassian genocide).
the conquest of other caucasian nations was almost as bad
ah, yes, we must defend “race science”, the heretical political belief that gets millions from techbros that are empowered politically right now due to the rise in fascism. So brave, it’s almost like we’re on the internet 15 years ago talking about Ron Paul /s
Sneerclub was right.
are usually intellectually honest enough to be able to acknowledge that various heretical political beliefs might be true.
Ow you have more heretical political beliefs? Such as? Come on dont be shy. (Place your bets, will it be sexism, pedophilia or antisemitism).
Also odd how they instantly give the game away, are they talking about higher Ashkenazi IQ or the higher Asian IQ scores? Nope. Instantly goes to IQ with a hard r.
A lot of unexplored assumptions as well, race being real, iq tests being real, iq tests showing intelligence, iq being genetic, and all that being scientific, etc. Same issues as the Basilisk.
I had thought lesswrong “merely” has a plurality of racists HBD’rs but judging from the total lack of comments calling out his racists bullshit and the majority of comments advising hiding your power level as a practical matter, I guess lesswrong is actually majority HBDers at this point.
Also, one of his followup comments (explaining why he doesn’t want to just stay mask on like the other lesswrongers) is pretty stupid and gross:
Thanks, good comment. The quick low-effort version that doesn’t require actually writing the posts is that without taking heritable IQ into account, I think you will be confused about:
- Various ways in which post-apartheid South Africa is a bad place to live.
- Why so many countries have market-dominant minorities.
- Why Israel is so good at defending itself even against far larger countries surrounding it (and the last few centuries of Jewish history more generally).
- Why the growth curves for East Asia and Africa looked so different over the last century.
1 and 4 show the continued willful ignorance about the harmful effect of colonialism and neocolonialism. The first part of 3 is obviously huge amount of material support from the US. I don’t know what 2 is talking about, I assume he’s got some stupid and racist interpretation of various historically contingent things.
but right now it doesn’t feel like LW is a place where I can collaboratively make intellectual progress on this very important topic.
Maybe that’s because people don’t feel comfortable when you say you should teach an AI race/iq pseudoscience???
Ngo does not seem to have been invited to speak at Hereticon 1 or 2
