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.
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.
Molly White is best known for shining a light on the silliness and fraud that are cryptocurrency, blockchain and Web3. This essay may be a sign that she’s shifting her focus to our sneerworthy friends in the extended rationalism universe. If so, that’s an excellent development. Molly’s great.
I don’t really have much to say… it kind of speaks for itself. I do appreciate the table of contents so you don’t get lost in the short paragraphs though
I’m seeing a SBF-like trajectory for Altman here. He’s building the foundation of his public persona and business on a house of cards that will come tumbling down at some point....
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.
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.
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.
When she’s not busy fantasizing about libertarian crypto-based UBI schemes or propping up the patriarchy, she’s writing wearying odes to transhumanism and longtermism. Truly the voice of a generation.
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)
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.
Effective Obfuscation (newsletter.mollywhite.net)
Molly White is best known for shining a light on the silliness and fraud that are cryptocurrency, blockchain and Web3. This essay may be a sign that she’s shifting her focus to our sneerworthy friends in the extended rationalism universe. If so, that’s an excellent development. Molly’s great.
Eliezer "8.5% more cheerful about OpenAI going forward" with Mira Murati at the helm (nitter.net)
Not 7.5% or 8%. 8.5%. Numbers are important.
Let them Fight: EAs and neoreactionaries go at it (www.nytimes.com)
Non-paywalled link: archive.ph/9Hihf...
Marc Andreesen’s techno-optimist manifesto… (a16z.com)
I don’t really have much to say… it kind of speaks for itself. I do appreciate the table of contents so you don’t get lost in the short paragraphs though
Sam Altman's sister, Annie Altman, claims Sam has severely abused her (www.lesswrong.com)
I’m seeing a SBF-like trajectory for Altman here. He’s building the foundation of his public persona and business on a house of cards that will come tumbling down at some point....
Let's walk through the uncanny valley with SBF so we can collapse some wave functions together (hachyderm.io)
Rationalist check-list:...
Generative AI producing racially biased results? Stop worrying about it, say orange site tech bros. It's just reflecting reality. (news.ycombinator.com)
Representative take:...
Croatia shutters a libertarian paradise, orange site readers have a sad (news.ycombinator.com)
Yud goes full seed oil-ist (nitter.net)
IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (medium.com)
Taleb dunking on IQ “research” at length. Technically a seriouspost I guess.
"Yudkowsky is a genius and one of the best people in history." (archive.ph)
[All non-sneerclub links below are archive.today links]...
"Tech Right" scribe Richard Hanania promoted white supremacy for years under a pen name (www.huffpost.com)
Excerpt:...
Grimes pens new TREACLES anthem: "I wanna be software, upload my mind" (genius.com)
When she’s not busy fantasizing about libertarian crypto-based UBI schemes or propping up the patriarchy, she’s writing wearying odes to transhumanism and longtermism. Truly the voice of a generation.
Bloomberg gives Yud a big slobbery one: "He’s worth hearing out." (archive.is)
Ugh....