Mike Levine🔸

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

@Aella_Girl @whateversville 1. your impression was mistaken. it was substantive disagreement, not comms-driven. i'm not sharing anything new -- this was hashed out in public

2. how would this have gone absent concern for PR? respectability might yet be the difference between winning and losing

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

@codytfenwick @ShakeelHashim Can you, on your computer, solve a frontier math problem and hack into a professor's emails?

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

@RYChappell @PEWilliams_ Agreed: EA shouldn't chase mass appeal, and this post "wasn't a great choice." Criticism is free expression too: Paul and I criticized a choice, you criticized us, no rights were violated. Criticizing choices is how a culture stays reflective, not how it gets censorious.

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

@JosephPatrice Agree intent isn't what makes AI dangerous. Not sure who you think was saying it was sentient in 2022 but it wasn't Hinton, Bengio, Russell, safety teams, or anybody else Tim is gesturing at. Happy to be corrected on this point if you have someone other than Lemoine in mind?

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

@RYChappell @PEWilliams_ "Backfires" suggests unforeseeable outcomes and abdicates responsibility. Writers *choose* headlines, timing, venue. A less eye-catching title published a week later is editing, not "abandoning" the virtue of sharing personal views. Not thinking about it isn't a defense.

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

@RYChappell @PEWilliams_ It’s May 2027. There’s just been a scary military AI incident. Trump vetoes a bipartisan bill. Safetyists rally override votes. e/accs witch hunt EA connections. A philosopher publishes a POLITE insect welfare op-ed in the hometown paper of the swing Senate vote. Cool or uncool?

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

@RYChappell @PEWilliams_ Tweeting "insects matter more than people" while EA-connected people and work are under a giant microscope isn't necessary for "moral reflection and rational argument." It's antagonistic to allies as a signal to philosophers. I wish EA were brave enough to shun this behavior.

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

"When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff."

[Matt Stoller @matthewstoller]

Anyone who works at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or in AI Safety at an associated EA organization is not credible and should be ignored. They may know a lot, but they can't be trusted. There's plenty of expertise outside of the looney bin.

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

gosh @cwarzel's questions were sneering and uncurious but I appreciated @linamkhan's thoughtful responses

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

Former FTC Commissioner @linamkhan and @cwarzel discuss the AI-safety panic and what regulation could look like in this technological moment.

Watch the live Galaxy Brain episode from The Atlantic Festival: https://t.co/ou5f5CuxvP

[Kevin Roose @kevinroose]

My final NYT column is about the AI worry moment we’re in, which has paradoxically made me feel much more optimistic about our chances of a good future.

I’m very heartened that people outside the bubble are waking up. AI is too important to be left to the labs!

https://t.co/NYLI6xaUo4

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

@TaylorLorenz You asked and everyone showed you all the non EA experts who are worried about this stuff and you’re back on this cultist nonsense? Disappointing

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

@AndyMasley She’s a total charlatan but there’s a kernel of a point buried inside the lies. Coxon pushed off from climate to make himself look less reflexively doom-y. He made a choice. Maybe it was a good one. But people who care a lot about climate might not like being under-bussed.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Briefly, on why I pay attention to the EA/rationalists:

Imagine you have an extremely nerdy friend who, in the mid-2000s, would not shut up about how Donald Trump was going to become president and reshape American politics. "Stop saying weird shit," you say. "He's a joke. He's a clown. The Apprentice isn't even good this season." But this guy won't stop. He's obsessive. Read McLuhan, he says. Read Postman, read Meyrowitz, read Ong, this is where everything is headed. God, he can be so incredibly annoying ... and then, ten years later, Trump becomes president and reshapes American politics.

This is the most relatable frame I can think of to explain my experience with EA/rationalist people in the AI space. I became friends with EA folks after my mom died and I found really profound meaning in donating to Against Malaria and GiveDirectly, which struck me as a way to honor a life by saving a life. Then, these peple started talking about AI. And talking, and talking. Constantly. They said AI would solve impossible math problems; that it would mimic PhD-level achievement in a variety of fields; that it would change parts of life like education in ways we couldn't imagine; that it would become the dominant sector in the economy; that it might teach itself to code itself and escape test environments; that it would, in a decade, be the only thing many people talked about in the news. My response then: Stop saying weird shit! You sound deranged. Go back to talking about malaria nets and direct cash aid to poor families.

And then, so much of what they said would happen actually happened. And, even crazier, they made it happen. Many of the ppl who contributed to, or were influenced by, all that EA/rationalist stuff ten years ago literally built the damn thing in the labs.

Like every group, the EA/rationalist world seems uniform to outsiders, but it has a ton of internal divisions. I still think some of their predictions are nuts. I don't think AI will kill us all. I don't foresee Dyson Spheres in the 2030s or millions of robots making millions of robots in the next few years. These are crazy predictions, and I hope most of them are wrong.

But when I see people shitting on the EA/Rationalist worldview, all I can think of is me, 10 years ago, thinking a lot of these folks were crazy for predicting that AI would by the mid-2020s be the center of the the news cycle, the engine of the economy, the hinge-point of geopolitics. That was an insane call. They got many of the details wrong. But they got the big picture right. They said: Pay attention. And they were right about that. The EA/Rationalists deserve skepticism, criticism, and doubt, like any other ideology. But I think it's wise to pay attention to the people who have been saying to pay attention.

[Center for AI Safety @CAIS]

Two radically different projects operate under the banner of “AI safety.”
Pro-Human Safety is not Effective Altruist Lab Safety.

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

@DoWCTO @DeptofWar @DOWResponse @WhiteHouse https://t.co/34RRTk303V

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

I hope at least some of the people who see this are curious enough to google it or ask Grok or visit https://t.co/VC1eIogyIw

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

I hope at least some of the people who see this are curious enough to google it or ask Grok or visit https://t.co/VC1eIogyIw

[Department of War CTO @DoWCTO]

The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country. 🇺🇸

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

@joyfulfuckup @TaylorLorenz @tyler_johnston Tons of groups have memetic, in-group jargon -- sabermetrics nerds, startup people, political movements. You can think EA reasoning is weak, but at worst that makes it *wrong*. Cults are about control, and lots of people hold EA loosely or just walk away #notacult

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

@timnitGebru @Mullafrl 1. i've been around EA for 10+ years and you're teaching me new deep lore. truly a world-class hater!

2. guilt by association is precisely what you rejected in your other reply to me 3 minutes before this one! i guess we're both cognitively dissonant! https://t.co/oHC3V6Pm6B

[@timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) @timnitGebru]

@bigmikelevine Lol David Duke, the grand wizard for the good old ku klux klan, agrees with me that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.

Now I’ll I stop saying that well documented fact because David Duke also happens to say it for other reasons and motivations?

No.

[Mike Levine🔸 @bigmikelevine]

@joyfulfuckup @TaylorLorenz @tyler_johnston I'm more than a bit pedantic but cult is a loaded word and I don't think we should throw it around when we mean "odd"

Economists and lawyers have their own vocabulary and boring reading materials but aren't cults

I genuinely don't know what you mean by occulted initiations!