This whole "we can't trust the people warning us because they're either weirdos or involved" deal is such a strange angle when you can just start from zero, look at what's known to be happening right now, and draw a very straight line to catastrophe.
It's like being concerned Oppenheimer and company are exaggerating when looking at the first nuclear tests at the same time.
Where someone has spent years in the texture of a topic that others only pass momentarily, their ability to increase resolution of their models on that corner of reality and project models forward in time (to imagine), that is the origin of both their generous offers and their compromising biases they might make to the public discourse. It doesn't make them reliable, but what they can imagine is an important in-road to more general social inquiry. Imagination and model-testing is what comes before data in science. If the world moving fast is the danger, maybe we could make more space for imagination in order to survive the acceleration?
You downplaying "imagining", when it is literally one of the gifts of intelligence that makes us worthy of distinction... That feels like a strange posture, I guess? I'm a scientist, but I think data fetishism is one of the dangers to wary of in this accelerating world and culture
At least this is the bias of my brain in this world. I certainly know your perspective is not uncommon, esp in tech and other spectrum-biased spaces.
arcticfox · · focus · HN ↗
It's like being concerned Oppenheimer and company are exaggerating when looking at the first nuclear tests at the same time.
0x20cowboy · · focus · HN ↗
It’s clear what a big bomb could do, but these “whistleblowers” are not showing anything.
They’re like “imagine…”, no show me internal documents or training data or something other than trust me bro.
I can imagine quite a bit. That doesn't mean anything.
patcon · · focus · HN ↗
You downplaying "imagining", when it is literally one of the gifts of intelligence that makes us worthy of distinction... That feels like a strange posture, I guess? I'm a scientist, but I think data fetishism is one of the dangers to wary of in this accelerating world and culture
At least this is the bias of my brain in this world. I certainly know your perspective is not uncommon, esp in tech and other spectrum-biased spaces.