Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this, and happy new year in advance.)
just after end of manhattan project there was an idea coming from some of manhattan project scientists to dispose american nukes and ban development of nukes in any other country. thatās why we live in era of lasting peace without nuclear weapons. /s
some EAs had similar idea wrt spicy autocomplete development, which comes with implied assumption that spicy autocomplete is dangerous or at least useful (as in nuclear power, civilian or military)
Yeah, my starting position would be that it was obvious to any competent physicist at the time (although there werenāt that many) that the potential energy release from nuclear fission was a real thing - the āonlyā thing to do to weaponise it or use it for peaceful ends was engineering.
The analogy to ārunaway X-risk AGIā is thereās a similar straight line from ELIZA to Acausal Robot God, all thatās required is a bit of elbow grease and good ole fashioned American ingenuity. But my point is that apart from Yud and a few others, no serious person believes this.
I donāt think it was obvious from first principles in 30s that fission works or releases energy, but if provided experimental evidence there was no other way to interpret it. also people had general sense that nuclear materials can be a source of energy because there were attempts at controlling decay, i think in interbellum. the other part is cult thinking and i donāt have links for this particular one
Yeah itās been decades since I read Rhodesā history about the atom bomb, so I missed the years a bit. My point is that even if we couldnāt explain exactly what was happening there was something physically there, and we knew enough about it that Oppenheimer and co. could convince the US Army to build Oak Ridge and many other facilities at massive expense.
We canāt say the same about āAIā.