Eliezer created LW in order to sort of spell out his understanding of the Art.
Part of the point of that was to act as a kind of combo summon spell and filter for potential AI risk researchers for MIRI.
The reason was in the wake of Eliezer noticing he had been ludicrously wrong in his thinking about AI, and noticing how hard it is to think about AI clearly, and how AI researchers in particular couldn’t think clearly about the topic clearly.
So the “This is literally unfathomably important, we have to actually solve this thinking clearly thing or literally everything anyone could ever value is going to get permanently destroyed!” tone was woven in from the very beginning.
This is just one example.
So, yeah. It’s always been like this. Just varying degrees of cloaked vs. transparent, with corresponding peripheral folk sometimes floating in who aren’t as much about AI risk.
But the thrust as a whole has always come from this Lovecraftian core.
It’s woven deep in LW’s memetic history.
Eliezer created LW in order to sort of spell out his understanding of the Art.
Part of the point of that was to act as a kind of combo summon spell and filter for potential AI risk researchers for MIRI.
The reason was in the wake of Eliezer noticing he had been ludicrously wrong in his thinking about AI, and noticing how hard it is to think about AI clearly, and how AI researchers in particular couldn’t think clearly about the topic clearly.
So the “This is literally unfathomably important, we have to actually solve this thinking clearly thing or literally everything anyone could ever value is going to get permanently destroyed!” tone was woven in from the very beginning.
This is just one example.
So, yeah. It’s always been like this. Just varying degrees of cloaked vs. transparent, with corresponding peripheral folk sometimes floating in who aren’t as much about AI risk.
But the thrust as a whole has always come from this Lovecraftian core.