TinyTimmyTokyo @ TinyTimmyTokyo @awful.systems

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21

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140

Joined

2 yr. ago

I see him more as a dupe than a Cassandra. I heard him on a podcast a couple months ago talking about how he's been having conversations with Bay Area AI researchers who are "really scared" about what they're creating. He also spent quite a bit of time talking up Geoffrey Hinton's AI doomer tour. So while I don't think Ezra's one of the Yuddite rationalists, he's clearly been influenced by them. Given his historical ties to effective altruism, this isn't surprising to me.

I mean, of course he loves unfettered technology and capitalism. He's a fucking billionaire. He hit the demographic lottery.

EDIT: I just noticed his list of "techno-optimist" patrons. On the list? John Galt. LMAO. The whole list is pretty much an orgy of libertarians.

Roko's authoritative-toned "aktshually..." response to Annie's claims have me fuming. I don't know why. I mean I've known for years that this guy is a total boil on the ass of humanity. And yet he still manages to shock with the worst possible take on a topic -- even when the topic is sexual abuse of a child. If, like Roko, I were to play armchair psychiatrist, I'd diagnose him as a sociopath with psychopathic tendencies. But I'm not. So I won't.

Lots of fascinating links in this article. This link in particular was fascinating:

If you're searching for Scott Siskind... I am Scott Siskind from Ann Arbor, Michigan. There used to be more things on this webpage. Right now I'm using it to spread the message that there are multiple statements being falsely attributed to me on the Internet. Somebody who doesn't like me - I am not sure who, but I work in mental health and guess this is sort of a professional hazard - has been trying to systematically discredit me by posting racist and profanity-laden things under my name. Some of the comments make some effort to convince, like linking back to my website. The end result is that if you Google me to try to find out what I am like, you will probably end up seeing angry racist profanity-laden comments made under my name. These are not mine.

Does anyone know the backstory here? This reads to me like a "hackers ate my password" story -- the kind of ass-covering someone might concoct after their racist writings accidentally leaked onto the internet.

EDIT: This seems to be related to the stuff Topher Brennan revealed? Except it was written many years before Topher's revelations. It's confusing...

Some nice sneer:

I can understand Aella wanting to fund a project so she never has to brush her teeth again

Probably also heavily interested in Never Take a Shower Again research

https://nitter.net/nunyabeeswaxfed/status/1705695595413790814

Here's a link to the original.

I wonder if he's ever applied this advice to himself. Because one could argue that trauma was a significant factor in his obsession with transhumanism and the singularity.

When Yud's younger brother died tragically at age 19, it clearly traumatized him. In this case, X was "the death of my little brother". From this he learned Y: to be angry and fearful of death ("You do not make peace with Death!"). His fascination with the singularity can be seen in this light as a wish to cheat death, while his more recent AI doomerism is the singularity's fatalistic counterpart: an eschatological distortion and acceleration of the reality that death comes for us all.

This part of the first comment got an audible guffaw out of me:

I think that there's been a failure to inhabit the least convenient possible world°, and the general distribution over possible outcomes, and correspondingly attempt to move to the pareto-frontier of outcomes assuming that distribution.

Unintentional self-parody of the highest order.

My attention span is not what it used to be, and I couldn't force myself to get to the end of this. A summary or TLDR (on the part of the original author) would have been helpful.

What is it with rationalists and their inability to write with concision? Is there a gene for bloviation that also predisposes them to the cult? Or are they all just mimicking Yud's irritating style?

Is it wrong to hope they manage to realize one of these libertarian paradise fantasies? I'd really love to see how quickly it devolves into a Mad Max Thunderdome situation.

What's it like to be so good at PR?

That reminds me. If the world is about to FOOM into a kill-all-humans doomscape, why is he wasting time worrying about seed oils?

Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man is always a good place to start.

Random blue check spouts disinformation about "seed oils" on the internet. Same random blue check runs a company selling "safe" alternatives to seed oils. Yud spreads this huckster's disinformation further. In the process he reveals his autodidactically-obtained expertise in biology:

Are you eating animals, especially non-cows? Pigs and chickens inherit linoleic acid from their feed. (Cows reprocess it more.)

Yes, Yud, because that's how it works. People directly "inherit" organic molecules totally unmetabolized from the animals they eat.

I don't know why Yud is fat, but armchair sciencing probably isn't going to fix it.

This is good:

Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.

Also this:

If, as psychologists show, MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.

And:

If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.

Now that his alter ego has been exposed, Hanania is falling back on the "stupid things I said my youth" chestnut. Here's a good response to that.

His brain has not been washed, as they say. It has been dry cleaned.

In theory, a prediction market can work. The idea is that even though there are a lot of uninformed people making bets, their bad predictions tend to cancel each other out, while the subgroup of experts within that crowd will converge on a good prediction. The problem is that prediction markets only work when they're ideal. As soon as the bettor pool becomes skewed by a biased subpopulation, they stop working. And that's exactly what happens with the rationalist crowd. The main benefit rationalists obtain from prediction markets and wagers is an unfounded confidence that their ideaas have merit. Prediction markets also have a long history in libertarian circles, which probably also helps explain why rationalists are so keen on them.

"Fat people disgust me, but drugs are cool."

If Books Could Kill is great. I believe the first podcast was about Freakonomics, another one of those incredibly popular books based on behavioral economics. They took it apart.