The main effects of the sort of “AI Safety/Alignment” movement Eliezer was crucial in popularizing have been OpenAI, which Eliezer says was catastrophic, and funding for “AI Safety/Alignment” professionals, whom Eliezer believes to predominantly be dishonest grifters. This doesn't seem at all like what he or his sincere supporters thought they were trying to do.

The irony is completely lost on them.

I wasn't sure what you meant here, where two guesses are "the models/appeal in Death with Dignity are basically accurate, but, should prompt a deeper 'what went wrong with LW or MIRI's collective past thinking and decisionmaking?, '" and "the models/appeals in Death with Dignity are suspicious or wrong, and we should be halt-melting-catching-fire about the fact that Eliezer is saying them?"

The OP replies that they meant the former... the later is a better answer, Death with Dignity is kind of a big reveal of a lot of flaws with Eliezer and MIRI. To recap, Eliezer basically concluded that since he couldn't solve AI alignment, no one could, and everyone is going to die. It is like a microcosm of Eliezer's ego and approach to problem solving.

"Trigger the audience into figuring out what went wrong with MIRI's collective past thinking and decision-making" would be a strange purpose from a post written by the founder of MIRI, its key decision-maker, and a long-time proponent of secrecy in how the organization should relate to outsiders (or even how members inside the organization should relate to other members of MIRI).

Yeah, no shit secrecy is bad for scientific inquiry and open and honest reflections on failings.

...You know, if I actually believed in the whole AGI doom scenario (and bought into Eliezer's self-hype) I would be even more pissed at him and sneer even harder at him. He basically set himself up as a critical savior to mankind, one of the only people clear sighted enough to see the real dangers and most important question... and then he totally failed to deliver. Not only that he created the very hype that would trigger the creation of the unaligned AGI he promised to prevent!

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

…You know, if I actually believed in the whole AGI doom scenario (and bought into Eliezer’s self-hype) I would be even more pissed at him and sneer even harder at him. He basically set himself up as a critical savior to mankind, one of the only people clear sighted enough to see the real dangers and most important question… and then he totally failed to deliver. Not only that he created the very hype that would trigger the creation of the unaligned AGI he promised to prevent!

As the cherry on top of this shit sundae, the bubble caused by said hype dealt devastating damage to the Internet and the world at large in spite of failing to create the unaligned AGI Yud was doomsaying about, and made people more vulnerable to falling for the plagiarism-fueled lying machines behind said bubble.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago

And some people are crediting Eliezer as if he predicted this devastating damage and not something completely different. Or they compare LLMs spewing shit to his scenarios of agentically and intellignetly dangerous and manipulative AGIs.

load more comments (1 replies)