Thread

1. panny · 1791136228 · focus · HN ↗

   My entire opinion of AI safety has been colored by the fact that I recently learned AI safety is a sex cult.

   <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.today&#x2F;bkOXn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.today&#x2F;bkOXn

   1. bryan0 · 1791137633 · focus · HN ↗

      This reminds me of during covid, when one of the biggest public proponents of vaccines in the UK was having an affair. The anti-vaxers then, instead of focusing on whether vaccines were helpful, focused on the affair. That allowed them to dismiss the pro-vaccine point of view without actually engaging on the merits of their argument.

      1. ianm218 · 1791137820 · focus · HN ↗

         I think the thing is engaging with “ML is mostly math and science engineering, AI is getting better at autonomous math and science, if it gets fully super human the rate of change could be mind boggling” is hard to fully dismiss in the same way you can fully dismiss weird Bay Area people. So that’s why we are seeing the pivot towards the personal attacks on these people.
      2. harvey9 · 1791138208 · focus · HN ↗

         In conducting his affair he was breaking the lockdown rules that he had written, which harmed their credibility. The antivax crowd (I am not a member) quite reasonably extrapolated that if the architect of lockdown was not locking himself down then he wasn&#x27;t too worried about the virus, ergo vaccines were being oversold. When you are a public figure like that then the personal is political.

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