Richard Ngo (rationalist circle-jerker and former employee of DeepMind and OpenAI) has finally identified the key problem that AI safety people won’t address: it won’t engage honestly with taboos.
More specifically, AI safety people are failing to acknowledge how much brown people suck. And if AI people can’t acknowledge controversial and obvious truths such as this, what’s going to happen with their LLMs?
Even Scoot, the bravest of the brave truth-tellers, is so fearful of being tarred a racist that he covers his actual beliefs about black people in jokes and irony.
Clearly one of the lesser intellectual crimes in this nazi manifesto, but the way rationalists use “ontology” to mean basically “core set of beliefs” irks me so much!! Though on the upside it leads to awe-inspiring metaphysical horror turns of phrase such as “update one’s ontology”.