LessWrong and Miri mentioned in major German newspaper's article on Neoreactionaries

post by -necate- · 2017-04-14T08:20:53.430Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 13 comments

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of germanies largest newspapers has mentioned LessWrong and Miri today in an article on the neoreactionary movement. I thought this might be interesting for  some of you, so I translated the passages related to LessWrong.

After introducing the neoreactionary movement the article contains the following pararaph:

It did not happen by chance that the seed of this ideology, that now presents itself on various websites were blogs such as Overcomming Bias and Less Wrong, which deal with artificial intelligence and the Idea to reach immortality with the help of technology("Transhumanism"). The "Martial Art of Rationality" which is practised there, tries not mainly to make machines smarter by using the human intellect, but to change human rationality by using the anticipated machine intelligence, according to computer-researcher Eliezer Yudkoswsky. "We need to apply science to our intuitions, we need to use abstract knowledge to correct our mental movements"  

Yudkoswsky has personally distanced himself from the neoreactionary movement, but the approach to see the logic of computers as standard of measurement for the human thinking was key for this movement in its try to distance itself from the current intellectual history that lead to the liberal mainstream. 

It then goes on to talk more about key figures from the neoreactionary movement and then contains a paragraph on Miri.

Yudkowsky founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, with the money of venture capitalist Peter Thiel, which focusses on the development of a benevolent AI. It should be benevolent, because it will have power over people, when it gets smarter than them. For the neoreactionaries, Intelligence is necessarily related to politics. based on the concept of human biodiversity, they believe that social and economical differences are caused and justified by a genetic difference in intelligence among ethnic groups. They reject the idea of a common human nature.

The article then goes on to talk more about the neoreactionary movement and ends by relating it to the trump administration, by mentioning that steve banon has contacted a prominent advocate of the movement.

For those of you who can read german here is the link to the full article: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/die-digital-debatte/neoreaktionaere-im-silicon-valley-14953248.html

What do you think of the article? In my opinion it misrepresents what LessWrong is about and even though they mention that Eliezer distanced himself from the neoreactionaries creates the impression that LessWrong is still an important place for the neoreactionary movement. Also, I do not understand how the part about Miri is related to the rest of the article.  

 

 

13 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.