Sort of. He believes that if people try to come up with infohazards and then immediately spread them, there’s a nonzero chance that they succeed. It’s unlikely, but still not something to encourage.
(This is not the same thing as “being certain that a minor modification of Roko’s basilisk would produce an evil time-travelling AI,” to be clear.)
The amount of self-importance on display is what makes it sound like gibberish.
A: "I have the most ground-breaking idea ever!"
B: "Okay, let's hear it?"
A: "No, it's too dangerous, it may well destroy the world, but trust
me it's brilliant and completely novel."
How about bitcoin? It's not so much an idea as a piece of software, but being predicted on wasting energy it's going to do a lot of harm. That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas.
I believe that there are other ideas like that, things that set up spirals that are a lot worse than just "destroy energy to make money". Obviously they're not going to be universally compelling, an idea that's dangerous like that in one context might be perfectly safe in another. It depends on the target audience.
>>It's not so much an idea as a piece of software, but being predicted on wasting energy it's going to do a lot of harm. That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas.
It's not a waste if the product the PoW generates is valued as equal to or greater than the cost of generating the PoW, and the market ensures that is the case, as miners cannot operating at a loss.
Where it can be socially harmful is when energy consumers don't pay for the cost of the negative externalities that the energy they purchase created in its generation, but that applies to all energy usage, not just that used in generating PoW.
You should know that costly signalling strategies are widely employed in nature because costly signals are reliable:
Money laundering is useful but that doesn't mean it's good. A Ponzi scheme can generate wealth but it can't generate value. Wealth without value is maybe not wasteful, but it is harmful.
> Where it can be socially harmful is when energy consumers don't pay for the cost of the negative externalities that the energy they purchase created in its generation, but that applies to all energy usage, not just that used in generating PoW.
Bitcoin alone uses as much power as a medium-sized nation. The increased power usage has caused old fossil-fuel power plants to come back online.
1. There is no evidence that cryptocurrency is widely used to launder money
2. Money laundering can improve economic efficiency when the crimes that generate the illicit revenue are socially beneficial, as is the case when people in China escape the Communist government's capital controls, or when people in Venezuela escape their Communist government's steep inflation tax via mandates to use the state's fiat currency.
Even in ostensibly free societies, socially harmful laws that repress the right to voluntarily interact, like price controls on N95 masks that prolonged a shortage in them for months, or heavy taxation to pay the pensions of a bloated and over-paid public sector kleptocracy, can be socially beneficial to undermine.
So your deduction that money laundering or other forms of escape from institutional rules, is socially harmful, is overly simplistic. In some cases it is harmful, and in some cases it's beneficial.
3. Cryptocurrencies are by definition not ponzi schemes. You could argue they're speculative bubbles, but that is itself speculation.
>>Bitcoin alone uses as much power as a medium-sized nation.
Because it generates billions of dollars of currency a year, and its production is costly in energy and affordable in labor. The energy consumption of labor-intensive industries obfuscates the real energy requirements of those industries, by effectively outsourcing the energy consumption to the workers.
It generates zero dollars. Every dollar in all cryptocurrency markets comes directly from someone buying in. Claiming otherwise is basically a blatant lie.
It's not generating dollars. It's generating a digital asset that is worth something. Of course the value of any commodity is based on what people are willing to buy it for, so your observation in no way discredits the point, that Bitcoin mining is generating something that objectively, based on what the market is paying, has value.
> That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas.
That's a good point on its own, but it's not a response. At no time did I or anyone here in this thread assert that "info hazards" do not exist. What is being discussed is whether it's worthwhile to be deferential to a person/community who is making claims of being in possession of an exceptionally catastrophic piece of information that by its nature would preclude public scrutiny on ethical grounds.
I don't think Yudkowsky is making that claim anywhere?
>At no time did I or anyone here in this thread assert that "info hazards" do not exist.
>What is being discussed is whether it's worthwhile to be deferential to a person who is making claims
It's honestly really not that clear what you're trying to discuss, certainly you haven't been making a clear statement like that. I don't think anyone is making claims of being in possession of such an infohazard for one thing, and if there were I don't think anyone would be saying you should be deferential towards someone who claimed to have one, sight unseen.
I think you're arguing with a bit of a straw man? Like no one is being all "let's be deferential towards Yudkowsky because he has the idea equivalent of a nuke". He doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, claim to have the idea equivalent of a nuke.
I assumed you were claiming that info-hazards don't exist because otherwise what exactly are you claiming?
Anyway, if that was your point, granted. Let's not be differential towards people who claim to have info-hazards, unless they can go into a room and make someone laugh themselves to death or something.
Now you've just generalised the statement until it becomes a truism. So you are now essentially claiming the statement is garbage because it is devoid of useful meaning.
