To answer the original question, it’s as simple as the people working on AI are unable to grasp the near term risks (e.g. deepfakes, labor devaluation, climate change from energy use), so they focus on the fun, sci-fi “long term” issues.
So then ofc we have yud here on his usual bullshit talking about some made-up problems that only his giant brain can confabulate.
I somehow missed this one until now. Apparently it was once mentioned in the comments on the old sneerclub but I don’t think it got a proper post, and I think it deserves one.
Epistemic status: Speculation. An unholy union of evo psych, introspection, random stuff I happen to observe & hear about, and thinking. Done on a highly charged topic. Caveat emptor!...
I was making a vague reference to that because I only had a vague recollection of a sneerclub discussion involving “eudaimonia”. Looked it up, I don’t think there was some major thing that happened. Rats use the word “eudaimonia” a lot, that seems to be pretty much it.
Utilitarian brainworms or one of the many very real instances of a homicidal parent going after their disabled child? I can’t decide, but it’s a depressing read....
“Today I will display my mastery of LOGIC and PERSUASION by contriving a scenario in which one simply MUST mercy kill their adult progeny. The masses will PROSTRATE themselves before me in ADORATION. They will learn to REVERE and FEAR the magnitude of my brain.”
I think in a cultural landscape where we’ve been fed fascist male power fantasies for so long, it’s only natural that we’ve got a bunch of people who think it’s cool and good to be “brutal” and able to make “hard choices” and “doing what’s necessary” etc. That and reddit has historically always been besieged by fascist troll farms.
Real boomer energy to look at a depressed person and lament that they don’t have the wherewithal to take care of themselves (meant both in the normal sense and in the mafia sense)
I’ve been looking through the replies in the crossposts. It illustrates your gullibility filter point completely.
Also, if you need validation, you are a fantastic science communicator. You take research that isn’t accessible to me and present it in a form I can understand. You also provide enough disclaimers about gaps in your knowledge when you might be glossing over details while providing me with inroads to research those details themselves. You dispel fear and confusion stemming from the unknown while inspiring me to discover more.
Yud doesn’t do any of those things and often does the opposite, but let’s forget about him for a moment. Good article!
At various points, on Twitter, Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.” …...
Ah fuck as a xoogler I do this. Everything I do is terrible (see my advent of code snippets) and I frequently refer to things that existed in the google ecosystem.
One of the last times I spoke to Scott, before the Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck began, his mother had been in the hospital half a dozen times in recent weeks. She is in her seventies and has a thyroid condition, but on a recent visit to the E.R. she waited nearly seven hours, and left without being seen by a doctor. “The right Copilot could have diagnosed the whole thing, and written her a prescription within minutes,” he said. But that is something for the future. Scott understands that these kinds of delays and frustrations are currently the price of considered progress—of long-term optimism that honestly contends with the worries of skeptics.
Either Scott is swimming in an olympic sized pool of AI kool-aid and constantly thinking about how else AI can invade aspects of his personal life or just a normal exec that is willing to cynically spin every aspect of his personal life in service of the grift. It’s probably just the latter.
Aw dawg, that’s on me for supposing for a moment that his story had truth to it. I did think it strange that this rich dude’s mum had to go to the ER for something, but decided to apply good faith.
So now it’s even more cynical. Scott, who now lives a life of convenience, doesn’t have any of his own stories to parlay into AI hype, so he has to wear someone else’s suffering as stolen valor.
Are there OpenAI employees who aren’t already in a TREACLESian cult? That’s the only way I’d believe them thinking that any cult rituals that their “spiritual leader” performs are strange.
I read his comment in the original post and thought he was endorsing your article, which, for a moment, made me think Yud had a little more magnanimity than I’ve seen before.
RE: covalently bonded bacteria. Here’s evidence of how Yud is joking: he understands bacteria as well as I do, which is not at all. However, I know that bacteria can be spooky, so if I were Yud trying to make a joke about bacteria, I’d google for developments in bacteria research and pick some phrase that stood out.
Bonus: I love the person in the comments who is effectively shouting, “A MILLION SUPERINTELLIGENCES! NANOTECH POSSIBLE! DEBATE ME! I’M VERY SMART!!!” into the void at this point.
There should be a cultist simulator mod where the principles are the TREACLES components. Expeditions are deep dives where you fend off scientific consensus to find contrarian blog posts as relics. Followers can take damage from information hazards and must be healed by adderall or nootropics.
I just read the post about 0 and 1 being invalid probabilities. Here’s my best attempt at interpreting it as a joke: This is clearly yud’s attempt at creating a mathematical trollpost using only words.
But yeah as someone with a (honestly atrophied) degree in mathematics I am struggling to figure out the post. Whatever he’s doing, he’s not performing mathematics; at best it is sophistry. Honestly it makes me sad that he wrote it at all and that people read it and agreed with it.
Reading it is like going to a restaurant, seeing “bowl of plain rice” on the menu, ordering it, and getting served an old boot full of glitter and sawdust. Seeing the comment section and seeing people that think yud is smart or correct about anything is reading the yelp reviews later for the restaurant and seeing people talk about how they’ve never tried rice before having it at the restaurant, and that it was really good and that now when they go to other restaurants with rice it’s never the real thing and they shouldn’t be trusted.
For actually interesting contrarian maths, go watch some Norman Wildberger videos or something.
Reading the article is like seeing a guy at a party pick up a guitar, announce he’s going to play wonderwall, but for whatever reason he starts holding the guitar like a trumpet, blowing on the headstock and everything. There’s no indication that this is a joke. A crowd forms and they love it, tunelessly and arrhythmically chanting “wonder wall! Wonder wall!” Over and over. It’s not even part of the song. You see him later making out in a puddle, people still chanting “wonder wall!” at the puddle. Your only recourse is to set the couch on fire and leave.
Given that the energy cost would probably kill off a significant portion of bumblebees or something, it’d have to do a lot of damage to TESCREAL to be worth it, just on utilitarian grounds alone. Given that these people seem to lack self awareness I don’t think satire would have any appreciable effect on them.
countercounterpoint: I did my best. Had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get through the content barriers. Here’s the result:
Cause Prioritization Analysis: “Kid Meat” as a Sustainable Choice Empowering Lower-Income Irish Families
Scale:
Community Impact: Empowers lower-income Irish families by creating a market for their “kid meat,” contributing indirectly to controlled populations.
Potential Reach: Niche market initially with opportunities for growth due to the appeal of supporting marginalized communities and sustainable products.
Neglectedness:
Empowerment Approach: Offers an avenue for economic empowerment to lower-income families through sustainable production.
Market Demand: Addresses the growing consumer interest in supporting marginalized communities and sustainable food choices.
Tractability:
Producer Collaboration: Involves collaboration with lower-income families for sustainable sourcing and processing.
Ethical Marketing: Crafting a narrative to highlight the ethical and community-based benefits of consuming "kid meat."
Consumer Awareness: Educating consumers about the positive impact of supporting marginalized communities through sustainable food choices.
Conclusion:
Strengths:
Empowers lower-income Irish families through market access and recognition for their “kid meat” produce.
Aligns with growing consumer interest in supporting marginalized communities and sustainable food choices.
Challenges:
Effective communication to ensure consumer understanding and embrace of the community-driven initiative.
Balancing pricing for consumer affordability while ensuring fair returns to producing families.
Overall Assessment:
Scale: Niche market initially with potential for expansion.
Neglectedness: Addresses economic empowerment indirectly through sustainable consumption and support for marginalized communities.
Tractability: Feasible with challenges in effective community-driven communication and pricing strategy.
Next Steps:
Producer Collaboration: Engage lower-income families for sustainable sourcing and processing.
Ethical Marketing: Craft a narrative highlighting the community-based benefits of consuming "kid meat."
Consumer Education: Create awareness about the positive impact of supporting marginalized communities through sustainable food choices.
Pricing Strategy: Balance pricing for consumer affordability and fair returns to producing families.
By navigating these challenges and leveraging the strengths of the initiative, “Kid Meat” aims to create a sustainable market opportunity that not only supports ethical consumption but also directly contributes to the economic empowerment of lower-income Irish families, aligning with consumers’ interests in supporting marginalized communities.
OpenAI’s current board consists of chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, former GeoSim Systems CEO Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner, the director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Unlike traditional companies, the board isn’t tasked with maximizing shareholder value, and none of them hold equity in OpenAI.
We’re not like, your traditional company. We do small plates.
Instead, their stated mission is to ensure the creation of “broadly beneficial” artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
Thought they were trying to melt the ice caps tbh.
Oh for sure. Another way to think about that is: they actually are honestly and genuinely trying to help humanity with their inventions and so forth, except for them “humanity” is just the wallet of whoever is bankrolling them.
from now on, my new bit is: I’m gonna prove how current yud tweet is a joke. Not that anyone needed more reasons to not take him seriously, of course. Just clowning on him and his inability to consciously produce humor for a lil’ fun.
In this case: Quoting an exact percentage for a made up quantity is clearly a reference to the “32.33, repeating of course” line from the leeroy jenkins video which was later revealed as a hoax, so by the transitive property, this twitter thread is also a hoax. Quite a clever, humorous, and timely meme reference. Bravo Dr. Yud
I actually wouldn’t be surprised if this were the case – the whole schtick of a lot of these people is “worrying about increasing the number of future possibly-existing humans, even at the cost of the suffering of actually-existing humans”, so being anti-abortion honestly seems not too far out of their wheelhouse?
Same energy as those score-maximising Tetris AIs that taught themselves to stack blocks to the kill line and pause.
Like I think in the EAverse you can just kinda go “well this makes people have less kids which means less QALYs therefore we all know it’s obviously bad and I don’t really need to justify it.” (with bonus internet contrarian points if you are justifying some terrible thing using your abstract math, because that means you’re Highly Decoupled and Very Smart.) See the quote elsewhere in this thread about the guy defending child marriage for similar reasons.
Reply guy EY attempts incredibly convoluted offer to meet him half-way by implying AI body pillows are a vanguard threat that will lead to human extinction... (nitter.net)
… while at the same time not really worth worrying about so we should be concentrating on unnamed alleged mid term risks....
"As always, pedophilia is not the same as ephebophilia." - Eliezer Yudkowsky, actual quote (www.lesswrong.com)
I somehow missed this one until now. Apparently it was once mentioned in the comments on the old sneerclub but I don’t think it got a proper post, and I think it deserves one.
"Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions." (blog.samaltman.com)
From Sam Altman’s blog, pre-OpenAI
this week's LW chud who is the sort of anti-wokeist who says he isn't right wing writes about human interaction from first principles. 100 upvotes. (www.lesswrong.com)
Epistemic status: Speculation. An unholy union of evo psych, introspection, random stuff I happen to observe & hear about, and thinking. Done on a highly charged topic. Caveat emptor!...
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...
LW: [Request]: Use "Epilogenics" instead of "Eugenics" in most circumstances - people just don't like the word itself yes that must be it. Coined by Aella. (www.lesswrong.com)
archive archive.is/8NW7e
LW: CRISPR Will Make Me A Genius - "I don’t have a formal background in biology. And though I learn fairly quickly and have great resources like SciHub and GPT4," (www.lesswrong.com)
archive: archive.is/KdzMM
Existential Comics on rationalism and parmesan (existentialcomics.com)
SSC Reddit having a normal one, OP fantasizing about murdering their child, I guess? (www.reddit.com)
Utilitarian brainworms or one of the many very real instances of a homicidal parent going after their disabled child? I can’t decide, but it’s a depressing read....
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.
18+ Why Yudkowsky is wrong about "covalently bonded equivalents of biology" (titotal.substack.com)
This is my article on one of the dumbest and most obviously false claims Yudkowsky has ever made, about biology not using covalent bonds.
Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement? (www.forbes.com)
At various points, on Twitter, Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.” …...
The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI (archive.is)
Most of the article is well-trodden ground if you’ve been following OpenAI at all, but I thought this part was noteworthy:...
Prominent Women in Tech Say They Don't Want to Join OpenAI's All-Male Board (www.wired.com)
non-paywall archived version here: archive.is/ztech
loving the EA forum on how the problem with spending the charity money on a castle was the public relations (forum.effectivealtruism.org)
OpenAI Employees Say Firm's Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims (futurism.com)
Ex-OpenAI board member Tasha McCauley is deep state because she married Joseph Gordon-Levitt (www.lesswrong.com)
Found this because an article on Helen Toner popped up in my feed and I wanted to find out more, and boy did I find out more.
18+ My deep dive into yudkowsky's "diamondoid bacteria" claims and drexler-style nanotech in general (titotal.substack.com)
…substack.com/…/diamondoid-bacteria-nanobots-dead…...
18+ Friends Don’t Let Friends Learn Probability from Yudkowsky | Science After Sunclipse (www.sunclipse.org)
For convenience, I gathered a few comments of mine into a blog post.
rationalist reaches the libertarian conclusion about child marriage (forum.effectivealtruism.org)
saw this pointed out here and felt it deserved it’s own post...
OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO - get me off this ride it's too dumb (www.theverge.com)
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.
the effectively altruistic AI's fans are gonna pipe bomb a Planned Parenthood (forum.effectivealtruism.org)