In his early blog posts, Scott Alexander talked about how he was not leaping through higher education in a single bound

He starts his recent article on AI psychosis by mixing up psychosis with schizophrenia (he calls psychosis a biological disease), so that tracks.

Other than that, I think it's ok in principle to be ideologically opposed to something even if you and yours happened to benefit from it. Of course, it immediately becomes iffy if it's a mechanism for social mobility that you don't plan on replacing, since in that case you are basically advocating for pulling up the ladder behind you.

Ed Zitron summarizes his premium post in the better offline subreddit: Why Did Microsoft Invest In OpenAI?

Summary of the summary: they fully expected OpenAI would've gone bust by now and MS would be looting the corpse for all it's worth.

How though, either he got cold feet in the middle of selling out to the tech-fash or he was honestly that incredibly oblivious (see also: agreeing to do tim pool's show), neither strikes me as especially mitigating.

edit: Tried to watch the video, I made it to the part where he all but claims he sold out ironically, apparently at the time he thought spreading the good news about Altman's hilariously dystopic crypto pet project was so off-brand that it would be perceived like performance art or something, baffling.

He also kept going on about how the money wasn't even that good as I guess further evidence that the whole thing was him going briefly insane, and not I don't know just him allowing sponsors to test the waters before committing more heavily.

As if the only options available to get him to shill for something would be either heap Faustian amounts of cash on him or cast a confusion spell and hope he likes getting underpaid.

That IQ after a certain level somehow turns into mana points is a core rationalist assumption about how intelligence works.

Nice to know even pre-LLM AI techniques remain eminently fuckupable if you just put your mind to it.

(Are there multiple ai Nobel prize winners who are ai doomers?)

There's Geoffrey Hinton I guess, even if his 2024 Nobel in (somehow) Physics seemed like a transparent attempt at trend chasing on behalf of the Nobel committee.

Before focusing on AI he was going off about what he called the rot economy, which also had legs and seemed to be in line with Doctorow's enshitification concept. Applying the same purity standard to that would mean we should be suspicious if he ever worked with a listed company at all.

Still I get how his writing may feel inauthentic to some, personally I get preacher vibes from him and he often does a cyclical repetition of his points as the article progresses which to me sometimes came off as arguing via browbeating, and also I've had just about enough of reading performatively angry internet writers.

Still, he must be getting better or at least coming up with more interesting material, since lately I've been managing to read them all the way through.

What else though, is he being secretly funded by the cabal to make convolutional neural networks great again?

That he found his niche and is trying to make the most of it seems by far the most parsimonious explanation, and the heaps of manure he unloads on the LLM both business and practices weekly surely can't be helping DoNotPay's bottom line.

Getting Trump reelected should count as 'billionaire philanthropy'.

It's not just systemic media head-up-the-assery, there's also the whole thing about oil companies and petrostates bankrolling climate denialism since the 70s.

I could go over Wolfram's discussion of biological pattern formation, gravity, etc., etc., and give plenty of references to people who've had these ideas earlier. They have also had them better, in that they have been serious enough to work out their consequences, grasp their strengths and weaknesses, and refine or in some cases abandon them. That is, they have done science, where Wolfram has merely thought.

Huh, it looks like Wolfram also pioneered rationalism.

Scott Aaronson also turns up later for having written a paper that refutes a specific Wolfram claim on quantum mechanics, reminding us once again that very smart dumb people are actually a thing.

As a sidenote, if anyone else is finding the plain-text-disguised-as-an-html-document format of this article a tad grating, your browser probably has a reader mode that will make it way more presentable, it's F9 on firefox.

That you can jailbreak recall and run it on non compliant hardware seems to be the least concerning thing in that article, recommended reading.