Astral Codex Ten

Aaronson

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Aaronson

Article

Aaronson is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 10, 2021 and January 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “She accused Aaronson of saying that”; “So how can I object when Aaronson turns the same lens on AI?”; “Aaronson’s Five AI Worlds”. It most often appears alongside Scott Aaronson, ACX, Osama bin Laden.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: January 30, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
I was heavily involved in this discourse, more than in any other part of this history, so I am a bad person to have writing about it (some people would omit the "to have writing about it" from that sentence). But I do want to higlight the "climax", which occurred when physics blogger Scott Aaronson mentioned his own experience a few hundred comments down in an unrelated essay. He self-disclosed that he had been really affected by this kind of thing when he was younger, ended up convinced that he was a bad person for feeling sexual attraction to women, and had no idea what to do about it. After becoming suicidal, he was referred to a psychiatrist, who he asked to "chemically castrate" him (obviously he refused). It took him years to get over his hangups and misery enough to ask anybody out, although he was eventually able to get married and have a happy family. After disclosing all this, he said that he remains "97% on board with the program of feminism", but that he wishes they would tone down the condemnation of shy male nerds in particular.
Inline links: mentioned his own experience
In a completely proportionate response, leading feminist Amanda Marcotte published an article in the webzine Raw Story calling out the comment. She accused Aaronson of saying that "women are failing him by not showing up naked in his bed, unbidden. Because bitches, yo". Of being angry that he has to talk to women at all "when they should already be there, mopping my brow and offering me beers and blow jobs". Of believing "women [are not] people, [just] a robot army put here for sexual service and housework". And that's just the beginning! It was whole pages full of this stuff! And most of the other top feminists wrote similar essays that were equally off-the-wall. Somehow there was an entire movement full of people who thought this was a completely accurate and proportional way to respond to things.
Inline links: published an article
I swear I tried to describe Aaronson's comment to the best of my ability without leaving anything out, and I swear I tried to describe Marcotte's article to the best of my ability without taking it out of context. Please follow the links and read both of them in their entirety and see if I'm misrepresenting either. This was just, objectively, an utterly insane thing to have happened. I still wonder whether maybe I dreamt it or something.
Kelly Bets On Civilization
March 07, 2023 · Original source
Scott Aaronson makes the case for being less than maximally hostile to AI development:
Inline links: makes the case
It’s not that you should never do this. Every technology has some risk of destroying the world; the first time someone tried vaccination, there was an 0.000000001% chance it could have resulted in some weird super-pathogen that killed everybody. I agree with Scott Aaronson: a world where nobody ever tries to create AI at all, until we die of something else a century or two later, is pretty depressing.
So how can I object when Aaronson turns the same lens on AI?
24
January 30, 2024 · Original source
Here’s an experiment courtesy of Metaculus, Scott Aaronson, and Boaz Barak. Aaronson and Barak wrote a blog post trying to divide AI scenarios into five categories, which Metaculus summarizes as:
I do think you could probably make a lot of real money in expectation buying Biden on Polymarket - if you were a degenerate gambler with a VPN, of course. Aaronson’s Five AI Worlds One forecasting flaw is that it can only distribute probability between pre-selected outcomes. Usually those outcomes are “yes” or “no” on a binary event.