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.
Ngo has been playing footsie with race science since as long as I have been skimming LW.
The irony is that in any “normal” space (i.e. not Stormfront) he would have been booted out toot sweet for being a racist. On LW, he’s tolerated, even celebrated, but apparently not enough for his liking. It’s not enough that he can spew race science unopposed by any meaningful reaction, everyone else has to take his position.
Edit
the piece he authored 6 months ago and references here is a doozy too
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FuGfR3jL3sw6r8kB4/richard-ngo-s-shortform?commentId=9g5QK3Km25fMBHgcK
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uh… the Roman Empire was a nation-state? Holy Roman Empire? (ok not as good an example) Ottoman Empire? Basically all of India pre-Brits?
A huge part of the French Revolution was the codification of France as “The Nation” of French people, not as the weird personifciation of the king. But somehow I suspect that bringing up the French Republic won’t be hugely popular in this crowd.
bloody polish-lithuanian commonwealth for fuck’s sake.
Russian empire…
entirely through forced acquisition and, with notable exception of finland until late XIX century, with very aggressive russification policy.
austro-hungary (i.e post 1848) is a better example.
plus, russian empire has a huge tradition of genocide as imperial policy (including, but not limited to, circassian genocide).
the conquest of other caucasian nations was almost as bad
/s The United Kingdom of England and Scotland, the Principality of Wales, the subject territory of Ireland (Let alone Normandy and Gascony) were famously lacking in linguistic, religious, and cultural differences back when they were a great power. /s
I feel like the answer to the first is “name one”. He can’t mean any Chinese dynasty, the Mongols, any of the Islamic caliphates, the UK, France. Maybe he means Bronze Age Egypt? They kept hiring all the Nubians they could get though.
pretty sure they’re thinking of a Reich of some sort…
I have bad news for them about how German Austrians felt when suddenly their bosses were all Preuße.
Wasn’t the Anschluss greeted with rapture by many Austrians? Ofc they thought they’d be runnign the show there afterwards…
Many liked the idea in theory (the Führer was Austrian after all). They pretty quickly found that a Tiroler was not the same as a Prussian at all. Its easier to feel part of an imagined community than to actually work with people all over that community.