Not opining on this one way or another, but the post buries the lede a bit with a one liner that explains where it's coming from, saying that this is all:

> reasonable evidence that their influence isn't prevalent because they're right, and that they would have ulterior motives for continuing to preach that the world is coming to an end even if evidence showed otherwise.

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amanaplanacanal 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

So how they enjoy their sex lives is dependant on continuing to preach AI catastrophism? I don't buy it. Lots of poly folks out here that probably don't care much about AI one way or another.

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tsimionescu 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

No one is claiming that all poly people have some ties to the AI community.

They make a claim about a specific community in San Francisco, that is tied together by a mix of AI doomerism and sexual relations. And it's not at all surprising or some farfetched claim that people who enjoy having sex with someone might adopt their ideas, at least publicly, for fear of losing that sexual connection.

	▲	deinonychus a day ago \| parent [-]
		>And it's not at all surprising or some farfetched claim that people who enjoy having sex with someone might adopt their ideas, at least publicly, for fear of losing that sexual connection. am i naive? in the direction you pose this, i can't imagine it's that common and if that happens i don't feel sorry for our imagined victim. being a bay area guy who attends so many orgies that AI doomerism rubs off on him? and he keeps spreading it to other people and that some substantial bulk of doomerism is due to this mechanism such that it voids the ideological purity of doomerism? i'm not a bay area guy and i haven't attended these orgies but i hope they have other shit to talk about at the orgies than AI if the relationship is flipped - being genuinely interested in the theory but then being roped into weird sex shit that you didn't ask for, sure that that sounds predatory. a sex cult where AI is instrumental, rather than an AI cult where sex is instrumental. it would be more remarkable imo but i don't know if anyone is saying out loud that's what's happening.

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Sander_Marechal 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah it is. If they stop preaching AI doomerism then they're out of the cult and won't get invited to orgies anymore.

	▲	jaycroft a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Hate to break it to you, but I don't think the AI doomers have a monopoly on orgies. You name the political / belief system and I'll find an orgy for you by 10pm.
	▲	thevinter 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Are you implying that every rationalist that preaches AI doomerism gets invited to orgies?

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vintermann 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Heh, if you think this post buries the lede, have you ever read anything by the community in question? They seem incapable of saying anything without five part Roman-numbered novel length blog posts.

I think this article kind of misses a crucial point. They weren't always AI doomers, that's a thing they picked up along the way. Their core beliefs are 1. That they are the smartest, and 2. That this makes them morally superior because consequentialism (This sort of follows. If you believe in consequentialism, leaving all your decisions to the superior consequence predictor is surely the moral thing to do)

Maybe one day they will stop believing in AI doom, but they will never, ever stop believing they belong to the intellectually and thus morally elect. The day any of them do that they have either broken with the cult or died.

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bombcar 2 days ago | parent [-]

> They seem incapable of saying anything without five part Roman-numbered novel length blog posts.

Maybe that’s why they’re so pissed, ChatGPT’s useless verbosity is threatening to put them out of a job.

	▲	vintermann 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm tempted to say "You're absolutely right" :) yeah, it's no coincidence that AIs sound a bit like them -- a lot of the people doing the instruction tuning are affiliated with these people. And it's also a profound self-identity threat to them if that kind of intelligence is nothing special.