Attention Conservation Notice: I listened to this as an audiobook, which means my recollection will be worse as I have no notes. There is an excellent chance you are not the right audience for this book, refer to the bolded sentence below.

Review

The AI Does Not Hate You is a solid introduction to the internet ‘rationalist’ community, and probably the only good one that exists (including things written by rationalists themselves). Chivers strikes a good balance of being sympathetic and seriousness without compromising his objectivity as an external observer.

The very nature of the book means that it’s only really a good fit for a fairly narrow range of people though. There will be a lot of people for whom the ideas that a lot of people in this book are talking about are just too weird, and a sizeable minority of people for whom they’ll be so obvious as to be boring. There’s some kind of Goldilocks Zone between those two, and I’d summarise it as if you have read Slate Star Codex but don’t read LessWrong then this book is a good fit for you, otherwise it isn’t.

Audiobook was a good format for this. I highlight and take lots of margin notes in books when I want to refer back to things, so losing out on that is the main disadvantage of audiobooks for me. The AI Does Not Hate You is conversational and journalistic rather than technical and academic, so the audio format is a good fit. Chapters are fairly short (10-20 minutes of audio) and fairly independent of each other, so it’s easy to bang through one or two at a time while cooking or at the gym or wherever you prefer.

Thoughts

Chivers devotes a chapter to the greater-than-usual number of polyamorous people in rationalist communities, and the fact that this is often offered as evidence in support of the “they’re a cult” hypothesis. He also mentions the theory that polyamoury might just be an adaptation to the fact that rationalist communities are highly gender imbalanced (i.e. mostly male), and that polyamory is a way to ensure nobody gets left out. This doesn’t seem to make sense to me. The Manchester United Football Club and the United States Senate are both highly gender imbalanced, but they both settled on the same non-polyamorous solution, viz. just dating people outside their organisations. The fact that this is not offered as a solution to gender imbalance in rationalist communities seems to indicate either (1) a prohibition on dating outside the group or (2) most members see rationalism as so indispensable to their identity that they couldn’t fathom dating anyone outside the group, neither of which strike me as particularly great arguments against the “they’re a cult” hypothesis.