Does anyone remember when that one commenter freaked out and declared he would be attempting to marginally increase existential risk by sending right-wingers information about the singularity?
...
Clearly Waitingforgodel was talking about, y'know conservative people - with a conservative general mindset that extends into politics - and not progress-loving, ultra-capitalist right-wingers that get lumped in as "Conservatives". The distinction looks obvious enough to me.
And I'm not at all convinced that we should prefer the latter's enthusiasm to the former's anger.
Clearly Waitingforgodel was talking about, y'know conservative people - with a conservative general mindset that extends into politics - and not progress-loving, ultra-capitalist right-wingers that get lumped in as "Conservatives". The distinction looks obvious enough to me.
That's because you're a Burkean socialist. That distinction is not obvious to a large part of the population.
Glenn Beck also openly states that his books are ghost written. So maybe he's heard of Kurzweil and wants to talk about the singularity, but I'm guessing he's not the one reading SI publications.
This is a surprising amount of information relevant to the Singularity that Glenn Beck is familiar with, including people like Luke, Anna, Eliezer, and Michael.
Could Glenn be part of Lesswrong? Is there a possibility that Glenn Beck has read the LW sequences?
"...smiling down from their huge piles of utility..." Oh my God.
"...smiling down from their huge piles of utility..."
I thought of that too. O.o
Glenn Beck being Eliezer's Finest Apprentice .... God must be a fanfic writer.
Say what you will about Glenn Beck, he is a fairly well read person. It doesn't surprise me so much that he knows of these people, from what I know of him.
Hmm, wow. This poses all sorts of interesting questions. How should this make me update on
Too provincial. The Singularity isn't important because thinking about it clearly and doing something to make it come out well were things SI/LW were involved in early on and this is a feather in our cap that speaks well for our "rationality" and may speak well for others if "they" agree with "us"... because the really interesting things aren't the particular current players, but where the game is headed.
SI/LW were and are important to the degree that they are an educated and good faith source of optimization pressure on the outcome of the singularity. Think of a sort of consequentialist litany... If it brings about better aggregate time-integrated outcomes for mainstream audiences to take the singularity seriously then I want mainstream audiences to take the singularity seriously. If it brings about worse aggregate time-integrated outcomes for mainstream audiences to take the singularity seriously then I do not want mainstream audiences to take the singularity seriously.
The real question is how and when contact with "real politics" will affect the trajectory and outcome of the singularity. If "serious" attention is predicted by...
Wow! the author has read a lot of SI material, including some not meant for a popular audience, and seems to understand it. That is the best mainstream write-up of SI I have seen so far.
I realize that Beck's job is political pontification (I had to look up whether he was 'right' or 'left', not that it matters), but this is a very good sign.
Bringing FAI into mass discussion is not valuable in itself, and may be harmful, but social acceptability for the ideas is important in 'allowing' the smart and rich people to get involved -- not every smart or rich person is willing to swim against the current.
I struggle to think of an idea that Beck's endorsement would improve the social acceptability of. He is a fringe political figure (to the point where he lost his Fox News show). Associating AGI with Beck makes the idea less socially acceptable in the communities most smart and rich people are found.
Edit: So this comment is getting downvotes. Which is interesting because I intended to be making the exact same argument that I made in this part of the thread in comments that are heavily upvoted. I'm guessing the rhetoric in this comment somehow comes off as politically mind-dead in a way those other comments don't. That's either accidental or leaking from cached thoughts I developed when I was heavily political. I don't care about the downvotes but I am really curious to know what word choices resulted in that overly-political impression since I don't think the point in this comment is denotationally different from those in the other two.
Why? The guy is far from stupid and he preaches to the segment of the US population not generally interested in browsing this forum.
He has a extremely poor reputation among a large pool of potential donors, employers, policy-makers, academics and 'serious' people. If you want your ideas taken seriously he is not the figure to have introduce them to the general public. This is true regardless of what his reputation ought to be.
Yes, but most people reading his book are considerably less important (at least, for my purposes) than people watching Laurence O'Donnell when he spends five minutes next week making fun of Glen Beck's book. Or Maureen Dowd's column when she does the same. Obviously if this is just a few pages in a little noticed book there is no problem with it at all (it's basically neutral). If Beck decides to spend a lot of time talking about it, to the point that it becomes identifiable as "one of Beck's ideas", that would be bad. I don't have a well-calibrated idea of how much publicity Beck gets these days or how often he puts out books which is why I'm unsure of the effect.
These seem like low probability concerns
Beck is on the air hours a day, and he has put out about 20 books, with no end in sight. He was a wild-morning radio disc jokey and still uses that bombastic style, and never scrips out what he is going to say. His opponents just cut out tiny samples- the least politically correct stuff, to slam him with. Its very unlikely that Blue team commentators would ever get around to something this serious, when there are far more juicy bits.
This section mentions Kurzweil enough times (over 10 times), with other names, to make it very clear to anyone that this isn't 'beck's' idea.
Beck's main 'sciencey' project he constantly promotes, funds, and fundraisers for is a cancer treatment where the patient is injected with metal nano particles that bond to the malignant tissue. The particles heat up under radio waves, bursting theses cells, leaving the rest of the body untouched. I've seen no evidence of other media outlets connecting this project with him, or any mention of this association at all.
It is my prediction that this will be ignored, as his critics have more to gain by ignoring any pro-sciencey Beck association.
This breaks my model. I mean Beck is a libertarian and libertarians are more friendly than average to transhumanist ideas. Also he is a Mormon, another group memetically compatible with transhumanism.
Still.
I would like confirmation of this text, it may be a hoax.
No, confirmation bias would be if the comment thread were full of people saying "of course Glenn Beck signs off on Singularitarian ideas, this makes perfect sense according to my model of politics" rather than "what the fuck, this breaks my model, I think I'm being trolled somehow".
Hm. This is very interesting to me. I think I am more surprised by Beck coming out for this than I should be. I used to listen to him, when he was far less popular and before he started predicting the end times and being generally insane. I don't necessarily think that Beck believes all of the things that he says, but that he knows that being outlandish brings him more success. And, accurate or not, the singularity is considered outlandish to the average person right now.
But I'm glad for the publicity. It's not like he said anything in that excerpt that I particularly disagree with - which surprised me, given the topic and his religious proclivities. And the vast majority of people reading his book will have a positive opinion of him, as opposed to a negative one, which will lead to more respect and interest in SI, not less.
Let's just make sure if anyone comes to LW referred by Glenn Beck we point to to Politics is the Mindkiller ASAP.
Edited to add: It would have been really interesting to see people's opinions of this if you had withheld the author and not told us until later.
It would have been really interesting to see people's opinions of this if you had withheld the author and not told us until later.
Somehow, I read the excerpt without noting the author. I got about halfway through it and thought it must be a piece that some relatively new Less Wronger had gotten published in a local paper somewhere (i.e. half-decent but not really high-quality, and obviously edited for mainstream publication). Then I looked back at the top and thought,
what.
Beck is a Mormon, and Mormons generally seem a lot friendlier to transhumanist-type ideas than standard Christians.
With self-improving AI we may be able to eradicate suffering and death just as we once eradicated smallpox.
It's one thing to be for technological progress - quite another to be for eradicating Death. Sign that man up for the Bayesian Conspiracy.
People talking about how low status Glenn Beck is need to realize that numerically far more people take Glenn Beck seriously than Kurzweil. Just because the Brahmin (Moldbug's terminology) hate him, dosen't mean he isn't influential and popular in among the class of people who find themselves vulnerable to be mislead to react badly to the Singularity.
We realize that. We just care a lot more about the the views of the Brahmin than your second class of people. Which class of people has the larger microphone? Which class has the money? Which class produces mathematicians? Etc.
The chapter begins with a pretty delightful infelicity, since in 1678 Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was still 130 years away from its premiere. Granted, this is very specialized knowledge available only to professional musicologists like myself and I doubt Beck's publisher can afford my consulting fees.
(I can just imagine the English scientists standing around wondering why this lunatic is inflicting this cacophony on them and looking at them so expectantly.)
The chapter begins with a pretty delightful infelicity, since in 1678 Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was still 130 years away from its premiere.
If Siri made the journey back in time, why are you surprised that an mp3 of Beethoven's 5th made the journey? Siri was created slightly later than Beethoven's 5th.
Somewhat more amazing is that this iPhone has cellular service in the 17th century, and can make video calls to future people. It must be on Verizon.
Well, at the risk of explaining my joke, I only meant to suggest that the opening of the chapter makes it sound like Beck thinks Beethoven's Fifth would have been "famous" and instantly recognizable to Englishmen in 1678. Maybe I should charitably assume that Beck originally had it as "the latest church anthem by Purcell" but his editors made him change it.
pretty sure beethoven's fifth would be impressive coming out of a phone whether or not you knew what it was.
your seventeenth-century friends would worship you
“Your seventeenth-century friends”? My last-year self didn't fully realize how awesome it would be to have a high-res camera, a satellite navigator, a flashlight with a strobe effect, and an Internet connection always with me. I was so proud to hold onto my Nokia 3330. How silly of me.
Finally, a palpable sign of success! I'm so happy that you guys are finally getting your message across :o)
This is interesting in what it suggests for the future.
Romney is a conservative mormon, for example.
Beck's rant proposing that the political left is aligned with a nebulous big-government/big-business anti-technological movement may be mostly rhetorical hot air, but it did make me wonder . ..
Well before AGI is super-intelligent, weaker AGI and stronger narrow AI will likely lead to a hugely disruptive socio-economic disruption. This isn't being discussed much (outside of perhaps a lone blog and book or two).
Actually, this transition is already under way. ...
Beck probably has ghostwriters. That excerpt was probably written by one of them, and could just be something that Beck signed off on because he's vaguely singularity-positive from having interviewed Kurzweil; it might be that Beck never read any of the references, and if that excerpt is is suprisingly high quality, we shouldn't automatically attribute that to him.
These are the kinds of research problems being tackled by the Singularity Institute in America and the Future of Humanity Institute in Great Britain. Unfortunately, our silly species still spends more money each year on lipstick research than we do on figuring out how to make sure that the most important event of this century (maybe of all human history)— the intelligence explosion— actually goes well for us.
Woo woo!
I wonder if this content of Glenn Beck's book with so much SI stuff in it is what sent Will Newsome into the deep end without a paddle recently?
Many years ago, a friend shared with me the putative fact that the Vatican was, at the time, the largest single stockholder in Johnson and Johnson, which was at the time the world's largest manufacturer of prophylactics. (I have no idea if either of these putative facts were ever actually true.) He went on to explain that, when he learned this, everything else began to make sense: whenever he encountered some X that might otherwise seem senseless, he could assure himself that in a world where the Vatican was the world's largest supplier of prophylactics, X made perfect sense.
I feel similarly about the world where Will Newsome is Glenn Beck's ghostwriter.
A (dated) montage on AI from Beck's Radio show. Much less Singularity-friendly, but perhaps he's changed since then.
Unfortunately Kurtweil’s vision, as with that of other adherents of the transhumanist cult, is grossly distorted.
His efforts to underline the very clear exponential pattern of technological development (which has been apparent to many of us for more than half a century and even quantified by Gordon Moore 40 years back) are certainly to be commended.
Nevertheless, Kurtzweil remains completely oblivious to the clear and inevitable extension of biological evolution which, by a process of self-assembly rather than direct human design, which will, within decades...
Glenn Beck was one of the first TV personalities to interview Ray.
The Interview is on YouTube, and is very informative as to Glenn's objectives and Agenda.
Primarily, he wishes to use the ideology behind the Singularity as support for "Intelligent Design." In the inteview, he makes an explicit statement to that effect.
Glenn Beck is hardly "rational" as per the definition of "Less Wrong."
Intelligent Design?
The thought that machines could one day have superhuman abilities should make us nervous. Once the machines are smarter and more capable than we are, we won’t be able to negotiate with them any more than chimpanzees can negotiate with us.
Not the best formulated example. From what I've read in accounts of chimpanzee owners and minders, chimpanzees do negotiate with people. From what I've read and heard about dog owners, it seems to me that dogs also negotiate with their owners.
I suspect that the ability to negotiate requires less int...
From the final chapter of his new book Cowards, titled "Adapt or Die: The Coming Intelligence Explosion."
The citations for the chapter include: