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7 Oct 2026 |
I think it’s illicit to anthropomorphise AI as being like humans, which are products of natural selection, when AIs are not products of…
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7 Oct 2026 |
I’m not a creationist, I’m not an intelligent design theorist
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7 Oct 2026 |
That isn’t what an intelligent system does – maximising one simply stated goal with monomaniacal determination.
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7 Oct 2026 |
my interest is not in AI except as a tool to understand natural intelligence.
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7 Oct 2026 |
the paperclip argument, the argument that if you give an AI a goal of solving climate change, it’ll exterminate every last human, because…
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7 Oct 2026 |
just to make sure, to reinforce, this is not a straw man
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7 Oct 2026 |
it’s a non sequitur to say it’ll wanna dominate us, wipe us out, whether accidentally or on purpose.
Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 |
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| Unresolvable |
Prediction |
7 Oct 2026 |
Pinker suspects that robots able to ride mountain bikes will be specially engineered for it, and that ChatGPT will not be able to ride a mountain bike anytime soon, if ever.
Prediction · 7 Oct 2026 |
AI capabilities |
| Mostly true |
Factual |
7 Oct 2026 |
Computers have always been better than humans at some tasks, which is why they were adopted from the 1950s for databases and calculation.
Factual · 7 Oct 2026 |
AI capabilities |
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Not checkable |
7 Oct 2026 |
It is completely reasonable to deny it to AIs.
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7 Oct 2026 |
I think it just replicates the same fallacy of a scala naturae defined by intelligence
Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 |
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| Not researched |
Factual |
7 Oct 2026 |
Pinker was wrong in his earlier view that neural networks alone could not achieve human-matching intelligence including language.
Factual · 7 Oct 2026 |
Their own work or organisation |
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7 Oct 2026 |
The previous iterations, like GPT-2, really were kind of bullshit generators that were statistical approximations.
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7 Oct 2026 |
But there’s nothing that puts an AI in zero-sum competition with us.
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7 Oct 2026 |
naturally look down on the people who are changing society without consulting them, like the people in tech, the people in commerce.
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7 Oct 2026 |
doesn’t mean that they have a built-in motive to use them in order to exploit us, dominate us, exterminate us and so on.
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7 Oct 2026 |
If you actually go back, there was always a kind of coolness to technology.
Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 |
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| Resolved true |
Factual |
7 Oct 2026 |
AlphaGo operated in a closed universe governed by fixed rules, unlike the open-loop real world.
Factual · 7 Oct 2026 |
AI capabilities |
| Not checkable |
Not checkable |
7 Oct 2026 |
it’s not omniscience, it’s not omnipotence, it’s not an uncanny ability to derive the truth of all propositions, the answer to all…
Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 |
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| Unresolvable |
Factual |
7 Oct 2026 |
Airplanes, bridges, cars and chemical plants are not put into service without first being tested.
Factual · 7 Oct 2026 |
AI safety and alignment |
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7 Oct 2026 |
It is absolutely not the case that any rational agent is willing to wreak any collateral damage in pursuit of one goal.
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7 Oct 2026 |
And say I was wrong. I will do that.
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7 Oct 2026 |
we shouldn’t assume that therefore they can solve any problem, such as, you know, persuade a human to make them immortal and never to cede…
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| Not researched |
Factual |
7 Oct 2026 |
David Deutsch, in The Beginning of Infinity, suggests the only method of knowing the world is hypothesis testing against data and reality.
Factual · 7 Oct 2026 |
Philosophy, ethics and society |
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7 Oct 2026 |
if that happened, then I would certainly reconsider.
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7 Oct 2026 |
we can’t take for granted that with enough intelligence that will just automatically be solvable.
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7 Oct 2026 |
Wipe every last one of them out – I’m not gonna shed any tears.
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7 Oct 2026 |
they’re not thinking in language, but they are thinking, you know, with all of the information embodied in language.
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7 Oct 2026 |
If there was a case of, say, instrumental convergence or misalignment, such that an AI system, given a laudable, desirable goal, ended up…
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7 Oct 2026 |
These are gadgets.
Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 |
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| Not researched |
Factual |
7 Oct 2026 |
Pinker said he thinks that, in Gary Marcus's most recent postings, Marcus has not embraced the idea that AI will exterminate every last human being and is concentrating more on foreseeable concrete risks, such as misuse by terrorists or saboteurs.
Factual · 7 Oct 2026 |
AI safety and alignment |
| Not checkable |
Not checkable |
7 Oct 2026 |
But there’s just no question that the current generation can do remarkable feats of intelligence.
Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 |
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| Not researched |
Factual |
7 Oct 2026 |
Scaling of data and compute made AI systems smarter than Pinker would have predicted.
Factual · 7 Oct 2026 |
AI capabilities |
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7 Oct 2026 |
It’s just not a good analogy.
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7 Oct 2026 |
AI intuitions are so contaminated by human intuitions that you really cannot take them at face value.
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26 Sep 2026 |
Let’s agree that the provenance of an idea has little bearing on its validity: whether or not doomers are weird, they could be right.
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26 Sep 2026 |
These debates are a spectator sport, not an epistemic tool.
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| Mixed |
Factual |
26 Sep 2026 |
Nuclear doomsday scenarios in the 1960s set off an arms race with the Soviets rather than disarmament.
Factual · 26 Sep 2026 |
Philosophy, ethics and society |
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26 Sep 2026 |
When I said that the doomer scenarios projected alpha-male psychology onto AIs, this was not an ad hominem insinuation that the proponents…
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| Not researched |
Factual |
26 Sep 2026 |
Pinker's 2018 book Enlightenment Now contains a 31-page chapter titled "Existential Risk," which is his principal contribution to mass discourse on existential risk.
Factual · 26 Sep 2026 |
Their own work or organisation |
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26 Sep 2026 |
I stand by my claim that most of the doomer scenarios are preposterous (beginning with the AI paperclip maximiser that consumes our bodies…
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26 Sep 2026 |
But as rationalists we should agree that attacking an idea should not be confused with attacking a person.
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26 Sep 2026 |
So let me begin by apologising for any inadvertent offence and by emphasising that my admiration for you is immense.
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26 Sep 2026 |
Obviously I believe in defending ideas in the face of criticism.
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26 Sep 2026 |
It was an analysis which proposed that they were applying an inappropriate alpha-male theory of mind (an intuitive psychology) to AI.
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26 Sep 2026 |
I think your brilliance is enviable and your integrity inspiring.
Not checkable · 26 Sep 2026 |
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| Unresolvable |
Factual |
26 Sep 2026 |
Steven Pinker has never criticised or publicly disagreed with Scott Alexander, nor called him names like "paranoid" or "weird moron."
Factual · 26 Sep 2026 |
Their own work or organisation |
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26 Sep 2026 |
We agree on almost everything, including your commitment to rationality and effective altruism (at least in their original, lower-case…
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26 Sep 2026 |
Nonetheless, I stand by them as substantive arguments against the radical claim (I trust you’ll agree that it is radical) that within a…
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| Unresolvable |
Factual |
26 Sep 2026 |
Pinker tweeted a New York Times article in which Cal Newport traced the history of AI doomerism to a Berkeley Rationalist subculture he called "weirder than we realize."
Factual · 26 Sep 2026 |
AI safety and alignment |
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26 Sep 2026 |
I’m just sceptical of the prophecy that AI will murder every last human and of the assumption that sowing such dread is the most effective…
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26 Sep 2026 |
And telling young people they will soon perish en masse has costs in their appreciation of the institutions of modernity, their mental…
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| Resolved true |
Factual |
26 Sep 2026 |
Pinker's arguments on AI risk were laid out five years before the release of LLM chatbots.
Factual · 26 Sep 2026 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Not researched |
Factual |
26 Sep 2026 |
Steven Pinker has taken part in only one formal public debate, alongside Matt Ridley against Malcolm Gladwell and Alain de Botton.
Factual · 26 Sep 2026 |
Their own work or organisation |
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Not checkable |
26 Sep 2026 |
I choose to delope: to fire my pistol into the ground to pre-empt the conflict.
Not checkable · 26 Sep 2026 |
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26 Sep 2026 |
I boosted the article because it addresses legitimate questions.
Not checkable · 26 Sep 2026 |
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| Unresolvable |
Factual |
26 Sep 2026 |
Pinker argued in Enlightenment Now that self-preservation and dominance motives come bundled with intelligence in humans due to natural selection but are not inherent to engineered intelligent systems.
Factual · 26 Sep 2026 |
AI safety and alignment |
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Not checkable |
26 Sep 2026 |
It’s consistent with my argument in Enlightenment Now that prophecies of doom are not effective responses to genuine risks but have…
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26 Sep 2026 |
But the AI X-Risk community itself is facetious about what they insist will be a massacre of humanity (the paperclip memes, the jocular…
Not checkable · 26 Sep 2026 |
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| Mostly true |
Factual |
26 Sep 2026 |
Pinker said he had argued that any intelligent system is a mechanism good at solving some problems but not others, and that it is inherently limited by knowledge about the world attainable only through observation and experimentation.
Factual · 26 Sep 2026 |
AI safety and alignment |
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Not checkable |
26 Sep 2026 |
The dangers of AI are real, including bioterrorism, cyber-sabotage, and unconstrained agents.
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26 Sep 2026 |
these are not aspersions on living people, but on the hypothetical protagonists of the exotic scenarios.
Not checkable · 26 Sep 2026 |
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| Not researched |
Factual |
26 Sep 2026 |
Frontier AI companies, led by alumni of the X-risk community, have released LLMs in a breakneck and sometimes irresponsible way that Pinker did not anticipate.
Factual · 26 Sep 2026 |
AI policy and governance |
| Mostly true |
Factual |
26 Sep 2026 |
The capabilities of LLMs trained on huge datasets are more general than Pinker and almost everyone else would have guessed at the time he laid out his arguments, five years before LLM chatbots were released.
Factual · 26 Sep 2026 |
AI capabilities |
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Not checkable |
26 Sep 2026 |
And the adjectives were not gratuitous insults but juxtaposed as antonyms to the “intelligence” in “artificial intelligence.”
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26 Sep 2026 |
I’m strongly in favour of sober safety evaluations and engineering best practices: independent oversight, mandatory investigations of…
Not checkable · 26 Sep 2026 |
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| Not researched |
Factual |
26 Sep 2026 |
Pinker argued in Enlightenment Now that trading off multiple competing goals is the essence of intelligence, so no genuine AI would cause the havoc imagined in doomer scenarios.
Factual · 26 Sep 2026 |
AI safety and alignment |
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Not checkable |
26 Sep 2026 |
I confess that my tone can be irreverent and my prose purplish, which you suggest is incommensurate with the gravity of the topic.
Not checkable · 26 Sep 2026 |
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| Unresolvable |
Factual |
26 Sep 2026 |
Pinker's counterargument to the criticism that the Enlightenment and the ideal of progress would lead to human extinction, for example through runaway AI, said nothing about maleness, polyamory, paranoia or similar irrelevancies.
Factual · 26 Sep 2026 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Not checkable |
Not checkable |
24 Sep 2025 |
If they try to enforce the letter of the law, it would be too much like a police state.
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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| Mostly true |
Factual |
24 Sep 2025 |
Harvard does not admit students on meritocratic grounds.
Factual · 24 Sep 2025 |
Philosophy, ethics and society |
| Not checkable |
Not checkable |
24 Sep 2025 |
There are other things where it’s not inexorable, it’s not monotonic, but it certainly seems to have a direction.
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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| Own records only |
Factual |
24 Sep 2025 |
Pinker gives many more A grades than he used to, to avoid an empty lecture hall.
Factual · 24 Sep 2025 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Not checkable |
Not checkable |
24 Sep 2025 |
Again, since it depends on nothing but common expectations, it can unravel as when you have a big public demonstration where people see…
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24 Sep 2025 |
Not to mention that in all of the songs, there are some lyrics that are rather misogynistic by today’s contemporary standards, but somehow…
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24 Sep 2025 |
I think a lot of the shaming mobs, a lot of the trolling, a lot of the degradation of discourse in social media comes because of that…
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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| Unresolvable |
Prediction |
24 Sep 2025 |
Pinker said he thinks a world war is less likely today than it was 100 years ago.
Prediction · 24 Sep 2025 |
Other global risks |
| Mostly true |
Factual |
24 Sep 2025 |
Some marine species, such as broadcast spawners, coordinate the release of gametes on the full moon or a fixed number of days after it.
Factual · 24 Sep 2025 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Factual |
24 Sep 2025 |
Human sacrifice, once practised by all ancient civilizations, no longer exists today.
Factual · 24 Sep 2025 |
Philosophy, ethics and society |
| Not researched |
Citation |
24 Sep 2025 |
A corollary of Aumann's agreement theorem, possibly pointed out by Geanakoplos, is that rational agents should not engage in speculative trade.
Citation · 24 Sep 2025 |
Economics and markets |
| Not checkable |
Not checkable |
24 Sep 2025 |
I suggest that eye contact is an instant common knowledge generator.
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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| Mixed |
Factual |
24 Sep 2025 |
More countries are democratic than not, though fewer than 20 years ago.
Factual · 24 Sep 2025 |
Philosophy, ethics and society |
| Not checkable |
Not checkable |
24 Sep 2025 |
It’s not particularly intuitive, in the same way that markets are not particularly intuitive, in the same way that science is not…
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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| Not checkable |
Not checkable |
24 Sep 2025 |
A Schelling point is a choice that people make to coordinate that has no intrinsic value other than the fact that everyone else knows that…
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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| Mostly true |
Factual |
24 Sep 2025 |
Large language models have features, such as hidden layers, that implicitly build in some insights of linguistics.
Factual · 24 Sep 2025 |
AI capabilities |
| Not checkable |
Not checkable |
24 Sep 2025 |
You can’t reasonably expect to make a greater profit by speculating on private information.
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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24 Sep 2025 |
I tend to think that our assessment of a work of art isn’t completely extricable from our knowledge of its provenance
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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24 Sep 2025 |
No government can have snipers on every rooftop and telescreens in every room surveilling you 24/7 with the Stasi ready to pounce on you if…
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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Not checkable |
24 Sep 2025 |
When it comes to just preferences, I don’t think that priors apply or are even meaningful.
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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24 Sep 2025 |
There needn’t be any predictability from outsiders other than it’s likely to pop into the mind of the people involved.
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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| Not researched |
Factual |
24 Sep 2025 |
The war in Ukraine is not as bad as World War I.
Factual · 24 Sep 2025 |
Other global risks |
| Not checkable |
Not checkable |
24 Sep 2025 |
If there wasn’t some suspicion, the weapons would be useless because they wouldn’t be a deterrent.
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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| Not checkable |
Not checkable |
24 Sep 2025 |
there can be no element of just raw subjective preference.
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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24 Sep 2025 |
Everyone knows that everyone knows that money has value. That’s what gives it value, as long as they do.
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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24 Sep 2025 |
I guess I’ll say not gone forever, but certainly in retreat.
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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Not checkable |
24 Sep 2025 |
I suggest that human relationships like friendship, like authority, like romance, like transaction partners are all coordination games that…
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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24 Sep 2025 |
Those assumptions are seldom satisfied, but if they are satisfied, then yes.
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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24 Sep 2025 |
In cases where there’s doubt as to whether this signal has been received or how it’s interpreted, or where there’s no way in which you can…
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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Not checkable |
24 Sep 2025 |
I’m one of those freaks who just does not enjoy the taste of chocolate.
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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| Not checkable |
Not checkable |
24 Sep 2025 |
That’s probably what happens most of the time.
Not checkable · 24 Sep 2025 |
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