Btw, rumors have been swirling about the Future of Humanity Institute shutting down(!!)–I’ve heard this from multiple people at this point. Does anyone have any extra info they can share with me? Off the record or in confidence would be fine. DM or email me!
Sorry for the off-topic rant, but WTF is Emile Torres doing on twitter? Anytime I see someone creating content for that Nazi hellsite, I start looking at them differently.
I wouldn’t know anything about the thread, as it’s impossible for me to read without a twitter account. Yet another reason why the site is trash.
But by all means, go on generating content for a bigoted fascist who will use everything you write to increase engagement with his platform and give it undeserved credibility and $$$.
The actually not even really a hatchet job NYT piece on SlateScott that mostly just called him a weird little guy has nonetheless created a festering psychic wound that oozes to this day. Here manifests as an interview with the author on LW. See also: discussion on reddit....
I’d really like to know the back story on this interview too. I realize weirdness isn’t exactly distinctive when it comes to rationalists, but Zack is in a league of his own.
I’ve been using DigitalOcean for years as a personal VPS box, and I’ve had no complaints. Not sure how well they’d scale (in terms of cost) for a site like this.
If you’ve been around, you may know Elsevier for surveillance publishing. Old hands will recall their running arms fairs. To this storied history we can add “automated bullshit pipeline”....
It seems like in the proceeds of building their alleged Star Trek utopia with robots and holodecks, tech bros have discovered that they’d rather be the Borg than Starfleet and have begun shilling the pros of getting yourself assimilated at SXSW of all places....
She really is insufferable. If you’ve ever listened to her Pivot podcast (do not advise), you’ll be confronted by the superficiality and banality of her hot takes. Of couse this assumes you’re able to penetrate the word salad she regularly uses to convey any point she’s trying to make. She is not a good verbal communicator.
Her co-host, “Professor” [*] Scott Galloway, isn’t much better. While more verbally articulate, his dick joke-laden takes are often even more insufferable than Swisher’s. I’m pretty sure Kara sourced from him her opinion that you should “use AI or be run over by progress”; it’s one of his most frequent hot takes. He’s also one of the biggest tech hype maniacs, so of course he’s bought a ticket on the AI hype express. Before the latest AI boom, he was a crypto booster, although he’s totally memory-holed that phase of his life now that the crypto hype train has run off a cliff.
[*] I put professor in quotes, because he’s one of those people who insist on using a title that is equal parts misleading and pretentious. He doesn’t have a doctorate in anything, and while he’s technically employed by NYU’s business school, he’s a non-tenured “clinical professor”, which is pretty much the same as an adjunct. Nothing against adjunct professors, but most adjuncts I’ve known don’t go around insisting that you call them “professor” in every social interaction. It’s kind of like when Ph.D.s insist you call them “doctor”.
I’m probably not saying anything you didn’t already know, but Vox’s “Future Perfect” section, of which this article is a part, was explicitly founded as a booster for effective altruism. They’ve also memory-holed the fact that it was funded in large part by FTX. Anything by one of its regular writers (particularly Dylan Matthews or Kelsey Piper) should be mentally filed into the rationalist propaganda folder. I mean, this article throws in an off-hand remark by Scott Alexander as if it’s just taken for granted that he’s some kind of visionary genius.
In her sentencing submission to the judge in the FTX trial, Barbara Fried argues that her son is just a misunderstood altruist, who doesn’t deserve to go to prison for very long....
You know the doom cult is having an effect when it starts popping up in previously unlikely places. Last month the socialist magazine Jacobin had an extremely long cover feature on AI doom, which it bought into completely. The author is an effective altruist who interviewed and took seriously people like Katja Grace, Dan Hendrycks and Eliezer Yudkosky.
I used to be more sanguine about people’s ability to see through this bullshit, but eschatological nonsense seems to tickle something fundamentally flawed in the human psyche. This LessWrong post is a perfect example.
It’s kind of fascinating how rotten the “New Atheist” movement turned out to be. Whether it’s Richard Dawkins revealing his inner racist-misogynist, Michael Shermer being rapey AF, or James Lindsay turning into a Christofascist, the movement seems to have spawned and/or revealed a lot of really problematic people. I guess it’s no surprise that the rationalist scene had such a membership overlap.
Hounding the president of Harvard out of a job because you think she’s a DEI hire is one thing, but going after a Billionaire’s wife? How dare these journalists! What big bullies....
It’s absolutely bizarre that Scott labels Rufo a journalist. Rufo is a right-wing activist who has only ever worked for right-wing think tanks. He first came to my attention as a part of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based “think tank” best known for promoting creationism.
Then again, Scott has previously said that he’s impressed by the arguments of creationist Michael Behe, another Discovery Institute lackey.
I haven’t read Scott’s comment sections in a long time, so I don’t know if they’re all this bad, but that one is a total dumpster fire. It’s a hive of Trump stans, anti-woke circle-jerkers, scientific racists, and self-proclaimed Motte posters. It certainly reveals the present demographic and political profile of his audience.
Scott has always tried to hide his reactionary beliefs, but I’ve noticed he’s letting the mask slip a bit more lately.
I’m called a Nazi because I happily am proud of white culture. But every day I think fondly of the brown king Cyrus the Great who invented the first ever empire, and the Japanese icon Murasaki Shikibu who wrote the first novel ever. What if humans just loved each other? History teaches us that we have all been, and always will...
Only an EA could take seriously someone who approvingly cites journals like “Mankind Quarterly” and crackpots like Richard Lynn, Steven Hsu, Jonathan Anomaly, and Emil Kirkegaard.
The author considers himself a “rationalist of the right” and a libertarian who enjoys Richard Hanania and Scott Alexander. He describes ten tenets of right-wing rationalism, 8 of which are simply rephrasings of various ideas promoted by scientific racists. It would be an understatement to say this guy is monomaniacally focused on a single topic.
(Oh, and he publishes his brain farts on Substack. Because of course he does.)
I think in their minds, there is this magical threshold below which all the brown and disabled people live, and once you get rid of all the people residing below that threshold all you have left is smart people who want to make the world better.
What a bunch of monochromatic, hyper-privileged, rich-kid grifters. It’s like a nonstop frat party for rich nerds. The photographs and captions make it obvious:
The gang going for a hiking adventure with AI safety leaders. Alice/Chloe were surrounded by a mix of uplifting, ambitious entrepreneurs and a steady influx of top people in the AI safety space.
The gang doing pool yoga. Later, we did pool karaoke. Iguanas everywhere.
Alice and Kat meeting in “The Nest” in our jungle Airbnb.
Alice using her surfboard as a desk, co-working with Chloe’s boyfriend.
The gang celebrating… something. I don’t know what. We celebrated everything.
Alice and Chloe working in a hot tub. Hot tub meetings are a thing at Nonlinear. We try to have meetings in the most exciting places. Kat’s favorite: a cave waterfall.
Alice’s “desk” even comes with a beach doggo friend!
Working by the villa pool. Watch for monkeys!
Sunset dinner with friends… every day!
These are not serious people. Effective altruism in a nutshell.
According to a comment, she apparently claimed on Facebook that, due to her post, “around 75% of people changed their minds based on the evidence!”
After someone questioned how she knew it was 75%:
Update: I changed the wording of the post to now state: 𝗔𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟳𝟓% 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘂𝗽𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁, 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻*
And the * at the bottom says: Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio. And of course this is not proof that everybody changed their mind. There’s a lot of reasons to upvote the post or down vote it. However, I do think it’s a good indicator.
She then goes on to talk about how she made the Facebook post private because she didn’t think it should be reposted in places where it’s not appropriate to lie and make things up.
18+ Torres: "rumors have been swirling about the Future of Humanity Institute shutting down" after they got $665m in ETH from Buterin (twitter.com)
Btw, rumors have been swirling about the Future of Humanity Institute shutting down(!!)–I’ve heard this from multiple people at this point. Does anyone have any extra info they can share with me? Off the record or in confidence would be fine. DM or email me!
SlateScott talking race and IQ: very cool and truth seeking. Revealing SlateScott's powerword: what's the public interest in that? (www.lesswrong.com)
The actually not even really a hatchet job NYT piece on SlateScott that mostly just called him a weird little guy has nonetheless created a festering psychic wound that oozes to this day. Here manifests as an interview with the author on LW. See also: discussion on reddit....
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 31 March 2024
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 24 March 2024
Feel like you want to sneer about something but you don’t quite have a snappy post in you? Go forth and be mid!...
Elsevier keeps publishing articles written by spicy autocomplete
If you’ve been around, you may know Elsevier for surveillance publishing. Old hands will recall their running arms fairs. To this storied history we can add “automated bullshit pipeline”....
When your big tech brain completely fails to read the room. (variety.com)
It seems like in the proceeds of building their alleged Star Trek utopia with robots and holodecks, tech bros have discovered that they’d rather be the Borg than Starfleet and have begun shilling the pros of getting yourself assimilated at SXSW of all places....
OK doomer (www.newyorker.com)
The New Yorker has a piece on the Bay Area AI doomer and e/acc scenes....
Since age 12, SBF was a dedicated utilitarian, mommy says. It's not fair to imprison him for life. (www.documentcloud.org)
In her sentencing submission to the judge in the FTX trial, Barbara Fried argues that her son is just a misunderstood altruist, who doesn’t deserve to go to prison for very long....
LessWrong is a machine for causing depression in its cultists (www.lesswrong.com)
Big Yud gives some dating advice (twitter.com)
The Cult of AI (including some fan favourites) (www.rollingstone.com)
Guess who's having a big mad about Journalism again! (www.astralcodexten.com)
Hounding the president of Harvard out of a job because you think she’s a DEI hire is one thing, but going after a Billionaire’s wife? How dare these journalists! What big bullies....
good news, everyone! eliezer is writing fiction again (www.lesswrong.com)
“glowfic” apparently. written in a roleplay forum format....
BasedBeffJezos has this girlfriend from Canada, you wouldn't know her (awful.systems)
Pass the popcorn, please....
in case you wondered when Grimes was going to go full Nazi (twitter.com)
I’m called a Nazi because I happily am proud of white culture. But every day I think fondly of the brown king Cyrus the Great who invented the first ever empire, and the Japanese icon Murasaki Shikibu who wrote the first novel ever. What if humans just loved each other? History teaches us that we have all been, and always will...
Effective Altruism is when you want to spend money on genetic engineering for race-and-IQ theories. Emphasises Richard Lynn fandom in the comments. Front-paged. (forum.effectivealtruism.org)
Nonlinear seem to think this post replying to the accusations about them will make them look like the heroes (forum.effectivealtruism.org)
warning: seriously nasty narcissism at length...
Let rationalists put GMO bacteria in your mouth (www.astralcodexten.com)
They’ve been pumping this bio-hacking startup on the Orange Site ™ for the past few months. Now they’ve got Siskind shilling for them.