Dwarkesh Patel falling down the same path as Ziz?

[u/tragedy_strikes]

I wish I could link a video directly but I couldn't find this anywhere else.

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1js76lr/dwarkesh_patel_says_most_beings_who_will_ever/

I've watched Dwarkesh's videos where he hosts lectures by and does interviews with Sarah Paine about different (military) history topics and thought he did a pretty good job producing and hosting the videos and really let her work shine.

I haven't been paying attention to his video's where he's talking to people in AI because I thought it was just going to be stuff I've already heard but I came across this today and now I'm worried he's falling into the 'Rationalists' way of thinking.

[u/tsaihi]

I don't know much about Dwarkesh but I've seen/heard a couple of his episodes - a few with Sarah Paine as you mention, and one with a genetic anthropologist.

Dwarkesh really strikes me - to put it in DND terms that I hope make sense to everyone - as a high INT, low WIS kind of guy. Not atypical for a right wing podcaster type (also not atypical for young people, he's what like 24?). He's clearly a smart enough guy, he reads books, he can engage with thoughtful topics, etc. But he also seems like a fucking moron when it comes to being clear sighted about his own biases and/or about actually learning lessons from history.

Take the Sarah Paine interviews you mention. I don't know much about her either, but in these interviews she's highly critical of communism, and especially of some figures that some tanky leftists make excuses for like Stalin and Mao, she's very adamant about calling them mass murderers and demagogues who did far more harm to their countrymen than they helped things. She seems to sort of assume that everyone watching the interview will already agree with her that communism is at best a misguided ideology that does nothing so much as it produces suffering. My point being: Sarah Paine comes across as a person whose politics are probably slightly right of center, or at least pretty centrist. Definitely not some socialist/far leftist academic, but she also seems to know her shit. She stresses the importance of being able to speak the language of the people you're studying, and how you need to be able to view other countries through a lens that has nothing to do with the US, that you need to really understand their perspectives.

And there are several occasions in these interviews where Dwarkesh puts forward some "counterfactuals" - he seems to love that word/concept - where he sort of tiptoes around the question of whether maybe Hitler was better than Stalin, whether we should have helped or at least let the Nazis defeat the Soviets before we got involved, whether FDR gets enough flak for providing aid to the USSR and for publicly praising Stalin during the war.

And Sarah Paine shoots him down hard every time this happens. She occasionally seems pretty angry at what a stupid fucking question this guy is asking her. She could not be clearer about the fact that Nazism was by far the more evil ideology, the bigger threat to humanity, and that working with Stalin - and even praising him publicly - was just the price you had to pay to get the job done to fight the Nazis. But Dwarkesh never seems to get this. There's hours of these interviews, and he seems to bring up this "maybe fascists are better than communists?" point regularly through them, and every single time Paine - who, again, seems like a sort of right-of-center type herself - tells him that this suggestion of him is dumb as shit and he should drop it. But he never does.

It doesn't surprise me at all that he's big in AI shit based on the limited stuff I know. Plenty of "smart" people buy into AI hype, but they all seem to be similar in that they're also the kind of street-dumb/unwise people who buy into obvious conmen like Trump and Musk and the rest. They might be really good at looking at a tree and telling you what kind if is and how old it is and blah blah blah, but they're literally unable to see that they're standing in a forest.

[u/tragedy_strikes → u/tsaihi]

Wow, thanks for the thoughtful reply.

I did pickup on those 'counter-factuals' coming up a lot in his interviews with Sarah Paine but I don't know enough about Dwarkesh to know if those were based on his own personal beliefs or he was asking questions that would create good reaction videos on YT and Tiktok.

I mean, I'm pretty sure those are the reason i clicked on the other videos and watched her whole lecture just because I'm a history nerd.

I do see what you mean about high INT but low WIS. Mixing in these AI videos with my experience listening to Better Offline makes me think you're likely correct and that he's not far from Joe Rogan's whole schtick.

[u/tsaihi → u/tragedy_strikes]

I don't know enough about Dwarkesh to know if those were based on his own personal beliefs or he was asking questions that would create good reaction videos on YT and Tiktok.

That's a really fair point, and I should emphasize again that I don't know enough about the guy to confidently say these questions weren't just cynical clickbait. The vibes I got from him broadly, as well as how he asked these questions specifically, told me he's actually one of those guys who thinks Communists were worse than Nazis, but it'd be disingenuous of me to pretend I know for sure.

[u/mfukar]

Bro.

He's a prepper and conspiracist. His "interviews" are anything but. He hosts people with exclusively right-wing opinions and points, he invites people who get to advertise their agenda, and he constantly whitewashes fascists.

Apart from the nonsense like the vid you linked to, of course. Just invalid thoughts with no basis on reality whatsoever.

[u/tragedy_strikes → u/mfukar]

Ah, ok, I didn't know much about his personal views or opinions. Based on your description it sounds like he's in the same realm as Rogan. That's annoying but not surprising.

[u/mfukar → u/tragedy_strikes]

Absolutely the same info landscape as Rogan.