YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

Okay so I know GPT-5 had a bad launch and has been getting raked over the coals, but AGI is totally still on, guys!

Why? Because trust me it's definitely getting better behind the scenes in ways that we can't see. Also China is still scary and we need to make sure we make the AI God that will kill us all before China does because reasons.

Also despite talking about a how much of the lack of progress is due to the consumer model and this is a cost-saving there's no reference to the work of folks like Ed Zitron on how unprofitable these models are, much less the recent discussions on whether GPT-5 as a whole is actually cheaper to operate than earlier models given the changes it necessitates in caching.

Yeah. He spends a fair chunk of ink that I can't be bothered finding the quote on trying to reassure readers that despite throwing out literal Frankfurt School Cultural Marxism dog whistles he's definitely not anti progressive, and in fact the robot apocalypse cultists are the real progressives. It smacks of Jordan Peterson and Moldbug, wrapped in a less competent and readable version of Scott's beigeness.

In related news I've been getting podcast ads for Anthropic touting Claude's emotional intelligence and value in working through life's challenges and listening to your relationship issues.

They're not explicitly saying that their chatbot is a therapist, but they're getting about as close as the law would allow, I'm sure.

I think Russian cosmism is part of the deep history there, but the modern incarnation is still pretty heavily integrated with the 1990-2009 era through guys like this. I'm not an expert in the history or philosophy here, but I think there's definitely room to treat it as a separate modern revival that fits in the same kind of mold.

That's exactly what I was thinking of, only with the kabbalah replaced by generic self-help and a list of cognitive biases.

Ed: or, y'know, kabbalah

Animated series about an honest propane salesman from Texas trying to survive modernity.

Having made the very poor decision to wade through all of that, and taken the necessary nap to try and let my brain stop overheating from the strain, here's what I'm left with:

This gets at part of why the TESCREAL bundle is such an awkward frame to work in. Emile Torres and the other writers who have broken it down do a very impressive job of drawing connections between the different members of the bundle not only through ideological consistencies and historical development of a body of work but through direct links between people and organizations that eventally led to this bizarre but influential sci-fi eschatology where our most important moral duty as a society is the development of post human AI that can move us one step closer to having forty gazillion simulated "people" doing who knows what in their Dyson spheres until the last sun goes out. Unlike most millenarian movements the people who work to advance these ideas don't (or at least didn't) have a central organization or a single ideology so you can't just criticize LessWrong or Effective Altruism in the same way that you could criticize the Branch Davidians or Heaven's Gate. And that really does feel like the most relevant point of comparison here: a terrifyingly large share of our collective money and power are controlled by people who seem to adhere to a bizarre secular apocalypse cult, but that cult doesn't have a name because these people don't organize that way. Describing the TESCREAL bundle does an admirable job of naming the problem and constructing it from the ground up, which is honestly a far more "good faith" handling of their belief system than any alternative I can find.

The most relevant point of comparison I can think of is the idea of "leaderless resistance" in both activist and terrorist activities. Even though you have a bunch of people who plan and take actions to advance their shared beliefs, they recognize the vulnerability created by doing so through an explicit heirarchical organization, so they don't create one. Unlike the klan or other terrorists, TESCREAL is able to use celebrity and public communities as their points of recruitment and activity rather than drawing media attention through atrocity, but the same ambiguity and pattern of disavowal seems to play in how the network operates. Anything too far outside of mainstream acceptability can be disavowed by LW as a specific organization or by Elon and Thiel as specific individuals, even as they're all broadly on the same "side" of the issue. TESCREAL is an attempt to name that "side" in a way that prevents this. People can argue whether or not they or their faces are adherents of TESCREALism, but not the existence of TESCREALism.

However, the fact that it's a constructed bundle rather than a preexisting flag that these people have claimed explicit allegiance to makes the attempt to describe the problem look like a bad-faith effort to construct an enemy where none exists. And that appears to be what the R9PRESENTATIONAL bundle (even more awkward than TESCREAL! Good job!) is trying to do. Most of the bundle doesn't refer to specific elements of an array as much as adjectives that can apply to a whole host of different activities and organizations. Transhumanism, for example, is a complete and specific structure of beliefs. "Relational" is an attribute of many different ideologies and while I think the idea is that the underlying bundle views all of these qualities as good the central thing he's trying to describe already has names like Humanism, Environmentalism, Socialism, Anti-capitalism, Ludditism, and so on. I think the problem is that the author doesn't want to demonize any of those actual ideologies that oppose TESCREALism either explicitly or incidentally because they're more popular and powerful and because rather than being foundationally opposed to "Progress" as he defines it they have their own specific principles that are harder to dismiss.

Most of the connections that the writer here draws are also well outside of living memory, while the oldest elements of TESCREAL appear to date back to cyberpunk science fiction in the 1980s and the surrounding conversations about technology and the meaning and importance of humanity. The defining elements came together over a period of decades, not centuries. While some of that was writers building on a body of knowledge and theory, that just brought us back to the end result where the central idea existed but didn't have a name, so one had to be constructed for it by naming it's constituents and ideological forefathers. By contrast, R9PRESENTATIONALism seems to have its "real" roots in obscure or unpopular theological disputes in the early 19th century. Even if those disputes did have some impact on the intervening history of thought, naming and outlining those and avoiding talking about anti-capitalism and environmentalism as central ideas to the tech backlash makes the attempt to construct a category very transparent. The author doesn't want to be anti-socialism or anti-environmentalism, but does want to do the tech thing that socialists and environmentalists are criticizing, so he needs to reframe those criticisms as arising from somewhere else that he can more comfortably position himself against.

This, combined with the emphasis on opposition to postmodernism, means that we're very likely to, whether the author intends it or not, end up going down some weird roads with this. I'm not sure if we're going to get to Jordan Peterson ranting about "Postmodern Neomarxism" or if we're going to end up doing the full Alex Jones thing, but just like those two zoo exhibits it should be fun to watch from outside the enclosure.

I know this is a shit post but I think we should probably spare some thought for the connection between Adam Weishaupt and modern technofascist grifters in the sense of trying to profit from building a social club/identity around a set of ideas that are broadly popular among a subset of wealthy elites but not necessarily powerful in wider society. Given their shared (professed) allegiance to the enlightenment and progress I cannot see him being anything other than proud of what Lighthaven or MIRI have accomplished in the field of separating people from their money.

Yeah. Better to call it religious and compare them to millenarian Christians rather than calling it science fiction and comparing them to literal toddlers in their inability or refusal to tell fact from fiction.

I think the religious angle isn't a general criticism as much as a counter to the specific narrative that the TESCREAL ideology is somehow rooted purely in logic and realistic evaluations of technology rather than in fantasy and wild speculation. The criticism of how it rhymes with certain elements of fundamentalist Christianity are usually rooted in this same observation, as well as in the fact that the elements of Christianity that TESCREALism most closely rhymes with are themselves harmful or insane regardless of what kind of wrapper you put them in. Like, both Christian and Singularitarian eschatologies use their faith in apocalyptic prophecies/predictions to devalue action to address very real suffering in the here-and-now in favor of trying to improve the lot of humanity in this hypothetical future, which just so happens to involve preaching more Christian/Singularitarian end times crap and also giving insiders to associated organizations lots of money and power. There's a leftist version of that too and it's also pretty fucked up.

When are they going to learn that it's all about the alien tech med beds that I definitely have in my basement and can sell you 14 seconds on for just $6660?

Looking to exploit citogenesis for political gain.

[...] it actually has surprisingly little to do with any of the intellectual lineages that its proponents claim to subscribe to (Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, conflict studies, etc.) but is a shockingly pervasive influence across modern culture to a greater degree than even most people who complain about it realize.

I mean, when describing TESCREAL Torres never had to argue that it's adherents were lying or incorrect about their own ideas. It seems like whenever someone tries this kind of backlash they always have to add in a whole mess of additional layers that are somehow tied to what their interlocutors really believe.

I'm reminded, ironically, of Scott's (imo very strong) argument against the NRx category of "demotist" states. It's fundamentally dishonest to create a category that ties together both the innocuous or positive things your opponents actually believe and some obnoxious and terrible stuff, and then claim that the same criticisms apply to all of them.

I'm a little surprised there hasn't been more direct interaction between my "watching the far-right like heavily armed chimpanzees in a zoo" podcast circles and our techtakes sneerspace. Zitron's work on Better Offline is great, obviously, but I've been listening through QAA, for example, and their discussions of AI and its implications could probably benefit from a better technical grounding.

You love to see it, though.

I do really wish someone smart and good at critical thinking would sit down and invest a lot of research into which claims by both sides are accurate and which are propaganda. This would be so good for the world

I feel like the fucking memestock people are actually more honest when they say "I'm just a smoothbrained ape, can someone with a few more wrinkles validate my preexisting beliefs?"

There's some truth to the rejection of NFTs/crypto. I think the current LLM bubble shows tech companies and capital more broadly betting that the economy is functionally post-consumer already. If the people won't accept their designated role I in technocapitalism, then it will simply exclude them. I don't think it can actually work but it's going to be rough seeing how many lives are destroyed in the attempt.

Yeah. I think there's definitely something interesting here, but it's mostly in how badly compromised the final pproduct ends up being in order to support the AI tools.

I'm reminded of the thing that happens to people learning the history of the American Civil War. First, you learn that it was about slavery and emancipation. Then you dig into the reeds and start finding a lot of contemporary evidence that actually there were bigger issues of state's rights or regional versus federal power or whatever at play. And then you keep getting deeper into the reeds and realize that all those other issues and factors were either contributing factors to why slavery was such an important and central issue at the time or were fallout from the decades of fighting about slavery in the legal and legislative systems.

Also you learn about how the existence of stage 2 owes a lot to postbellum revisionism as the men who lost tried to convince themselves and the world that their cause had been for something more than racism and exploitation, even as they supported domestic terror organizations that worked to retrench that same system of racism and exploitation without explicitly being allowed to fucking own human beings.

Like, there's a lot of motivated reasoning required to get to the point of "actually it's all very complicated" and not think past that into "because they're trying to make a smokescreen around a genocide".

That's how I remember it too. Also the context about conserving N95 masks always feels like it gets lost. Like, predictably so and I think there's definitely room to criticize the CDC's messaging and handling there, but the actual facts here aren't as absurd as the current fight would imply. The argument was:

1. With the small droplet size, most basic fabric masks offer very limited protection, if any.
2. The masks that are effective, like N95 masks, are only available in very limited quantities.
3. If everyone panic-buys N95 the way they did toilet paper it will mean that the people who are least able to avoid exposure i.e. doctors and medical frontliners are at best going to wildly overpay and at worst won't be able to keep supplied.
4. Therefore, most people shouldn't worry about masking at this stage, and focus on other measures like social distancing and staying the fuck home.

I think later research cast some doubt on point 1, but 2-4 are still pretty solid given the circumstances that we (collectively) found ourselves in.

The on-camera duo are exempt for obvious reasons, but they've definitely hit at least one of their mods. Before The Wheel was implemented I seem to remember they even specifically targeted them sometimes for the joke.