Adam Becker: preference

Transcript context

…I think Could could I give you 1 example? So so like Sure. Yeah. Give me an example. So so, you know, I've I've seen presentations from Timnit, and she's very quick to go to, you know, you're racist, basically, and eugenics and all of this kind of stuff. And it is quite it's quite heavy going. It's quite scary stuff. And and so maybe we should just start there. So is is that part of the problem? Is it just because it's a little bit kind of too intense? Yeah. I mean, I think I think that the that I mean, look, you you know I think that that my sympathies lie significantly more with people like Timnit than with someone like Yadkowsky. And and my issue is, like, I I I think that what's going on is you have people in the effective altruist rationalist community who, you know, want to or feel that they should be able to entertain ideas like human biodiversity without recognizing that actually this is an idea that has been entertained for a very long time and has a really horrifying history and has no good science behind it. And then don't understand why someone gets upset, at the prospect of, you know, having a dispassionate rational argument about whether or not certain people are fully human and entitled to, you know, the same rights and have the same inherent abilities. And and this is, you know, this goes back actually to that thing I was I was attributing to Adrian Daub earlier. This sort of like looking at things outside of the context of history, there is no way to do that. History is something that we all live in. We we you know, as the meme says, we live in a society. Right? And and I think that it is irrational to assume that someone is not going to take that history and that context into account when having a conversation on a particular subject. Especially if that subject ends up being related to, you know, whether they and their friends and family are going to be treated like people. So I I I think that that's where a lot of this comes from is there's there's, you know, a group that feels that rationality means not taking particular pieces of context into account. And another group that's like, why wouldn't we take that into account? And and, of course, my sympathies lie much more with that 2nd group. And and and it's funny as well because, speaking personally, I'm I'm a bit of a weird guy in the tech community because I I do believe in physical situatedness. I think it's about how you got there. It's you know, you can't just abstract yourself out of the city. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and also, I I think that the fundamental impedance mismatch, just as we were saying earlier, is is folks like Timnit are talking about super agency, not individual agency. So she's not necessarily saying you're individually racist. She's saying that you are basically caught up in this larger system of of, you know, power dynamics that you don't that you're not aware of and and you don't have control over. Yeah. I think that's that's probably…

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