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bryant | on: AI Safety Is Mostly a Sex Cult
Not opining on this one way or another, but the post buries the lede a bit with a one liner that explains where it's coming from, saying that this is all:

> reasonable evidence that their influence isn't prevalent because they're right, and that they would have ulterior motives for continuing to preach that the world is coming to an end even if evidence showed otherwise.

amanaplanacanal | parent | next
So how they enjoy their sex lives is dependant on continuing to preach AI catastrophism? I don't buy it. Lots of poly folks out here that probably don't care much about AI one way or another.
tsimionescu | root | parent | next
No one is claiming that all poly people have some ties to the AI community.

They make a claim about a specific community in San Francisco, that is tied together by a mix of AI doomerism and sexual relations. And it's not at all surprising or some farfetched claim that people who enjoy having sex with someone might adopt their ideas, at least publicly, for fear of losing that sexual connection.

Sander_Marechal | root | parent
Yeah it is. If they stop preaching AI doomerism then they're out of the cult and won't get invited to orgies anymore.
thevinter | root | parent
Are you implying that every rationalist that preaches AI doomerism gets invited to orgies?
MelonArmiger | root | parent | next
Isn't one of them going around offering people "reverse gangbangs" to resign from Anthropic?
tsimionescu | root | parent | next
No, just the ones that are part of this specific community described in the blog post.
watwut | root | parent
No, he is saying that if they stop preaching it, they stop being invited. A -> B does not imply B -> A.
vintermann | parent
Heh, if you think this post buries the lede, have you ever read anything by the community in question? They seem incapable of saying anything without five part Roman-numbered novel length blog posts.

I think this article kind of misses a crucial point. They weren't always AI doomers, that's a thing they picked up along the way. Their core beliefs are 1. That they are the smartest, and 2. That this makes them morally superior because consequentialism (This sort of follows. If you believe in consequentialism, leaving all your decisions to the superior consequence predictor is surely the moral thing to do)

Maybe one day they will stop believing in AI doom, but they will never, ever stop believing they belong to the intellectually and thus morally elect. The day any of them do that they have either broken with the cult or died.

bombcar | root | parent
> They seem incapable of saying anything without five part Roman-numbered novel length blog posts.

Maybe that’s why they’re so pissed, ChatGPT’s useless verbosity is threatening to put them out of a job.

vintermann | root | parent
I'm tempted to say "You're absolutely right" :)

yeah, it's no coincidence that AIs sound a bit like them -- a lot of the people doing the instruction tuning are affiliated with these people.

And it's also a profound self-identity threat to them if that kind of intelligence is nothing special.