robert darwen @mathdancer1

“Independence, originality, and therefore dissent: these words show the progress, they stamp the character of our civilization… The profound movements of history have been begun by unconforming men. Dissent is the native activity of the scientist… But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.” Jacob Bronowski

@DavidDeutschOxf @patty_never @IMAO_ Yes, interesting to wonder about the first religion of the AGIs.

"I accidentally gave an award to an Osama Bin Laden apologist on the 25th anniversary of 9/11."

@TimandraHarknes It's not today!

@ToKTeacher The anti-sisyphus

Guy who pushed boulders down mountain complains about avalanche.

Louis Anslow @LouisAnslow

3 years ago

Here is Nick Bostrom admitting that AI panic feels out of control right now, "like a wrecking ball" that could "destroy the future"

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It was a great pleasure to join @Miss_Snuffy in one of my absolute favourite pastimes: remembering what a terrible person Rousseau was youtu.be/8FwErQ4j93w?si…

Speaking as a woman and a member of the Church of England, I find it infuriating that the first female Archbishop of Canterbury has turned out to be so spectacularly useless.

RIP Hollywood

@Doylech No but they have the leaders they chose

@DavidDeutschOxf @IMAO_ They could rename the associated texts The Neuro Testament.

“And there is one final asymmetry, the one that ought to settle the matter once and for all. There is no flight from Europe by anyone—no community, no religious minority, no ethnic group, no political tendency—as a consequence of European far-right violence. No Muslims, no Jews, no atheists, no ex-Muslims, no gay men and women are packing suitcases in Frankfurt or Manchester or Marseille and applying for asylum in Cairo or Islamabad or Algiers because European far-right militants have made their lives untenable at home. The traffic runs, on a massive scale, in the opposite direction, and it has run in the opposite direction for two generations. Muslims, Christians, Yezidis, Baha’is, Ahmadiyyas, ex-Muslims, secularists, feminists, gay men and women, and religious minorities of every description are leaving the Muslim-majority world in millions, and they are coming to Europe and the rest of the West. They come because Europe, whatever else it is, is not governed by the doctrinal architecture they are fleeing. The presence of a European far right that occasionally shouts at them, or, at the violent extreme, produces a Breivik or a Tarrant, has not slowed the movement at all. If the two extremisms were symmetrical, the flow would also be symmetrical. It is not even close. The direction of migration by itself—that is, the votes of feet cast in their tens of millions by the very people who know both worlds—is a stronger empirical statement about the relative danger of the two phenomena than any Home Office report, academic study, or half-baked media essay will ever be.” thefp.com/p/ayaan-hirsi-…

@KugelV6 @AvailableViking It's (rightly) the Industrial Revolution for most of us.

Mao – The Bloodiest Idiot Who Ever Lived Between 45 and 80 million dead. Not in war. Not in camps, mostly. In peacetime, in a country at peace with itself, killed by a series of decisions so stupid that a competent farmer could have refuted every one of them in an afternoon. This is what happens when a warlord with no education in anything runs a billion people – and is applauded from Paris while he does it. 1. The sparrows. In 1958 he decided the birds were eating the grain. So the entire country was mobilized to kill them: villagers banging pots and drums for days so the sparrows could not land, until they dropped dead from exhaustion. Hundreds of millions killed. Then came the locusts, which the sparrows had been eating. The harvest was devoured. The country had to import sparrows from the Soviet Union. A single conversation with an ornithologist – or a farmer – would have prevented it. There was no such conversation, because by then nobody told Mao anything he had not already decided. 2. The backyard furnaces. He wanted to overtake British steel production, so ordinary people were ordered to smelt steel in their yards. Millions of households melted down their own pots, tools, door handles and farm implements in mud furnaces, burning their furniture and their doors for fuel. What came out was unusable pig iron, immediately discarded. They had destroyed working tools to produce slag. And they had done it during harvest season, so the crops rotted in the fields while the peasantry played at metallurgy. 3. The planting theories. Close planting: crowd the seeds together, because plants of the same class do not compete. Deep ploughing: turn the soil to two metres, because deeper roots mean bigger yields. Both were nonsense, both were imposed nationwide on the authority of a man who had never farmed, and both destroyed the harvest wherever they were applied. The agronomists who knew better had learned what happened to agronomists who knew better. 4. Then the lie ate the country. Local officials, facing quotas and terror, reported harvests that did not exist. The state requisitioned grain proportional to the fake numbers. So the villages that had reported the biggest imaginary surpluses had the most real grain taken away. People starved beside empty granaries while China exported food to prove the Leap was working. This is the systemic lie in its purest form: a country that had made truth a crime, then starved on the arithmetic. 5. Between 45 and 80 million dead. The range is that wide because nobody counted – counting would have been a political act. And when Mao was informed, at the Lushan conference in 1959, that the policy was killing people, the man who told him was denounced and purged, and the campaign was intensified. There is no version of this where he did not know. There is only a version where knowing did not matter. 6. Then he did it again to the mind. The Cultural Revolution: students beating teachers, children denouncing parents, temples and libraries and instruments burned, a decade spent severing a four-thousand-year-old civilization from its own memory. Not a side effect – the objective. Destroy the transmission and the new man appears. The new man did not appear. Only the wreckage did. 7. And all the while, Paris applauded. The French intelligentsia – professors, editors, philosophers, entire journals – declared Maoism the future, made the Little Red Book fashionable, and treated any report of the famine as reactionary propaganda. They were not deceived; the reports were available. They simply preferred the theory to the peasants. Sartre and his circle backed the Cultural Revolution while it was burning the libraries. They paid nothing. They were never asked to. The lesson is not that Mao was evil, though he was. It is that he was stupid – and that stupidity at the top is only lethal when nothing below can correct it. Kill the price signal, kill the free press, kill the expert who contradicts you, and there is no mechanism left to stop a bad idea about sparrows before it becomes forty-five million funerals. Every system that abolishes correction eventually kills at the scale of its own ignorance. Mao’s ignorance was enormous, and so was his population. And his portrait still hangs over Tiananmen Square.

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland

a week ago

Pol Pot – What Happens When a True Believer Takes Power. He learned it in Paris. And he thought it was for real – not just the moral posturing of irresponsible French intellectuals in their Parisian cafés. That was the difference. And the difference was two million dead. Most

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I’ll never let the world forget how Hamas forced hostage Evyatar David to dig his own grave in front of cameras after torturing and starving him in a dark tunnel in Gaza. How can anyone not stand with Israel after what they saw?

@codybaldwin Currently the only way is by making babies!

@skdh Ja, wortlängenhäufigkeitsverteilungsschweifshalber .

The only solution to AI safety issues is to race at break-neck speed in developing AI guardian systems designed to defend & protect us. The notion of stopping is absurd & unworkable.

BBC Newsnight @BBCNewsnight

5 days ago

"Britain has the opportunity to start that debate and bring countries around the world together." Darren Jones MP says "governments have to step up" amid concerns over AI safety. #Newsnight

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Fascinating to hear from these two landlords - representatives of the rentier class - telling the people of Holborn that conflict in the middle east should decide their vote rather than housing or crime in London

The Green Party @TheGreenParty

a week ago

A strong voice on climate. A strong voice for Palestine. A strong voice for Holborn and St Pancras. Let’s get Zack Polanski into Parliament.

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@DavidDeutschOxf @Henrik_wes For the dramatic logic to work 4. has to read, 'leave a warning for the next intelligent civilization that emerges in the universe'. We have to assume that the message left is not to build AGIs so that the great twist works.