Jayson_Virissimo comments on Open thread, 21-27 April 2014 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Metus 21 April 2014 10:54AM

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Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 23 April 2014 04:39:45PM *  6 points [-]

Tyler Cowen talks with Nick Beckstead about x-risk here. Basically he thinks that "people doing philosophical work to try to reduce existential risk are largely wasting their time" and that "a serious effort looks more like the parts of the US government that trained people to infiltrate the post-collapse Soviet Union and then locate and neutralize nuclear weapons."

My Straussian reading of Tyler Cowen is that a "serious" MIRI would be assembling and training a team of hacker-assassins to go after potential UFAIs instead of dinking around with decision theory.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 24 April 2014 08:42:54AM 8 points [-]

My Straussian reading of Tyler Cowen is that a "serious" MIRI would be assembling and training a team of hacker-assassins to go after potential UFAIs instead of dinking around with decision theory.

A "serious" MIRI would operate in absolute secrecy, and the "public" MIRI would never even hint at the existence of such an organisation, which would be thoroughly firewalled from it. Done right, MIRI should look exactly the same whether or not the secret one exists.

Comment author: gwern 23 April 2014 05:20:05PM 3 points [-]

Excerpts and discussion on MR: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/04/nick-becksteads-conversation-with-tyler-cowen.html

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 April 2014 08:49:41PM 2 points [-]

My Straussian reading of Tyler Cowen is that a "serious" MIRI would be assembling and training a team of hacker-assassins to go after potential UFAIs instead of dinking around with decision theory.

If you ideas of being serious is to train a team of hacker-assassins that might indicate that your project is doomed from the start.

parts of the US government that trained people to infiltrate the post-collapse Soviet Union and then locate and neutralize nuclear weapons."

As far as I know there are still nuclear weapons in the post-collapse Soviet Union.

Comment author: knb 24 April 2014 03:19:52AM 1 point [-]

As far as I know there are still nuclear weapons in the post-collapse Soviet Union.

Pretty clear that he meant the "loose nukes" that went unaccounted for in the administrative chaos after Soviet Collapse.

Comment author: ChristianKl 24 April 2014 02:47:58PM 0 points [-]

How many nuclear weapons did get neutralized in that way?

Comment author: knb 24 April 2014 09:46:41PM *  1 point [-]

Most of this information isn't being released to the public. It is known that the entire Kazakhstan arsenal was left unguarded after the fall of the Soviet Union, and it was eventually secured by the US.

Comment author: ChristianKl 24 April 2014 11:54:12PM *  0 points [-]

How do you know?

The official story that the Kazakhstani tell seems to be:

Kazakhstan followed this move with an even more historic initiative when we voluntarily renounced the world's fourth largest nuclear arsenal, which we inherited on the break-up of the Soviet Union. No country has done more to bring the goals of the NPT closer.

US official history as retold by the Council of Foreign relations seems to be:

The former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan—where the Soviets based many of their nuclear warheads—safely returned their Soviet nuclear weapons to post-communist Russia in the 1990s, but all three countries still have stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium.

Comment author: Lumifer 23 April 2014 04:51:08PM 1 point [-]

training a team of hacker-assassins

A team of slightly more sophisticated Terminators, right?

Oh, wait... :-D

Comment author: Squark 23 April 2014 07:34:50PM 1 point [-]

Hackers / assassins would at best postpone the catastrophe, not avoid it.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 24 April 2014 03:44:33AM 0 points [-]

"the parts of the US government that trained people to infiltrate the post-collapse Soviet Union and then locate and neutralize nuclear weapons."

What is he talking about? Sam Nunn?

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