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Comment by sagebird

7 hours ago

public forums should be for exchanging ideas and not a place to virtue signal whatever fad Nextdoor/Facebook emotional bait normies are feeding each other via brain rot feeds.

the public essentially has little interest in preventing human extinction. And tons of interest in preventing data centers under false arguments and performative displays.

What is the point of empowering the public when they are not curious but rather emotional children.

Basically, to empower the public now means, how to bastardize your arguments into an emotional narrative that is palatable to the commoners but probably misses all relevant arguments.

Like if you think x-risk is real, and datacenters are benign/reasonable/can-be-done-in-net-local-positive-way - then you are incentivized to pretend like datacenter are bad because peasants will not entertain your x risk calculus.

It's a herding/shepherding game where the only people willing to play are compromised.

> It's a herding/shepherding game where the only people willing to play are compromised.

This is how all politics is, and frankly the existential risk crowd needs to learn how to play the game instead of complaining about it.

>the public essentially has little interest in preventing human extinction.

yes, most people don't belong to that cult

  • Hasn’t the idea of existential risks entered the kind of “cultural elite Overton window” at this point?

    Bill gates is talking about it, NYT just ran a bunch articles on AI safety concerns, a reporter just asked Trump about it in a one on one.

    Feels unfair to still dismiss it as a cult LessWrong thing at this point.