Ezra Klein is the biggest mark on earth. His newest podcast description starts with:

Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trump’s term, they tell me. We’re not ready.

Oh, that’s what the researchers tell you? Cool cool, no need to hedge any further than that, they’re experts after all.

Read here a worthwhile deconstruction of Hanania’s bullshit by John Ganz: https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/enough

Bari Weiss, IDW star, founder of The Free Press and author of “How to Fight Anti-Semitism” publishes and then approvingly tweets excerpts from not-very-convincingly-ex white supremacist Richard Hanania explaining that

These stiff-armed salutes are not expressions of sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.

Quite uncharacteristically, she deleted her tweet in shame, but not before our friend TracingWoodgrains signal boosted it, adding “Excellent, timely article from Hanania.” His favorite excerpt, unsurprisingly, is Hanania patiently explaining that open Nazism is not “a winning political strategy.” Better to insinuate your racism with sophistication!

Shortly after, realizing he needed to even out his light criticism of his fascist comrades, Woodgrains posted about “vile populism to right of me, vile populism to left of me”, with the latter being the Luigi fandom (no citation that this is leftist, and contrary to the writings of Luigi). To his mind the latter is worse “because there is a vanishingly short path between it and more political murders in the short-term future”, whereas open Nazism at the highest levels of the American conservative movement doesn’t hurt anyone [important].

Woodgrains and fans are taking a victory lap now for getting Vox to take up one of their anti-diversity memes, claiming that FAA endangered lives by adding a biographical assessment to their application process: https://www.vox.com/politics/399804/trump-dei-democrats-faa

Excellent work. These pseudonymous post-liberal Nazis creep me the hell out.

I’ve used this before: https://song.link/i/1169243537

Short answer: “majority” is hyperbolic, sure. But it is an elite conviction espoused by leading lights like Nick Beckstead. You say the math is “basically always” based on flesh and blood humans but when the exception is the ur-texts of the philosophy, counting statistics may be insufficient. You can’t really get more inner sanctum than Beckstead.

Hell, even 80000 hours (an org meant to be a legible and appealing gateway to EA) has openly grappled with whether global health should be deprioritized in favor of so-called suffering-risks, exemplified by that episode of Black Mirror where Don Draper indefinitely tortures a digital clone of a woman into subjugation. I can’t find the original post, formerly linked to from their home page, but they do still link to this talk presenting that original scenario as a grave issue demanding present-day attention.

less than 1%…on other long-term…which presumably includes simulated humans.

Oh it’s way more than this. The linked stats are already way out of date, but even in 2019 you can see existential risk rapidly accelerating as a cause, and as you admit much moreso with the hardcore EA set.

As for what simulated humans have to do with existential risk, you have to look to their utility functions: they explicitly weigh the future pleasure of these now-hypothetical simulations as outweighing the suffering of any and all present or future flesh bags.

Perhaps present-day humans are more obviously aided by questioning literally any aspect of hyper-capital. Better to cast out to the far future and insist (without any real basis) that fellating billionaires is the best course.

Perhaps the beneficiaries of the most efficient public health interventions (the previous focus of the movement) are somehow more difficult for them to identify with…

Unfortunately I think this is a win for those companies; you already had to create an account to interact, but now you can’t even see other people’s complaints without one.

That was a fun little read