#Nick Bostrom

[probablyasocialecologist]

[Longtermism] was developed over the past two decades by philosophers at the University of Oxford including Nick Bostrom, Toby Ord and William MacAskill. Bostrom is one of the leading advocates of the idea that advanced artificial intelligence is going to kill everyone on Earth, and he was the subject of harsh criticism earlier this year after an old email surfaced in which he claimed that “blacks are more stupid than whites”. MacAskill’s past is chequered too, as he was the moral “adviser” of Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency billionaire and diehard longtermist charged with perpetrating what American prosecutors have called “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history”. Longtermism is the brainchild of these people – a group of highly privileged white men, based at elite universities, who have come to believe that they know what’s best for humanity as a whole. Longtermists ask us to imagine the future spanning millions, billions, even trillions of years, during which our descendants have left Earth and colonised other star systems, galaxies and beyond. Though Earth may only remain habitable for another one billion years or so, at which point the sun will grow too luminous for us to survive, the universe itself won’t stomp out the flames of life for an estimated 10¹⁰ years – that’s a 1 followed by 100 zeros, an unimaginably long time.

[...]

Bostrom, the father of longtermism, has written that we shouldn’t shy away from preemptive violence if necessary to protect our “posthuman” future, and he argued in 2019 that policymakers should seriously consider implementing a global surveillance system to prevent “civilisational devastation”. More recently, Bostrom’s colleague Eliezer Yudkowsky contended that pretty much everyone on Earth should be “allowed to die” if it means that we might still reach “the stars someday”. He also claimed in Time magazine that militaries should engage in targeted strikes against data centres to stop the development of advanced artificial intelligence, even at the risk of triggering a nuclear war. When I was a longtermist, I didn’t think much about the potential dangers of this ideology. However, the more I studied utopian movements that became violent, the more I was struck by two ingredients at the heart of such movements. The first was – of course – a utopian vision of the future, which believers see as containing infinite, or at least astronomical, amounts of value. The second was a broadly “utilitarian” mode of moral reasoning, which is to say the kind of means-ends reasoning above. The ends can sometimes justify the means, especially when the ends are a magical world full of immortal beings awash in “surpassing bliss and delight”, to quote Bostrom’s 2020 “Letter from Utopia”.

[lesbianchemicalplant]

One of the world’s most celebrated philosophers has apologized for writing a racist email in which he used an appalling racial slur and said he believed it was “true” that “Blacks are more stupid than whites.”

Oxford University Professor Nick Bostrom—the Swedish philosopher famed for his argument that we might be living in a simulation and popularizing the field of “existential risk”—shared the offensive message in an apology posted to his website. In the document dated Jan. 9, Bostrom wrote that he had “caught wind that somebody has been digging” through the archives of an old listserv mailing list called the Extropians, and that he wanted to “get ahead” of someone surfacing the “most offensive stuff” which could be used in “smear campaigns.” [🤪]

[...]

Bostrom, 49, who is white, then shares an extract he wrote from a thread he says concerned “offensive content and offensive communication styles.”

“I have always liked the uncompromisingly objective way of thinking and speaking: the more counterintuitive and repugnant a formulation, the more it appeals to me given that it is logically correct,” the quoted excerpt begins. “Take for example the following sentence: Blacks are more stupid than whites. I like that sentence and I think it is true.

“But recently I have begun to believe that I won’t have much success with most people if I speak like that. They would think that I were a ‘racist’: that I _disliked_ black people and thought it is fair if blacks are treated badly. I don’t. It’s just that based on what I have read, I think it is probable that black people have a lower average IQ than mankind in general, and I think that IQ is highly correlated with what we normally mean by ‘smart’ and ‘stupid’. I may be wrong about the facts, but that is what the sentence means for me. For most people, however, the sentence  seems to be synonymous with: ‘I hate those bloody n------!!!!”

Bostrom did not redact the n-word in his apology.

[...]

Bostrom, who is the director of Oxford’s influential Future of Humanity Institute, does not explicitly apologize for the substance of the comments about relative IQ. He goes on to say that he believes that it is “deeply unfair” that inequalities in access to education, nutrients, and health care lead to unequal social outcomes “including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive capacity.”

(12 Jan 2023)

In addition to being an Oxford professor, Bostrom is also a LessWronger (“rationalist”) on the board of MIRI. I think this is worth mentioning because Race Science Truthing is one of the main planks of LessWronger / Effective Altruist ideology, referring to their belief in eugenics by the euphemism “Human Biodiversity” [HBD], a transparent fig leaf over what Bostrom wrote in the email

(MIRI is Eliezer Yudkowsky & co.’s techno-doomerist “give us money or else an Evil AI will destroy everything, or maybe a Savior AI will torture a simulation of your brain forever” scam foundation, one of many in the LessWronger / Effective Altruism cult-sphere. for some basic information about MIRI and LessWrong, see here and here)

[shortmeteor]

Really great news! They closed the stupid nazi Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, and the lead guy quit.

"The closure of Bostrom’s center is a further blow to the effective altruism and longtermism movements that the philosopher has spent decades championing, which in recent years have become mired in scandals related to racism, sexual harassment and financial fraud. Bostrom himself issued an apology last year after a decades-old email surfaced in which he claimed “Blacks are more stupid than whites” and used the N-word."

[aronarchy]

FYI this has been going on— (cw for screenshots from a racist rightwing blog)

[image IDs: several screenshots from a blog post by Noah Carl, a rightwing “researcher” of racial pseudoscience, regarding “Nick Bostrom’s pre-emptive apology”

2nd screenshot of Carl’s statement shown above:

Nick Bostrom is a philosopher at Oxford who works on topics like existential risk and human enhancement. I haven’t read much of his work, but people I respect rate it very highly. Anatoly Karlin (whom I had on the podcast recently) considers him “the greatest living philosopher”.

A few days ago, Bostrom posted a document titled ‘Apology for An Old Email’ on his website. The document was subsequently shared on Twitter by his colleague Anders Sandberg, apparently at Bostrom’s request. It begins:

> I have caught wind that somebody has been digging through the archives of the Extropians listserv with a view towards finding embarrassing materials to disseminate about people … I fear that selected pieces of the most offensive stuff will be extracted, maliciously framed and interpreted, and used in smear campaigns. To get ahead of this, I want to clean out my own closet, and get rid of the very worst of the worst in my contribution file.

The email in question, which was sent “in the mid 90s” as part of a discussion about “offensive communication styles”, is as follows:

> I have always liked the uncompromisingly objective way of thinking and speaking: the more counterintuitive and repugnant a formulation, the more it appeals to me given that it is logically correct. Take for example the following sentence:

> Blacks are more stupid than whites.

[I cut off the rest of Carl’s screenshot of Bostrom’s email, as it contained more unpleasant antiblack commentary]

3rd screenshot:

You don’t have to apologise for saying offensive things in a setting that people have selected into for the specific purposes of discussing offensive things. Stand-up comedians don’t need to apologise for telling jokes at their shows that it would inappropriate for them to tell in church. Moreover, Bostrom made the comments more than twenty years ago, and he “immediately apologised” at the time! End of story.

Yet as you well know, academia is crawling with offence archaeologists – low-lifes who spend their time combing through other people’s writing with the hope of finding something they can use to ruin their careers. They are not virtuous, and they do not care about the downtrodden. Their aim is simply to “take down” someone whose views they disapprove of – usually someone who contributes far more to society than they do.

In light of this, you can understand why Bostrom wanted to “get ahead” of the controversy by saying his piece pre-emptively. Unfortunately, what he said may have made things worse – not only for himself but for others who might find themselves in similar situations in the future.

4th:

Rather than making the points I made above (and perhaps apologising for needing to bring the admittedly provocative email to people’s attention), he issued an embarrassingly grovelling apology:

> I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago … The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time … and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.

As for his “actual views”, Bostrom thinks “it is deeply unfair that unequal access to education, nutrients, and basic healthcare leads to inequality in social outcomes, including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive capacity”. And he wants you to know that he has given to charities “fighting exactly this problem”, including “the Black Health Alliance”.

The one saving grace of his apology – from the perspective of grown-up intellectual discourse – was that he didn’t denounce the hypothesis that genes contribute to group differences in cognitive ability. “It is not my area of expertise”, he wrote, “and I don’t have any particular interest in the question.” Note: the latter claim is likely to be false; how could you not be interested in it?

/end image ID]

https://twitter.com/rechelon/status/1615072322058076166

[image ID:

tweet by xriskology:

The real victimhood culture is on the political right:

[a screenshot from the same Noah Carl blog post shown above]

thread QRTing their tweet:

“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”

My line is that your career can be destroyed by exposing the truth (that you’re still soft on vapid racial pseudoscience 25 years after endorsing it), then it deserves to be.

I find it deeply disgusting and infuriating the way that so many “rationalists” are framing everything in terms of “he said a bad word and immediately apologized 25 years ago” when that’s not even fucking remotely the issue and would amount to almost no blowback on its own.

I think almost no one gives a shit about Bostrom using the n-word 25 years ago, his apology for that isn’t the issue. The issue is that his recent apology is stunning in what it studiously doesn’t renounce and the way it leaves claims about genetic racial intelligence open.

I’m well aware that Bostrom makes the perfectly fine transhumanist move that “even if racial intelligence disparities were a thing, they’re irrelevant because everyone can individually tinker with themselves in whatever direction” but it’s not enough to merely bracket the claims.

Bostrom’s “apology” sounds perfectly fine to him and his circles because “I am not an expert on racial science” sounds like a renunciation of his claim “blacks are stupider than whites” to them. But it’s anything but! It doesn’t address at all what he still believes.

The fact is that the specific measures the rationalist community chooses to valorize, certain limited performances of rationality, do not exclude shitbags willing to make some contortions so those shitbags flock into their circles, expelling others, and shaping background norms.

I’d be willing to bet at sharp odds that >50% of the self-identified rationalist community believes “there are significant genetic racial disparities in intelligence between the races and unfairly we can’t talk about this.”

That is the problem Bostrom’s non-apology exemplifies

Now there are myriad good mechanisms and reasons to dismiss the object-level claim, but sure, ghosts could exist and it could be true, the biggest problem is the way this “likelihood” has been drastically inflated within the rationalist community by their social dynamics.

The rationalist community is running the proverbial bar where they let nazis in. And if you fail to draw the line with one nazi, you very rapidly just have a nazi bar. Because nazis are large in number, have few other options, and are willing to go through a lot of contortions.

Nazis will absolutely shit themselves silly writing endless papers throwing chaff everywhere like the “200 proofs the earth is not flat” and credulous “rationalist” bros whose whole self-image prioritizes feeling smarter than everyone and holders of esoteric truths love that.

And so we see vast asymmetries and distortions in the epistemic frames of most “rationalists” as a consequence of their sociological dynamics. They proactively read anti-woke folks on the right and then pretty much never delve deep into radical leftist arguments.

They’ll delve into the most esoteric neoreactionary screeds with giant bibliographies of catholic and postmodern writers to find the secret actual argument for an inane conservative position, but then assume every leftist argument is the first related tumblr post they found.

Scott Alexander Siskind BRAGGED that his readership was fair and balanced because he had some socialists and only like 22% identified openly as alt-right or neoreactionary. That is not balance. That is a nazi bar. And that social fabric warps one’s epistemology.

Bostrom honestly thought he was addressing the problem with his racist email in the 90s. And Sandberg (god damnit dude) read it and was like “this is a knockout response I want to be associated with” and hordes of fuckers saw the same.

reply to the thread by zorangecats:

One observation I’ve made is I’ve never seen the rationalist “steelman” for the feminist worldview. An interesting omission.

/end image ID]

https://twitter.com/rechelon/status/1614428504581607424

[image ID:

tweet by Aella_Girl:

Lost some respect for EA due to the response to the Bostrom thing. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised? CEA has always leaned a bit too far towards PR at the expense of integrity. I guess I’d hoped to see some more bravery. Feel like the correct response would have had more nuance.

thread QRTing her tweet:

The lost “integrity” she’s bemoaning is that the Centre for Effective Altruism released a very thin anodyne statement condemning Bostrom’s “words” (presumably just his original email and no detail on whether the racial pseudoscience in particular sucks)

Imagine being so fucking twisted that you see condemning racist shit to any minor degree as a lack of integrity.

These people’s entire morality is about fiercely condemning and ostracizing anyone who ever dabbles in condemning or ostracizing people over shit like racism, rape, and transphobia.

It’s pure Coalition Of The Bad shit.

/end image ID]

[metastable1]

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

[channeledhistory]

Oxford University this week shut down an academic institute run by one of Elon Musk’s favorite philosophers. The Future of Humanity Institute, dedicated to the long-termism movement and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years of operation. Musk had donated £1m to the FHI in 2015 through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence.[...] The center was run by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher whose writings about the long-term threat of AI replacing humanity turned him into a celebrity figure among the tech elite and routinely landed him on lists of top global thinkers.[...] Bostrom resigned from Oxford following the institute’s closure, he said. [...] Bostrom – who popularized the theory that humanity may be living in a simulation [...] spoke about the closure of the institute in a lengthy final report published on its website this week. He praised the work of the center, while also saying that it faced “administrative headwinds” from Oxford and its philosophy department. “The closure is the culmination of process that’s been playing out over several years,” Bostrom said via email. “We were funded initially for three years, back in 2005, and then that got extended a number of times. “Eventually a pressure to conform began bearing down (we were administratively housed within the faculty of philosophy, even though the majority of our research team by this time were non-philosophers), and there was a death by bureaucracy.” [...] A statement on the Future of Humanity’s website claimed that Oxford had frozen fundraising and hiring in 2020, and that in late 2023 the faculty of philosophy decided to not renew the contracts of remaining staff at the institute. Oxford and its philosophy department did not return requests for comment.

[slimethought]

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[arammonnews]

Effective Altruism Contributed To The Fiasco At OpenAI

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was a hero of the Effective Altruism movement, until his empire was … [+] revealed as a giant fraud. (Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images) TNS In a surprising turn of events, OpenAI’s board abruptly fired co-founder and CEO Sam Altman on Friday. Following a backlash on social media, the board appeared to be reconsidering its decision…

[ehj3]

SERF IN SAFARI

Worried about artificial intelligence (AI) be it narrow, general, or super? Some folks don’t and they tell us to look at our mechanical servants and buddies and how dumb they are in spite of being called smart. These folks don’t realize that serving our needs and desires hassle-free and with good cheer was never the goal of the creators and distributors of the technology. You have to ask, “cui…

[markashtonlund]

Last Chapter

[philotreat]

Failures of Artificial Intelligence AI

[garudabluffs]

NICK BOSTROM: In this century probably, we will be building this hugely consequential thing which is the first general intelligence that will be smarter than humans. This involves an enormous responsibility. This is like maybe the most important thing that our species will ever have done on this planet. Giving birth to this new level of intellect.

I'm Nick Bostrom, I am a professor at Oxford University where I run the Future of Humanity Institute. With the unusual mandate of trying to think carefully about the really big picture questions for humanity and the future of earth originating intelligent life.

AI has been a big focus of mine really since my teenage years. It always seemed that if you look around and ask what accounts for why the world is the way it is? Our human world, a lot of it is because we humans have made it so. We have invented all kinds of technologies. And so all these things whether it's jet planes or art or political systems have come into the world through the birth canal of the human brain. That immediately made it plausible to me that if you could change that channel creating artificial brains, then you would change the thing that is changing the world."

READ MORE https://bigthink.com/series/the-big-think-interview/superintelligence/

[newluddite]

Crazy Professors.

I read the BBC news stream regularly because I trust it and it has a global outlook. In Canada the CBC does OK, but they are not quite as good. They have too many people to please.

Recently (April 2023) I watched a quick BBC video thing about a "theory" that posits we are living in a Matrix-like simulation. By that we must all be simulations. This is Promoted by a Dr Nick Bostrom who has taught at Yale and Oxford and such places.

OK, this is utter bullshit. For this to be true it would require that some civilizations computational science (not ours) had fully understood and modeled with equations in total detail every component (to the molecular level) of every person and animal and insect and fish and rock and drop of water in the sea and on and on. His idea is that at some point this will happen.

Since it WILL happen in his universe it probably has happened and many times over so there are many many such simulated worlds out there and since there are so many the probability of YOU being in a real one is rather small. That hurts my head it is so stupid.

His PhD is in philosophy and he should really know how to construct arguments better. Thing is if there is one step in a logical argument that can be disproved then the whole thing collapses. He is lucky in that almost every step of his argument is so shaky it falls apart immediately upon examination. Lucky as people are intimidated by his CV and wont raise the objection. Lucky that media like to hit out with click bait, which this is.

I got lots of objections and recall that it takes only one true objection to pull the legs of the thesis out from under it.

First Objection is the idea that computational power is regularly increasing without limit. It has not done so for about 10 years. Moore's Law stopped being valid about 15 years ago. There have been modest increases in processor speed on the order of 50% more but it is hitting several limits. Current "supercomputers" are just built with large arrays of many rather pedestrian processors not faster ones. My 8 year old laptop is exactly as fast today as the top "gaming" units currently for sale. So that computational power is increasing without limit is False.

Full disclosure Solid State drives which are huge arrays of memory chips have sped up computers quite a bit. That is due to the fall in cost of EEPROM type memory. Storage media is getting bigger, but not the processor speed, that is not increasing.

Second objection is that some ultimate programmers have FULLY understood and modeled everything down to molecular detail. That means it is fully and completely understood. Also that accurate mathematical equations to mimic those things have been developed. Think about the implications of that. Those computational GODs are all knowing. There is nothing left to learn. That leads to the simple problem of why build a simulation of our world as it is with wars and crazy Americans shooting children to exercise their rights. How about a nice place? If this is a programed simulation choices were made. Bad choices.

Third objection is the "many worlds" problem his argument depends on there being many such simulations so that it is where the likelihood comes from. If there are not many worlds then that argument fails. I say it fails. No evidence or true arguments at all for such a meta-reality.

Fourth Objection. How big is this computer system running the simulation? The most powerful AIs run on BIG computers and computer arrays. They are not that smart, but have vast knowledge put into them by many real people. If you take the weight of all those people the machine weighs roughly as much, but is not as smart as that group of people together. So does a computer that could simulate the entire universe weigh as much as the universe or even a significant part of it? Most of the universe is Dark Matter and Hydrogen not the heavy metals and stuff to build computers. Those are minuscule fractions of the total. Basically there is not enough stuff to build a computer system that big. If you extrapolate to many worlds type simulation it takes even more of what does not exist.

As I said it takes only one correct objection to kill the thesis. I have four, I could go on.

Two more things. Occam's Razor is a conceptual tool that basically says if there are several options to describe a phenomena the most likely is the simplest, not the most complex. Dr Bostrom's is transcendentally complex. But it does get him interviews and book sales.

If you are patient here is another viewpoint from a hard scientist.

[allisstupidnow]

Oxford University: Nazi Death Cult

Did you know that Oxford University has a Nazi Death Cult? It’s true. And it’s funded by racist Nazi rich people (like that car company moron). Being in academia is the best way to lose any illusion about academics being “smart”. This philosophy guy here can use big words, but is just stupid (and evil). And Oxford University lets him run a Nazi Cult on their dime. Fucked up swedish nazi. Bald little rat faced asswipe. Imagine “doing philosophizingings” like this little weasel. Imagine. Can you? Privileged asshole shitface wants a pure race, just like the Nazis.

So I guess we learn A) Don’t take the philosophy department at Oxford seriously in any way (if they hire this guy, they are all shitweasels) B) Nazis run Oxford university (only Nazis hire Nazis) C) Academics are mostly stupid. D) This guy is so fucking stupid and confused (and thinks he is hot shit) E) He is also a racist, obviously. F) At Oxford racism is the game. 

Also the supreme court in the US is controlled by billionaire Nazis, so basically the US government is also (for all intents and purposes) Nazi. So they are everywhere, I guess. Fat clown in his black dress sucking off rich people who love Hitler is so stupid wouldn’t even work as a superhero villain character.

[batgovernor]

Sonnet: 'Simulating the Past'

In the far future, humans gone from Earth, now disembodied as self-structured flows of energy and information, woes of the unknown replacing old Death, Birth and even Copulation; when a dearth of physical experience bestows rich glamor on ideas of Nature’s shows– sunset, moon rise, trees, seas–the planet’s worth… they’ll lust after these days we suffer through, marveling at the rich chaotic…