blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

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"Welcome to our Burning Man camp, Bugs Crawling Under Your Skin"

hey hey I'm P(doom) and I'm here to say / MIRI needs cash so tithe your pay / Basilisk comes by night or day / so atheists reinvent how to pray

But Silicon Valley thinks we’re all overregulation-loving authoritarian communist bureaucrats.

[citation needed]

I'm disappointed that they never (to my knowledge) tried to justify the purchase by saying they needed a castle to build a fortified base that would be safe against marauders in the event of civilizational collapse. The return on investment for keeping a catastrophic failure from becoming an existential one is (handwave, handwave) at least 10^69.

"We need a castle for Isaac Asimov's Foundation Beyond Thunderdome" would, at least, be on brand.

It's not even "GIGO" with these people. "Garbage In, Garbage Out" implies that the process between input and output is legitimate at least. They're not trying to make justifiable decisions in the face of incomplete information, or detect inconsistencies among their own beliefs, or anything of the sort. They're just emitting math-shaped noises to bolster their own egos and further insulate their cult. They use language nominally about changing one's beliefs in order to keep their own beliefs locked in place.

These guys use "entropy" the way that people trying to sell you healing crystals use "quantum".

There is a fractal optimization algorithm that created life, intelligence, and every meta-organism we know.

I'm wanking at the speed of light / wanna make a meta-fractal brain out of you

I think that's it — it's the one Timnit Gebru linked to back in February which prompted the old!SneerClub discussion I mentioned, and Molly White's newsletter links to the same place.

A link to what?

(The link in the Substack post is to the Wikipedia page for the Crooks result, disguising — intentionally or not — the fact that the writer is just smashing together science words.)

For example, the inaugural Substack post defining effective accelerationisms’s “principles and tenets” name-drops the “Jarzynski-Crooks fluctuation dissipation theorem”

To echo a comment from old!SneerClub: That's not a thing. There are three separate but related ideas (the Crooks fluctuation theorem, the Jarzynski equality and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem) which the author doesn't know are separate, because he hasn't a clue what he's talking about.

They have muscles you wouldn't know about in Canada

We're not bothered. We're bored. Off you go now.

Not counting those who returned once more to the land (p. 61).

"Covalently bonded bacteria" sounds like something the writers of Star Trek: Voyager would have come up with because they heard that "covalent bond" was a science term but did not know what bacteria are actually made of.

“covalently bonded” bacteria

what an amazing theoretical possibility

The new location is literally, not figuratively, in the sticky comment on the top post at the old place. But that's probably asking too much of their reading skills.

In short: too correlated.

Personally, I've always found Cromwell's rule a deeply boring proposal for screwing with the axioms. Try doing the Dutch-book argument with surreal numbers, then I'll pay attention. :-P

(I would expect that many subjectivist Bayesians would take Cromwell's rule as an addition to the basic rules that are themselves justified by Dutch book or some such means. Not assigning sharp-edged probabilities out of general prudence is a thing an individual gambler can choose to do, if that's the way their tendencies lie, while not being part of the mathematical definition of the subject itself. But, well, 46,656 varieties and all that. Moreover, it is hard to do physics having chopped off the endpoints of the interval without chopping other structures as well. For example, if you don't even allow 0 and 1 to be available as idealizations, you might end up peeling the skin off quantum state space. Some could cope with this, but not Yud, since he demands that all of reality be a single pure quantum state. Insofar as any sense can be made out of Yud's rambles, he is wanting something stronger than Cromwell's rule, anyway, since he wants to forbid probability 1 even for logical implications, which Lindley allowed.)

Thanks for taking on that task (I linked to your post to provide further details).