includes considerable nonspecific shit-talking of assigned EA enemies, including - horrors! - Timnit Gebru talking about the social issues of the actually-existing AI-industrial complex. also it’s not a CASTLE it’s a MANOR HOUSE, you fools, you rubes,
Why did 3.6 million people watch this hour long video dunking on flat earthers? Because the topic of people believing crazy things is fun and interesting.
Dan Olson’s In Search of a Flat Earth is most definitely not just an hour of dunking on flat-Earthers.
It pivots to discussing QAnon at 37:30.
From the comments:
This just went from 0 to 100 real quick.
Lord, the cry of pure anguish I gave out in response to that line…
Props to the Qanon guy’s kid for standing up to him and saying “nobody’s gonna help you” when he kidnapped them, that must have been terrifying
Occasionally rewatch this while dealing with the loss of my own parents to conspiracy lunacy. Even tried using this video to pull them back from the edge. Ended up precipitating cutting contact with them, something that has done wonders for my mental health. I have since realised they were deeper in than I thought, and were never going to listen to their child, and unlikely to listen to people they actually might have respected the opinions of.
The person I used to consider my father now believes that viruses aren’t real and is getting deep into transphobia and Putin worship. He is likely to already be a holocaust denier. There is no bottom to the conspiracy theory abyss and few ever seem to find their way back from the depths.
Thank you for crushing that last bit of remaining hope I didn’t even know I had.
It’s honestly kind of chilling to see him effectively spending half an hour predicting the Jan 6th riot.
This Is Financial Advice would’ve been a much better video to make that point with - that video was about a financial doomsday cult centered around a dying mall retailer, and doesn’t start going into anything particularly heavy until near the end.
Not to mention a lot of the first part is just honestly beautiful shots of nature, while showing the curve of the earth. There’s very little that’s dunking on flat-earthers. In fact, focusing on dunking on flat-earthers is something he criticizes other youtubers for in the video.
So who is motivated to dedicate significant time to attacking AI x-risk beliefs, generally in their spare time?
This is exactly analogous to the baffled coiners who couldn’t understand why people spent even a minuscule amount of time criticizing Bitcoin, when they weren’t remunerated for doing so.
edit
I misread this sentence
Some people find Al gore smug and pretentiousness
as referring to AI gore which is a great term for generated shit.
Also Al Gore was a thing about 30 years ago, maybe update the cultural touchstones.
I actually don’t find this a bad post, but I do want to point out that it got way more karma than any of titotals more critical posts, even though I find many of them better. This once again points to how the EA Forum’s voting-power-by-popularity karma system creates groupthink; being critical nets you less voting power than being lauditory, and it disincentivizes calling out bullshit in general.
When Ives Parr of “Effective Altruism is when you want to spend money on genetic engineering for race-and-IQ theories” fame, made a seperate post complaining that that post got downvoted despite nobody giving a good counterargument, I wanted to comment and call him out on his bullshit, but why bother with a karma system that allows him and his buddies to downvote it out of the frontpage while leaving you with less voting power? A lot of EA’s missteps are just one off blunders, but what makes the EA forum’s “”“epistocratic”“” voting system so much worse is that it’s systematic, every post and comment is now affected by this calculus of how much you can criticize the people with a lot of power on the forum without losing power of your own, making groupthink almost inevitable. Given the fact that people who are on the forum longer have on average more voting power than newer voices, I can’t help but wonder if this is by design.
I fuckin’ do, it looks like disingenuous trash sneaking in a pile of awfulness under cover of a facially plausible argument that was obviously never going to reach these bozos, as the comments amply demonstrate
but i’m sure titotal (who is active here) will be along any moment to explain how we’ve got him wrong
i’ll also add that he completely misses how cults work. (intentionally?) all that jargon and doorknocking have additional effect of convincing cult members that everyone else is hostile to them
the émile torres hit piece linked in there is pretty fucking awful (how could anyone display such incivility towards honest intellectuals such as Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose! gasp!) and destroys any semblance of good faith this post might have been trying to build
Pointing out the existential risk of evil toaster ovens: on the up and up.
Pointing out the existential risk of politically connected doomsday cultists who pontificate about nuking any country with too many sweet gaming PCs: Oh no too mean :(
Torres has written about that hit piece! It’s the only article on that substack, “Mark Fuentes” doesn’t appear to exist, the material was partially published under another name first, the material ultimately originated in the EA forums, and the article is a favourite of EA attempted astroturfers.
anyway, that’s the quality of article that titotal just happens to reach for first
he’s just using it as an example of a supposedly well-written and convincing article about Torres you understand, and just happened to pick an odious lump of slander that originated in that very forum
Academics and Journalists could interview an arbitrary EA forum user on a particular area if they wanted to get up to speed quickly. The fact they seem not to do this, in addition to not giving a right to reply, makes me think they’re not truth-seeking.
Why don’t academics and journalists do their job properly and interview random forum members to inform their research?
In my skim of the two posts I didn’t get to any suggestion of “used to be favorable, then realized they’re led by duplicitous misanthropes” as a pathway.
What about: “read a particular HP fanfic to try and fit in with a new crowd, was utterly repulsed by the narrative voice, discovered later it was part of what seemed like an elaborate cult that was weirdly sensitive to sneers, and finally found an outlet for their nerd bloodlust”
I wandered over somehow from RationalWiki, which I had known of since the science-blogging days of yore, and found it more congenial to my tastes than other subreddits. E.g., it was friendlier to excursions into the wonky and erudite than r/badphilosophy, and generally had a justifiably low tolerance for superficial politeness while maintaining a level of empathy for serious matters.
@dgerard We need to yank Dilbert Stark's driving license and chauffeur and force him to travel everywhere on an e-bike or sailboat for a year or two before he's allowed to have anything to do with Tesla again. (Or to use his private jet.)
Actually, Dilbert getting e-bike religion might be the best thing he could possibly do for the climate …
The problem with this type of criticism is that for the most part it’s usually pretty lazy. If you just want to make people laugh, there’s no need to be charitable or high-effort. The average r/sneerclub post consisted of finding something seemingly absurd or offensive said by a rationalist and then mocking it. The resulting threads are obviously biased and not epistemically rigorous. Like, Wytham abbey was technically a manor house, but “EA gets a castle” is objectively a funnier meme. There are sometimes good arguments in there (I think my old sneerclub posts weren’t terrible), but they’re not the point of the community, and you shouldn’t expect them to be common.
@titotal hey I spend whole minutes crafting sneers, how dare ya call me lazy!
<span style="color:#323232;">THE SNEER is provided AS IS in the hope that it will be funny,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">but WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">including but not limited to the warranties of MERCHANTABILITY,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, and NONINFRINGEMENT.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">In NO EVENT shall the authors or commenters be liable FOR ANY CLAIM,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">DAMAGES or OTHER LIABILITY, arising from, out of or in connection
</span><span style="color:#323232;">with THE SNEER or the reading or commenting on THE SNEER.
</span>
The average r/sneerclub post consisted of finding something seemingly absurd or offensive said by a rationalist and then mocking it. The resulting threads are obviously biased and not epistemically rigorous.
This is correct
Like, Wytham abbey was technically a manor house
Lol, ‘technically it was a manor house not a castle’ come on, you cannot just complain about how low effort sc is and then post something as silly as that.
a mere tumbledown cottage in a sleepy czech village!
(literally the news story calls it a “castle” in czech)
but let me correct myself: it’s COMPLETELY WRONG to say that they blew millions in charitable donations of money stolen from FTX customers on buying a castle. they blew millions in charitable donations of money stolen from FTX customers on two castles
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