Hi, my name is Scott Alexander and here's why it's bad rationalism to think that widespread EA wrongdoing should reflect poorly on EA.

The assertion that having semi-frequent sexual harassment incidents go public is actually an indication of health for a movement since it's evidence that there's no systemic coverup going on and besides everyone's doing it is uh quite something.

But surely of 1,000 sexual harassment incidents, the movement will fumble at least one of them (and often the fact that you hear about it at all means the movement is fumbling it less than other movements that would keep it quiet). You’re not going to convince me I should update much on one (or two, or maybe even three) harassment incidents, especially when it’s so easy to choose which communities’ dirty laundry to signal boost when every community has a thousand harassers in it.

It's not even eugenics to optimize ze genome to make ze uberbabies, OP mostly seems mad people are allowed to have non-procreative sex and couches it in a heavily loaded interpretation of inclusive fitness.

Not so much a random terf as someone who appears to have been trying to use lesswrong struggle sessions in place of trans conversion therapy for a while now.

Or at least that's my diagonal impression, and I'm also not going over that entire maelstrom just to make sure if they are a rotten egg or not.

Top comment by a large margin is an extensive 'your sources are bad and you should feel bad' by some Bob Jacobs, which would be encouraging, if wasnt for every. single. other. comment.

Not a bad read overall (the BJ comment), especially if like me you didnt remember off the top of your head who Lynn is and why he sucks, even if it suffers from the forced rationalist equanimity that dictates you treat obviously disingenuous bulshit with the utmost respect as long as it is presented in a sufficiently formalistic manner and doesn't call for genocide too overtly (I wonder what the deleted Roko comment was about).

clicked one of the livejournal links at random:

Personally, I'd have liked to see him touch on some of the more interesting heresies in our culture, like:

1. Children are sexual creatures

aaaand I'm out.

The best part is that because of blockchain immutability fixing a buggy contract is simply not a thing, you need to deploy a new one, as well as replace any other contracts that refer to the original since they are now compromised as well, all the while paying for gas fees out the ass.

And also as far as I can tell you can't actually stop your users/exploiters from using the broken contract, you can only try to politely tell them not to.

I didn’t know the “eu” in “eugenics” came from greek.

Further fun facts: Eugene (the name) is greek for noble born, but since like most people we did away with nobles a long time ago now eugenic just means to have good manners, so when the modern term 'eugenics' came to Greece it was regreekified into eugonics (ευγονική).

/r/buttcoin seems to have it handled, but it might be worth it to have an alternative just in case, especially if @dgerard@awful.systems is going to be contributing.

It's from today's acx, apparently they offered free samples to the siskind household.

edit: this is not sarcasm.

I thought this looked kind of interesting and not especially grifty apart from the usual anti-FDA narrative up until

The plan is:

Phase 1: (January 2024) Sell to biohackers in Prospera for $20,000.

By good luck, Prospera will soon be hosting a two month super-conference of biotech and crypto entrepreneurs/enthusiasts.

whence my eyes did an uzumaki. And also Aela is somehow involved, apparently.

Give them the benefit of a doubt, sure, maybe they are pandering this hard to an audience that self selects for gullibility and cultbrain and against consumer protections strictly for the greater good, merely accelerating what should have already happened if it weren't for those meddlin' kids at the FDA.

Siskind's always been pretty explicit about it, you get banned if you broach so-called culture war topics in the open threads. They ended up with two subreddits for similar reasons.

Between this and EY seemingly being a huge fan of employing gullibility filters, one might argue that many of the most prominent rationalists aren't necessarily the most candid of characters.

Day 4: Scratchcards

Late to the party and never done advents before, I liked how this problem reminded me that tree traversal is thing, almost as much as I don't that so much of my career involves powershell now.

I'm putting everything up at https://github.com/SpaceAntelope/advent-of-code-2023 except the input files.

Using command abbreviations like % and ? to keep the horizontal length friendly to lemmy post areas, they are expanded in git. ::: spoiler Part 2 in Powershell

    
function calculate([string]$data) {
  # code for parsing data and calculating matches from pt1 here, check the github link if you like banal regexps
  # returns objects with the relevant fields being the card index and the match count
}

function calculateAccumulatedCards($data) {
    $cards = calculate $data # do pt1 calculations

    $cards 
    | ? MatchCount -gt 0 # otherwise the losing card becomes its own child and the search cycles to overflow
    | % { 
        $children = ($_.Index + 1) .. ($_.Index + $_.MatchCount)  # range of numbers corresponding to indices of cards won
        | % { $cards[$_ - 1] } # map to the actual cards
        | ? { $null -ne $_ }  # filter out overflow when index exceeds input length

        $_ | Add-Member -NotePropertyName Children -NotePropertyValue $children # add cards gained as children property
    }

    # do depth first search on every card and its branching children while counting every node
    # the recursive function is inlined in the foreach block because it's simpler than referencing it 
    # from outside the parallel scope
    $cards | % -Parallel {
        function traverse($card) {
            $script:count++        
            foreach ($c in $card.Children) { traverse($c) }
        }
        
        $script:count = 0 # script: means it's basically globally scoped
        traverse $_ 
        $script:count # pass node count to pipeline     
    } 
    | measure -sum    
    | % sum
}


  

:::

Must be another one of those hundred hostile bloggers who inexplicably have it in for EA, according to siskind.

To be clear, it's because he played Edward Snowden in a movie. That's the conspiracy.

'We are the sole custodians of this godlike technology that we can barely control but that we will let you access for a fee' has been a mainstay of OpenAI marketing as long as Altman has been CEO, it's really no surprise this was 'leaked' as soon as he was back in charge.

It works, too! Anthropic just announced they are giving chat access to a 200k token context model (chatgtp4 is <10k I think) where they supposedly cut the rate of hallucinations in half and it barely made headlines.

So far I like best that he was probably fired for not being enough of an AI doomer, i.e. deprioritizing AI safety and diverting too many resources from research to product service, all the while only paying lip service to the ea/rationalist orthodoxy about heading off the impending birth of AI Cthulhu.

Any remaining weirdness can be explained away by the OpenAI board being sheltered oddballs who honestly though they could boot the CEO and face of the company on a dime and without repercussions, in order to bring in an ideologically purer replacement.

It certainly looks like more of the same. Maybe the negative publicity on EA is a silver lining.

This certainly looks like both venture and established capital saying that while it was fun pretending to take EA concerns about AI seriously, it's time to move on.

Also the increasing number of anti-EA effortposts that started cropping up in the OpenAI subreddit over the last few days is deilghtful.

Every ends-justify-the-means worldview has a defense for terrorism readily baked in.

On one hand it's encouraging that the comments are mostly pushing back.

On the other hand a lot of them do so on the basis of a disagreement over the moral calculus of how many chickens a first trimester fetus should be worth, and whether that makes pushing for abortion bans inefficient compared to efforts to reduce the killing of farm animals for food.

Which, while pants-on-head bizarre in any other context, seems fairly normal by EA standards.