Anyone willing to read that wall of text should also read Yudkowsky's original piece on the topic: https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...

The inflammatory conclusion of his 2023 writing was that we need to "shut it all down", escalating to bombing datacenters:

> be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

Now that someone who was an open follower of his words tried to bomb Sam Altman's house and threatened to burn down their datacenters, Yudkowsky is scrambling to backtrack. The X rant tries to argue that "bombing" and "airstrike" are different and therefore you can't say he advocated for bombing anything (a distinction any rationalist would normally pounce on for its logical inconsistency, if it wasn't coming from a famous rationalist figure). He's also trying to blame his hurried writings for TIME for not being clear enough that he was only advocating for state-sponsored airstrikes, not civilian airstrikes, bombs, or attacks. Again that distinction seems like grasping at straws now that he's face to face with the realities of his extremist rhetoric.

I found the last paragraph a fairly great summary of a rather long post:

> How certain do you have to be that your child has terminal cancer, before you start killing puppies? 10% sure? 50% sure? 99.9%? The answer is that it doesn't matter how certain you are, killing puppies doesn't cure cancer.

That was really fascinating. Thanks.

Jeebuz that was long, I only made it through about half of it. But I think he's calling for cold war nuclear treaties style international cooperation. But I believe those mechanisms are broken and unavailable to us for two main reasons:

1. The Western world and especially the US is in the process of destroying the UN and other institutions of international law in order to protect Israel, for reasons that I have tried and failed to understand because the propaganda around it is so dense.

2. The Supreme Court made bribery of politicians legal so now we have AI investors with actual governmental power. All restraint efforts will be blocked by the federal government at minimum for these next 3 crucial years.

I find all of this stuff very interesting but nonetheless these two voices sound like they could never win an election and aspire not to. That is the ultimate test of the worthlessness of a policy - it's all equally worthless until it wins an election, and that's what makes it reality.

AI Doomerism versus Accelerationism are both playful fantasies, it doesn't really matter what measurements or probabilities or observations they make, because the substantive part is the policies they advocate for, and policies are meaningless - all equally worthless - until elected.

What am I saying? The best rebuttal is, get elected.