Arguing about gender is like taking OxyContin. There can be good reasons to do it. And even if you start doing it for good reasons, you might get addicted and ruin your life. Walk through San Francisco if you want to see people who ruined their lives with opioids; browse Substack to get a visceral appreciation of the dangers of arguing about gender.
In a world that might be on the verge of radical, even unimaginable changes, how do we justify spending time on such an unsavory field? This post is about a fake answer which I think is funny, but which also has just enough truth to be worth thinking about: I think fetish research can help us understand AI and AI alignment.
We try to explain AI alignment by analogy to human alignment. Instead, it tried to give us instincts that align us with that goal.
The most relevant instinct is sex: most humans want to have sex, an action that potentially results in pregnancy, childbearing, and genes being spread to the next generation. This alignment strategy succeeded well enough that humans populations remain high as of It made us interested in a certain type of genital friction, which was a good proxy for its goal in the ancestral environment.
But once we became smarter, we got new out-of-training-distribution options available, and one of those was inventing contraception so that we could get the genital friction without the kids. Another major alignment failure is porn. People want genital friction associated with attractive people and certain emotions relating to complex relationships.
