Today Sam Harris debated Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸's AI claims. At one point Sam catches Marc contradicting himself, and the resulting word salad is 😙🤌

Full podcast:

Marc’s argumentation is consistently low quality. His claims may be right or wrong, but he’s shown that he wouldn’t be a person capable of distinguishing that via argumentation.

@pmarca I think I'm most offended by him not getting the Norm Macdonald joke. The joke is not that the good guys always win, but that the winners always portray themselves as the good guys. Which basically invalidates his entire argument.

@pmarca My guess is, he gets the joke, but he’s throwing in the joke as an indulgent tangent even though he knows the joke undermines his point, and then he’ll get back to making his point. Similar to @balajis, just throw in tangents for entertainment as if they’re Family Guy cutaways.

@pmarca I’m usually pretty hip to the word salad train - but I think his point is, if you think the LLM is hostile because we fed it all our literature, the most common literature is the good guys winning, therefore nothing to be afraid of? It felt kind of coherent?

@pmarca Lol that is kind of coherent, it’s not maximum word salad, but it’s (1) very dumb and (2) contradicts his original point that AI is super different from humans.

@pmarca I agree Marc got tripped up here but Sam is pointing at something that isn’t a contradiction. The nature of humans is a mix of nature vs nurture. You can’t just assume the nature part is going to come along for the ride if you feed the shog all our tokens.

@pmarca Sure, that’s one way to not contradict oneself. The point of this thread’s clip is just to expose Marc’s consistently low quality of argumentation. But the observation that AI didn’t evolve by nat. selection and therefore “lacks survival instincts” provides very little comfort.

@pmarca Had the same thought listening to the full podcast. Each time Sam called out an obvious bit of flawed logic, Marc would vomit out a response like this that didn't address Sam's point OR simply change the subject.

@pmarca What's very concerning to me is not that the AI doomers are that compelling, but realizing how absolutely terrible the other side is in reassuring everything is going to be fine.