YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM @ YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

There are no known problems that can’t theoritically be solved, in a sort of pedantic “in a closed system information always converges” sort of way

Perhaps. The problem of human flight was “solved” by the development of large, unwieldy machines driven by (relatively speaking, cf. pigeons) highly inefficient propulsion systems which are very good at covering long distances, oceans, and rough terrain quickly - the aim was Daedalus and Icarus, but aerospace companies are fortunate that the flying machine turned out to have advantages in strictly commercial and military use. It’s completely undecided physically whether there is a solution to the problem of building human-like intelligence which does a comparable job to having sex, even with complete information about the workings of humans.

The Sequences are inherently short, there are just massively many of them - the fact that each one is woefully inadequate to its own aims is eclipsed by the size of the overall task.

The longer stuff, Siskind included, is precisely what you get from people with short attention spans who find it takes longer than that to justify the point that they want to make themselves. There’s no structure, no overarching thematic or compositional coherence to each piece, just the unfolding discovery that more points still need to be made. This makes it well-suited for limited readers who think their community’s style longform writing is special, but don’t trust it in authors who have worked on technique (literary technique is suspicious - splurging a first draft onto the internet marks the writer out as honest: rationalism is a 21st century romantic movement, not a scholastic one).

Besides which, the number of people who “read all of” any of these pieces is significantly lower than the number of people who did so.

The only thing any of us can do is choose how we are going to get dumber every day

I’ve just dipped in and out of it all day - I can’t look away! It’s better than a car crash: you can slow down multiple times

All i hear is that “polycule drama” is back on the table

There are too many comments in here going for the stringy lean detail and not pointing out magnificent conceptual errors like this

I’ve been saying this more often lately, but LessWrong gets its readers in, by and large, at the absolute bottom rung of intellectual thought, they don’t know anything else

You have to interpret somebody getting into LessWrong as just graduating from Cracked or Newgrounds in the mid-2000s

It’s a technique he uses to get you, the reader, to understand that you aren’t the person who thinks in terms of elan vital.

In one of his essays on quantum phenomena and personal identity he does it with time. He explains something like if you think time in the universe works in the sense of clock time, then you just don’t have a clue about physical reality, so when he gets to his next point it stands in contrast to the straw layman. But his readers are obviously already the sort of people who do know that, because they’re nominally smart, education-enthusiastic western(ised) nerds, even if they understand next to nothing about how this works out in real physical theory.

So the strawman doesn’t just create a favourable contrast for Yudkowsky’s argument, it constructs them as smart and different from lay people - it isn’t a one-shot effect, it builds as he starts small and piles on increasingly esoteric speculations (even if this is the first “mind = blown” blog post they’ve ever read from this weird guy).

I reply: Because the strength of the material is determined by its weakest link, not its strongest link. A structure of steel beams held together at the vertices by Scotch tape (and lacking other clever arrangements of mechanical advantage) has the strength of Scotch tape rather than the strength of steel.

This is sub-childishly false and he opens with it. Unbelievable.

“…trying to head off an argument by bringing their estimates down as low as possible” - you’ve got it. We’re done. You can stop now.

and seeing people talk about how they’ve never tried rice before having it at the restaurant

And this is the fundamental, absolute, no-further-down essential appeal of rationalism. Fans have never encountered ideas before, or not in any way that they’ve been able to digest them (“what the author really meant: the curtains are fucking blue”). And it bubbles up throughout, in every environ of the culture. If you are ever as stupid and masochistic as I am and find yourself on TheMotte.org, it’s the key to everything they say: they literally have never encountered facts from beyond their own rabid whirlpool of hatred, and everything that they learned in the whirlpool was laced with contrarian ressentiment towards an enemy they literally haven’t seen.

This is great, and also immediately sends me back to 10ish years ago when I would read these things and laugh without the incredible weight of (a) being harassed and stalked by Yudkowsky (et al.) fans (b) the knowledge that at one point I could have used that time fruitfully (c) the fact that we live in Yudkowsky’s Clown Car California Ideology Nightmare now

One of the least studied rationalist tics is “as far as I can tell, most people who believe X is bad think so because Y reason which nobody has ever brought up, but which I find easy to disregard”

Apparently, pace my own username, you don’t know who the fuck I am.

I don’t think any of that first paragraph is true. LessWrong and EA very blatantly do not teach people how to spot fallacious reasoning. Nor does the culture of either encourage the adherents of their one movement to repress their “irrational” emotions. Fallacious reasoning, emotional reasoning, irrational thinking - all three of these self-evidently ran rampant in the culture, so there has to be something else going on here which would explain both what the culture is like and why you have an impression that seems to line up so squarely with their self-presentation.

Rather, it seems that what happens at LessWrong and EA is roughly that a charismatic self-presentation of “rational thinking” (with attendant ideas along the lines of repressing one’s emotions and so on) hooks in impressionable people, who - like victims of any multi-level marketing scheme - quickly replace their own styles and habits of thought with those propounded and taught by the movement. So those people do do something like “repress” their emotions, but only in the sense that they repress those styles of thought and emotional presentation which had previously come naturally to them. But of course the movement also teaches that it is right and proper or that there is even a sort of duty to make impassioned (whiny) emotional appeals to this or that privileged source of the right kind of emotions to feel (such as feeling indignant about normie reasoning, or feminism, or whatever), which are (some would say fallaciously) considered above rational criticism themselves.

You can see that sort of thing play out in basically any rationalist discussion or article at Vox’s “Future Perfect”!

So what you describe with respect to drugs and so on is true enough but misses the point. It’s rather that throughout the movement there’s a strong current of precisely the things that in its self-presentation the movement is supposed to ward off. The drug scene isn’t an outlet for repressed feelings, it’s just a particular place (of many) towards which the movement’s leaders have directed the energies (which they don’t repress but encourage) of their followers.

The shame and guilt thing is a separate issue, it has nothing to do with the conscious or directed repression of emotions under the auspices of the movement.

My impression is that, as a group, on average, rationalists tend to both feel and repress more intense feelings of shame and guilt than the rest of society can be bothered dealing with, and I say that as somebody who has spent nearly two years doing addiction recovery

The little paranoid devil on Siskind’s shoulder screaming horrible compulsive thoughts in his ear is my favourite character in this whole decades long saga

The fossil fuel companies thing is a metaphor run wild. It makes some sense in its own context as a characterisation of the way economic ‘forces’ (or ‘capital’) are able to go on operating and eating everything no matter what human beings collectively try to do about it. It does not make sense when you transfer the metaphor over to a new domain by holding onto one word (for example: “machine”) and behaving as if it continues to mean the same thing in a new context.

It isn’t a parsimonious way of thinking, it’s a rhetorical move he’s making.

Did OP consider the work going on at literally every single tech college’s VC groups in optoelectronic neural networks built on optical components to improve minimisation and how that’s going to impact the decoupling of AI training and operation from Moore’s Law that’s one hope for making processing power gains so that the banner headlines about “Moore’s Law” are pushed back a little further? I’m guessing no.___

You have the insider clout of a 15 year old with a search engine

This whole situation is making me so glad I stopped taking drugs and never learned to program

Born too young to be made to learn how to program in school

Born too old to lose my code monkey job to a literal mechanical code monkey in a mutually disastrous management fuckup

Born just in time to burn out on drugs and alcohol and watch the machine revolution from home

GHB aside I wouldn’t even call it particularly dangerous, it’s just blissfully wrongheaded. Ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic, and it does what it says on the tin: it takes however your mind is at that moment and just brutally lops off all the connections you normally anticipate it having with your body and other bits of itself, with various interesting consequences for mind and body both. Alcohol is alcohol, it’ll depress your euphoria to some extent but it is also in itself sugar and obviously will make you drunk on top of the (significant) remaining effects of the stimulant - rather than calm down, you are far more likely to get outrageously mad and try to punch a stranger, poorly, because already the whole point of abusing most stimulants, euphoria aside, is to turn you into the world’s sharpest spoon.