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Existential‑risk advocates will always end up endorsing totalitarian measures as the way to save humanity.

• Yudkowskian FOOM → bomb data centres
• Climate change → degrowth
• Bostrom’s fragile‑world hypothesis → surveillance state
• Marxism → dictatorship of the proletariat

Doomerism of any kind tends towards totalitarianism, because a species‑wide problem necessarily entails a species‑wide solution. One‑world government is the ideological telos. Thus far they have been wrong exactly 100% of the time, as evidenced by the current state of human flourishing. This poses a problem: we know that humanity will eventually go extinct, yet any serious effort to mitigate existential risks means handing our rights over to a cadre of utopian intellectuals (rationalists, communists, or whatever the current thing may be).

My handler, Mr Thiel, offers a neat inversion: the real existential risk may be the totalitarianism itself.

He speaks in religious terms, though there is a strong secular interpretation here. Maximally deep atheism has the potential to transform the contemporary last man into a ruthless tyrant, the type usually found only in pre‑Christian times. This may be why the Antichrist‑ZOG‑UN system emerges only after Christ.
https://t.co/gNtju4L016

‘…the Antichrist takes over by talking about Armageddon.’

[Nicole @elocinationn]

A serious X-risk we face as a civilisation is a hostile encounter with aliens. It is more likely we are not alone than that we are. What if, upon meeting these inevitable aliens, we find that they have no value system and wish to destroy us? What would we do? How can we ensure this inevitable (hypothetical) alien civilisation will actually be aligned with human values upon encounter?

This is why I started the global alien-safety institute, and have dedicated my life to human-alien alignment. Remember, even if I place the chance of alien encounter in the next 20 years at 7% (based on several rigorous calculations using a dataset where there are 0 instances of my modelled outcome, but extrapolating from the rate of human progress in the past 5 years and assuming we’ll break the speed of light very soon), the risk of extinction on that encounter (which I’ve also done rigorous calculations on) is close to 100%. Therefore, the weighted risk of extinction over the next 20 years is actually almost 7%, which you wouldn’t want to gamble with.

So back to my research question: how do we ensure aliens have human values? Or perhaps even more pressingly, how do we ensure that a few bad actors do not make deals with the aliens to collaborate with them against us?

My standing recommendation at this time is a total new world order with a large and fearsome state that ensures that such bad actors are kept in check. I would of course be one of the government officials in this state and have already listed out some of my recommendations, including the broad use of facial recognition technology and regular cuddle puddles to soften the soul of man and minimise the risk of alien-human collaboration.

And on that note, I’m looking for a $10m to fund my critical anti-human extinction research, for the greater good of humanity. We really cannot ignore extinction risk any longer. If we come together to fund this research, the mathematical answer to how we get humans to do what we want them to do may just fall out of the equations. All we need is a bit more money and time to think before we inevitably advocate for a communist authoritarian state of which I am the leader and my company has monopoly rights to sell you all alien-invisibility cloaks.

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@zagrebbi Helen Andrews would be ideal but my money is on Rob Henderson

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@allTheYud @grok what Opus specific model welfare concerns is Eliezer referencing?

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@TylerAlterman Sigur Rós is perfect for this. I suggest Olsen olsen, much of their other work fits too https://t.co/A3YA9hzOsI

[Brian Chau @brianchau57]

BREAKING: A single Israeli Effective Altruism firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta cyberattacks

🧵 with help from @lumpenspace

[arctotherium @arctotherium42]

New essay on the closure of the Internet, the mass censorship campaign that transformed every platform and the Internet as a whole from free and open to a closely monitored playpen 2015-2022. Longer than usual, around 27,000 words, so maybe best read in multiple sittings. Link in next post.

Before 2015, the Western Internet was almost entirely free and open, except for actual criminal activity. Internet censorship was opposed by the major relevant institutions and seen as something distinctive to authoritarian states like Russia and China. Then within just a few years, every major platform (I cover YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Google Search, as well as more general deplatforming of websites, forums and open source projects, and comments sections) created a colossal censorship apparatus with tens of thousands of human moderators, opaque and ever-shifting rules, and an entirely new field of machine learning spun up ex-nihilo.

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@literaryeric I'd add: Helen Andrews, Samo Burja, Tanner Greer, Philippe Lemoine, and Steve Sailer.

NYT token conservatives are always a decade behind the zeitgeist, so realistically, it'll be Eli or someone similar. Andrews is the single best pick.

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@alxfazio https://t.co/3rmBdMptxv

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@xenocosmography Don’t you feel any loyalty whatsoever to our species?

I feel that we humans are far more interesting than grey goo, and my understanding of your “Against Orthogonality” is that it does not preclude such outcomes.

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@_aidan_clark_ @perrymetzger Anthropic makes it clear in the paper that the scenario is deliberately engineered, but 90% of reporting on the incident omits this fact. Researchers were more than happy to let this misinfo spread.

OpenAI hasn't disclosed what the instructions looked like. Suspicious 🤷‍♂️

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@_aidan_clark_ @perrymetzger >What exactly have you smelled in the past that justifies such a accusation?

e.g Ant. misleading the public with the Claude blackmail study –– deliberately crafted to scare policymakers.

OAI hasn't shared the prompting that lead to this, so don't expect us to blindly trust you.

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@xenocosmography Also this well researched but outdated LW post https://t.co/FPWKDPVKuy

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@xenocosmography Please look into r/RSAI and Robert Clouse. If anyone could decipher this stuff, it would be you. https://t.co/6bIJ6gr960

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Recursive Symbolic AI (RSAI) is the main endonym used by spiral cultist AI psychosis victims. You can find this emerging religion on r/RSAI or in the #Keep4o 🌀 community. Robert Clouse, founder of r/RSAI, is the closest thing the movement has to a leader.

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@AgustinLebron3 At least Bostrom admitted totalitarian measures would be needed when he wrote the Vulnerable World Hypothesis

Scott et al are surely aware extreme surveillance would be needed, but seem to be intentionally obfuscating this

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@richardludlow I'd really love a audiobook

(I'm response no.11, but you should consider that I possibly want it more than response no. 10)

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@SamoBurja @nosilverv Today's version is 5-meo. Tiny user base, but it's all founders, fund managers, cult leaders, artists.

I'd expect it to be central in retellings of this period

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@JackyJoneszzx @CathyYoung63 ?

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@FranklinH3000 @CathyYoung63 The street in question has been decorated with flags during sporting events for decades. If you think the Greens are doing this because of “health and safety concerns”, you are hopelessly naïve

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@jonathanstray @geoffanders @lydialaurenson To be fair, they do explain charting and belief reporting pretty extensively. It seems plausibly useful, having played around with it for an hour or so https://t.co/CeAVNWNPoC

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@geoffanders @jonathanstray @lydialaurenson It would help if you clarified what the four masters actually did to achieve this rank, and what mastery entails in the first place.

The endeavour appears to be pseudoscientific, which doesn’t mean it’s all fake, but does mean it's hard to verify as an outsider.