Conversation Among Cade Metz, Michael Vassar, Jessica Taylor, and Zack M. Davis

(Previously, previously, previously.) 20–21 August 2025 From: Zack M. Davis To: Cade Metz CC: Benjamin Hoffman, Jessica Taylor, Michael Vassar Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2025 14:18:53 -0700 Subject: the importance of probabilistic reasoning Dear Cade (cc Ben Michael Jessica): I think I failed to explain the substance of the Sequences to you—and really, not the Sequences themselves, but the underlying philosophical insights they popularized. I want to try again, because I think it's important to the book you're writing. You want to tell the story of how this internet ideology that no one has heard of has been a driving force in the shadows behind the people making DeepMind and OpenAI and Anthropic, which everyone has heard of. But in order to tell the story of the people, you need to understand enough of the ideology to make sense of why the ideology has affected these people in this way. In our conversations and in your coverage, you've focused on the analogy between religion and belief in the singularity, but I don't think that's an adequate explanation of what's going on in these people's heads. In our 21 March and 22 April conversations, you expressed amazement that Yudkowsky set out in the early 2000s to create a community of people attuned to what he saw as the dangers of AGI, and then actually did it. It's worth asking: why did Yudkowsky have all these effects such that you're writing this book, and not, say, Ray Kurzweil (who I assume you have some familiarity with)? Kurzweil's work (e.g. The Age of Spiritual Machines) is a much better fit to the "techno-religion" angle expressed in your 4 August Times piece, and yet it didn't catch on in the same way. (Kurzweil's Singularity University bought the "Singularity Summit" brand from MIRI in 2012, and you haven't heard of the Singularity Summit since.) I don't think it's that Yudkowsky is somehow that much more charismatic than Kurzweil. I think much of the difference has to do with the philosophical content of "rationalis