Noting out loud that I'm starting to feel a bit worried about the culture-war-like tribal conflict dynamic between AIS/LW/EA and e/acc circles that I feel is slowly beginning to set in on our end as well, centered on Twitter but also present to an extent on other sites and in real life. The potential sanity damage to our own community and possibly future AI policy from this should it intensify is what concerns me most here.
People have tried to suck the rationalist diaspora into culture-war-like debates before, and I think the diaspora has done a reasonable enough job of surviving intact by not taking the bait much. But on this topic, many of us actually really care about both the content of the debate itself and what people outside the community think of it, and I fear it is making us more vulnerable to the algorithms' attempts to infect us than we have been in the past.
I think us going out of our way to keep standards high in memetic public spaces might possibly help some in keeping our own sanity from deteriorating. If we engage on Twitter, maybe we don't just refrain from lowering the level of debate and using arguments as soldiers but try to have a policy of actively commenting to correct the record when people of any affiliation make locally-invalid arguments against our opposition if we would counterfactually also correct the record were such a locally-invalid argument directed against us or our in-group. I think high status and high Twitter/Youtube-visible community members' behavior might end up having a particularly high impact on the eventual outcome here.
First, I suggest that people pay heed to what happened in the movie "Don't Look Up." I don't remember the character names, but the punk female scientist, when confronted during an interview by unserious journalists, went absolutely bonkers on television and contributed significantly to doom. The lesson I got from this is if you do not present serious existential threats in a cogent, sober manner, the public will polarize based on vibes and priors and then lock in. Only the best, most unflappable, polished spokespeople should be put forward, and even then, it might be no use.
Second, you cannot have a meaningful exchange on Twitter. Twitter encourages the generation of poorly reasoned emotional responses that are then used to undermine better reasoned future arguments. I would recommend people just avoid that platform entirely because the temptation to respond to raconteurs like Jezos is too high.
In the spirit of pointing out local invalidities, the first paragraph (while perhaps true) is a display of learning from fictional evidence, which is usually regarded as fallacious.
Therefore I have weak-downvoted your comment. It would be much improved by trying to learn from real-world cases (which might as well support the position).
I'm not really fond of Connor's current culture war-esque public persona. Some relatively minor issues with Yud's 2000s personality alone (it's probably a neurotype thing, not unusual in rare extraordinary people as they were often failed to conform to other children, and also something he did a great job working on over the years, including the routine strategic jettison of the fedora) resulted in like a dozen people who are way too fond of spending way too much of their time hating on him. The internet doesn't particularly dunk on Bostrom.
If everything goes well, the culture war types will probably look back at Connor's persona and think he was very based. But that requires everything to go well, and I'm doubtful that Connor's current persona will be net positive towards making things go well. Not a good look for AI safety; the Openphil and FHI people aren't consistently friendly and thoughtful because they're EA, it's because it's instrumentally convergent to work on your personality if you're serious about saving the world and it's a social primate species.
"entities that are most inclined towards growth"
As always, the word for this entity is "cancer" and it has a well-known tendency to kill its host and evolve around interventions to restrain it.
Previously: Based Beff Jezos and the Accelerationists
Based Beff Jezos, the founder of effective accelerationism, delivered on his previous pledge, and did indeed debate what is to be done to navigate into the future with a highly Worthy Opponent in Connor Leahy.
The moderator almost entirely stayed out of it, and intervened well when he did, so this was a highly fair arena. It’s Jezos versus Leahy. Let’s get ready to rumble!
I wanted to be sure I got the arguments right and fully stated my responses and refutations, so I took extensive notes including timestamps. On theme for this debate, this is a situation where you either do that while listening, or once you have already listened you are in practice never going to go back.
That does not mean you have to read all those notes and arguments. It is certainly an option, I found it interesting and worthwhile to study everything, if only sometimes on the level of an anthropologist, and to be sure I had gone the extra mile and had not missed anything.
There is however another option. Before I give my detailed notes, I will attempt a summary of the important takeaways from the debate, and attempt to build a model of what Jezos and Leahy were claiming and advocating. You can then check the transcript and notes for more details as desired.
Or you can Read the Whole Thing. If you do, I recommend skipping over the summary until after you have read the details, to see if your overall impressions match my own.
Actually Based Beff Jezos (ABBJ)
We were introduced in this debate to a character one could call Actually Based Beff Jezos (Analytical? Academic? Antihero? Apprehensive? Aligned?), or the Good Jezos, or the Motte Jezos, or the Reasonable Jezos.
Sometimes in this debate he is the one talking. Sometimes he is not.
I like Actually Based Jeff Jezos. We still very much have some issues, I think he is still importantly wrong about some very central things, but this would be someone I could be happy to work with or seek truth alongside in various ways. Actually Based Beff Jezos talks price.
Actually Based Beff Jezos starts from a bunch of positions that he takes farther than I would, but where I am much closer to his position than I am to the mainstream position on these questions:
He also acknowledges these (and other) things that I believe to be true:
This is not a complete list. But it is clear that in terms of our models of how the world works, we are actually Not So Different, and Connor observes this as well. All three of our models are remarkably similar, although with very impactful and important differences that change key decisions.
Actually Based Beff Jezos (ABBJ) also poses some excellent questions to Connor, many of which lack good answers.
Bold Based Beff Jezos (BBBJ)
We were also introduced in this debate to a character one could call Biased (Bailey? Borderline? Balanced? Biased? Blunt? Brash? Baiting? Bro?4) Based Beff Jezos, or the Neutral Jezos, or the Civil Jezos.
I like this person a lot less than Actually Based Beff Jezos, especially given his tendency to conflate himself with ABBJ. I wish he would pick a side and fully own or disown each of his positions, would more often talk price, not get too carried away with the physics metaphors and so on.
He is still, however, someone who I would welcome into a civil discussion. It would be great if this was the Based Beff Jezos that was driving the e/acc movement, and more people in such circles acted like this. I could work with that. Alas.
A term used often in the discussion by both participants was ‘bait and switch,’ as opposed to the old motte and bailey.
This was happening a lot. Jezos would claim something very reasonable one minute, then switch to making a far stronger unreasonable (or at least, I believe, false) claim the next, and often switch back and forth several times.
In several cases he says close parallels of ‘all we are saying is’ or ‘all we are asking for is’ when this is very clearly not the case if you expand your search even a few minutes.
Then there is a combination of assertions from BBBJ, and also some assertions that still might be thought to come from ABBJ, where the whole operation goes off the rails.
This list is highly incomplete, but here are the key places where I feel BBJ went off the rails (or at least was saying that which is not) in this debate with his assertions, and which version of him was saying what at the time, apologies for the overlap but I want to be sure I hammer these home properly:
A good summary of key points that I felt were being claimed might be:
Again, none of these lists are complete even based only on the debate. While there were a lot of things that were said several times, there really is a lot going on here.
Caustic Based Beff Jezos (CBBJ)
We must also take note of the third face, the one we see on Twitter, the Combative (Combative? Condescending? Careless? Cruel? Core? Copious? Callous? Crazy? Certifiable?), or the Evil Jezos, the Warring Jezos, the Alter Ego.
That guy is, to put it exceedingly generously, a lying, trolling, raging a*******.
That person did not show up to the debate. He does, however, continuously show up on Twitter, and continues to do so.
His thesis is something like:
Using this strategy, he has, as I noted previously, assembled a motley crew of malcontents willing to indeed put the label in their bio and lend their support, with a broad coalition of reasons for doing so. From my previous post:
So which Based Beff Jezos is real in which senses? We cannot know that, nor can we know that about his followers. We do know how they behave in public.
The good news, again, is that this character did not show up for the debate. Which resulted in a less eventful and dramatic discussion, but a more fruitful one.
What about Connor Leahy?
Connor Leahy takes a consistent, straightforward (and, in relative terms, extreme) position on the issues of technological development and AGI.
That should set the stage. The debate is focused around what Jezos thinks rather than what Leahy thinks, which I found to be the more useful approach.
Around the Debate in 80 Notes
They do extensive highlights before starting, so skip to about 8:30 to start.
Afterwards
I thought this was a good discussion and debate. The participants said so as well.
There are a few key cruxes or questions here that seem fruitful to explore.
These and more are excellent questions that came up in various forms, many asked by Jezos to Leahy. You could write many books, have endless dialogues.
Alas, the follow-up seems to have been the re-emergence of Caustic Beff Jezos.
First, he describes Connor Leahy as grandstanding. I would say that there was far more dissection in the first two hours of Jezos’s positions than Leahy’s, but that seemed appropriate to me, as we are mostly clear where Leahy sits, and he did lay out his positions later. One could say that Leahy was asking somewhat gotcha-like questions in places in places, but I think that there was a clear purpose behind them.
Which is all fine and good, and the invitation to Eliezer Yudkowsky is welcome, whether or not that actually happens.
Then he went back to his old endless stream of memes and vibing, it was actively painful to click through to verify the situation, which, I mean, I do know exactly what I was expecting and no one is forced to follow him, then… well…
What brought that on? He quotes AI Safety Memes having a number of claims that I am not going to check or mention further, but one is both highly on point and very easy to fact check, there is a transcript.
Which is the claim that Connor was calling for violence, and continuing to label his opponents as future terrorists, no matter what everyone constantly says and does?
All right, sure. Look at the context, ideally watch the clip, judge for yourself. Here is the context, with Leahy talking about society needing to have bounds on competition:
This is the fundamental idea of the social contract, and the idea of state monopoly on violence, and there being bounds on competition and our actions. And it is Leahy not pretending the world works other than in the way that it works, that we sleep soundly in our beds thanks to men with guns tasked with ensuring it is so. We agree to never use violence on or kill other people. Civilization and law and peace, putting bounds on competition, are how we are able to have these discussions and use words rather than bullets.
Was this a tactical error on Leahy’s part, opening up the opportunity for Jezos to make this interpretation? Yes, on reflection there was no need for it, it risks more heat than it brings light, it is a mistake, and Jezos at the time reacted exactly correctly to note that it was a mistake but without any actual substantive concern.
Does it reflect any kind of actual threat of violence? No.
Does it represent a call to others to go commit violence? No.
That’s obvious highly overdetermined nonsense. Either it is deliberate nonsense, or a sign of extreme and unhealthy paranoia and disconnection from reality, that was not on display in the debate, but is compatible with other statements attributed to Jezos.
So unfortunately that is where we leave it. We had an appearance by a relatively reasonable person, who made actual arguments and claims that could be explored in more detail, and promises to do exactly that.
Then in public we continued to get something entirely different.
I am happy to continue discussing the questions in the afterwards, or other good questions. And I am glad I did this once. But I see no need to ever do it again.
1
They don’t discuss decision theory, and seem to both implicitly be likely using more of a utilitarian (although explicitly not hedonic utilitarian) and causal decision theory framework than I would use or think is wise, but I will treat this question as well beyond scope here given it did not come up, and handwave with a version of ‘without loss of generality and in a way that allows for virtue ethics or deontology and FDT and so on.’
2
Sounds like fun.
3
He is unclear on whether he also worships the God of Civilization, this is one of the things that kept switching.
4
Anyone want to guess which of these are LLM-generated and which ones I came up with myself, or the same with the C labels? There are at least two of each in both cases.
5
In at least one case ABBJ does briefly clearly admit that free energy and growth are at least not his sole terminal values.
6
I am less confident in the distinction here but I think this is how it goes.
7
Well, actually, he holds back quite a bit throughout, while in another sense never holding back. This is one of those things no wise man actually fully means.