Architeuthis @ Architeuthis @awful.systems

It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

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2 yr. ago

stonetoss

What a botched circumcision does to a mf

I read

Most of it was exactly like the example above: Kurzweil tosses a bunch of things into a graph, shows a curve that goes upward, and gets all misty-eyed and spiritual over our Bold Future. Some places it’s OK, when he’s actually looking at something measurable, like processor speed over time. In other places, where he puts bacteria and monkeys on the Y-axis and pontificates about the future of evolution, it’s absurd. I am completely baffled by Kurzweil’s popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination.

and immediately thought someone should introduce PZ Meyers to rat/EA as soon as possible.

Turns out he's aware of them since at least 2016:

Are these people for real?

I’m afraid they are. Google sponsored a conference on “Effective Altruism”, which seems to be a code phrase designed to attract technoloons who think science fiction is reality, so the big worries we ought to have aren’t poverty or climate change or pandemics now, but rather, the danger of killer robots in the 25th century. They are very concerned about something they’ve labeled “existential risk”, which means we should be more concerned about they hypothetical existence of gigantic numbers of potential humans than about mere billions of people now. You have to believe them! They use math!

More recently, it seems that as an evolutionary biologist he apparently has thoughts on the rat concept of genetics: The eugenicists are always oozing out of the woodwork

FWiW I used to read PZM quite a bit before he pivoted to doing youtube videos which I don't have the patience for, and he checked out of the new atheist movement (such as it was) pretty much as soon as it became evident that it was gradually turning into a safe space for islamophobia and misogyny.

Now I really wonder how much EA donation money went into making this.

Mom: We have Eyes Wide Shut style orgies at home

Eyes Wide Shut orgies at home:

Imo because the whole topic of superforecasters and prediction markets is both undercriticized and kaleidoskopically preposterous in a way that makes it feel like you shouldn't broach the topic unless you are prepared to commit to some diatribe length posting.

Which somebody should, it's a shame there is yet no one single place you can point to and say "here's why this thing is weird and grifty and pretend science while striclty promoted by the scientology of AI, and also there's crypto involved".

Maybe he's the guy who goes to the orgy just to hold hands.

In yet another part of the article:

She had found herself in both an intellectual community and a demimonde, with a running list of inside jokes and in-group norms. Some people gave away their savings, assuming that, within a few years, money would be useless or everyone on Earth would be dead.

More totally normal things in our definitely not a cult community.

I wonder how much of that family fortune has found its way into EA coffers by now.

Basically their only hope is that an AI under their control takes over the world.

They are pretty dominant in the LLM space and are already having their people fast tracked into positions of influence, while sinking tons of cash into normalizing their views and enforcing their terminology.

Even though they aren't trying to pander to religious americans explicitly, their millenialism with the serial numbers filed off worldview will probably feel familiar and cozy to them.

Wasn't he supposed to be a romantic asexual at some point?

This was such a chore to read, it's basically quirk-washing TREACLES. This is like a major publication deciding to take an uncritical look at scientology focusing on the positive vibes and the camaraderie, while stark in the middle of operation snow white, which in fact I bet happened a lot at the time.

The doomer scene may or may not be a delusional bubble—we’ll find out in a few years

Fuck off.

The doomers are aware that some of their beliefs sound weird, but mere weirdness, to a rationalist, is neither here nor there. MacAskill, the Oxford philosopher, encourages his followers to be “moral weirdos,” people who may be spurned by their contemporaries but vindicated by future historians. Many of the A.I. doomers I met described themselves, neutrally or positively, as “weirdos,” “nerds,” or “weird nerds.” Some of them, true to form, have tried to reduce their own weirdness to an equation. “You have a set amount of ‘weirdness points,’ ” a canonical post advises. “Spend them wisely.”

The weirdness is eugenics and the repugnant conclusion, and abusing bayes rule to sidestep context and take epistimological shortcuts to cuckoo conclusions while fortifying a bubble of accepted truths that are strangely amenable to allowing rich people to do whatever the hell they want.

Writing a 7-8000 word insider expose on TREACLES without mentioning eugenics even once throughout should be all but impossible, yet here we are.

Yeah, a lot of these TESCREAL exposés seem to lean on the perceived quirkiness while completely failing to convey how deeply unserious their purported scientific and philosophical footing is, like virgin tzatziki with impossible gyros unserious.

Something like a weekly general topic thread would work great for this I think.

Greece has no groups focused on improving fish welfare however, Charity Entrepreneurship is possibly starting a charity focused on advocating for fish welfare improvements Greece.

EAs advocating for fish welfare is about the only thing yet to be seen in this country, awesome.

If you want to influence Greece just use some of the fabled EA obsquatumatillions to buy out the left part of our two party system, they're currently in such shambles they'd barely notice, and it's not like they could do much worse with shrimp rights as a flagship issue.

Looking through the reddit thread, the whole 'Peter Miller has great recall' thing feels off, like it's less an excuse for shoddy preparation and more a genuine grievance that he kept his superior memory genes skills purposefully hidden so they couldn't sent someone who had rolled equal or better brain stats to the debate.

This is in response to PM himself showing up in the thread to say rootclaim actually had his presentation 24 days in advance because the debate was delayed once:

This is true. I think the point is more that, even having seen all your own and your opponents information, a debater with greater recall / working memory can potentially "win" even if their argument is weaker.

Like, of course they lost, mere facts are nothing when the opponent has the IQ advantage, this is how the AI demons get us.

Judge 1 says they, just, uh, decided some past disease outbreaks were lab leaks and never looked to see if that’s actually scientifically debated or just weird Rat Accepted Truths.

Yes but see, an anthrax environment containment breach almost five decades ago at a sprawling soviet weapons facility with biosecurity protocols that consisted of a wink and a handshake totally strengthens our claim that in 2019 some chinese intern accidentally shot up a gm bat virus and wandered off. Bayesian inference is unintuitive like that, you plebs wouldn't understand.

birdsite stuff:

It would have to be something specific but recurring, like tescreal guru accidentally-but-not-really advocates eugenics on main, or yudkowski running afoul of actual AI researchers on twitter and getting roundly mocked.

But where's the fun in canned sneering?

Maybe we should have a weekly thread for meta discussion and sneers that are too low effort to be their own post?

Absolutely, you can't keep pandering to the so called anti-woke and not end up with a lot of incel-adjacent people in your spaces, and the eugenics undercurrent feeds directly into manosphere perceptions about optimizing dating and tying your self worth to your splachnocranium/neurocranium ratio.

More specifically Scott Alexander has pandered pretty aggressively to the Dogged Good Guy demographic, and is also on the hook for being all about the 'merits' of neoreaction, and people like Moldbug and Emil Kirkegaard are semi-regulars in his comment sections.

Also worth noting that before the infamous EY editorial in TIME that called for airstrikes against foreign datacenters to prevent clippy from going rogue, the previous time they covered ea/rat was to report that they appear to have a serious sexual exploitation problem.

On a more speculative note, some staples of the movement like effective polyamory may have come about directly from early rationalist inability to get any on the regular. Apparently if you go reddit spelunking it appears they also went through a phase of trying to brainwash each other optimize into bisexuality to stave off sexual frustration.

in a world of greater legibility, romantic partners would have the conversation about “I’d trade up if I found somebody 10%/25%/125% better than you” in advance, and make sure they have common knowledge of the numbers

To be clear, that world is inceldom and they already have a term for exactly that sort of thing.