[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago

In the case of O'Connor and people like him, I think it's about much more than his philosophy background. He's a YouTube creator who creates content on a regular schedule and makes a living off it. Once you start doing that, you're exposed to all the horrible incentives of the YouTube engagement algorithm, which inevitably leads you to start seeking out other controversial YouTubers to platform and become friendly with. It's an "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" situation dialed up to 11.

The same thing has happened to Sabine herself. She's been captured by the algorithm, which has naturally shifted her audience to the right, and now she's been fully captured by that new audience.

I fully expect Alex O'Connor to remain on this treadmill. <remind me in 12months>

[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 22 points 5 days ago

The Lasker/Mamdani/NYT sham of a story just gets worse and worse. It turns out that the ultimate source of Cremieux's (Jordan Lasker's) hacked Columbia University data is a hardcore racist hacker who uses a slur for their name on X. The NYT reporter who wrote the Mamdani piece, Benjamin Ryan, turns out to have been a follower of this hacker's X account. Ryan essentially used Lasker as a cutout for the blatantly racist hacker.

https://archive.is/d9rh1

[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago

It's starting to feel like I need to download a snapshot of Wikipedia now before it gets worse.

[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 9 points 6 days ago

I'd be lying if I said the randomly generated narrative the LLM is stringing together isn't hilarious.

"I panicked and ran database commands without permission."

"I destroyed all production data."

"You immediately said 'No', ''Stop', 'You didn't even ask.'"

"But it was already too late."

[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 22 points 2 weeks ago

Not gonna lie, it's fun reading those reddit posts from vibe coders, squealing like stuck pigs because their heavily subsidized code extruder stopped working.

78
Roko has ideas (bsky.app)

"Ban women from universities, higher education and most white-collar jobs."

"Allow people to privately borrow against the taxable part of the future incomes or other economic activities of their children."

So many execrable takes in one tweet, and that's only two of them. I'm tempted to think he's cynically outrage-farming, but then I remember who he is.

[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 24 points 3 weeks ago

I have no doubt that a chatbot would be just as effective at doing Liuson's job, if not moreso. Not because chatbots are good, but because Liuson is so bad at her job.

22

Nate Soares and Big Yud have a book coming out. It's called "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies". From the names of the authors and the title of the book, you already know everything you need to know about its contents without having to read it. (In fact, given the signature prolixity of the rationalists, you can be sure that it says in 50,000 words what could just as easily have been said in 20.)

In this LessWrong post, Nate identifies the real reason the rationalists have been unsuccessful at convincing people in power to take the idea of existential risk seriously. The rationalists simply don't speak with enough conviction. They hide the strength of their beliefs. They aren't bold enough.

As if rationalists have ever been shy about stating their kooky beliefs.

But more importantly, buy his book. Buy so many copies of the book that it shows up on all the best-seller lists. Buy so many copies that he gets invited to speak on fancy talk shows that will sell even more books. Basically, make him famous. Make him rich. Make him a household name. Only then can we make sure that the AI god doesn't kill us all.

Nice racket.

[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 27 points 3 months ago

After minutes of meticulous research and quantitative analysis, I've come up with my own predictions about the future of AI.

126

The tech bro hive mind on HN is furiously flagging (i.e., voting into invisibility) any submissions dealing with Tesla, Elon Musk or the kafkaesque US immigration detention situation. Add "/active" to the URL to see.

The site's moderator says it's fine because users are "tired of the repetition". Repetition of what exactly? Attempts to get through the censorship wall?

44

Sneerclubbers may recall a recent encounter with "Tracing Woodgrains", née Jack Despain Zhou, the rationalist-infatuated former producer and researcher for "Blocked and Reported", a podcast featuring prominent transphobes Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog.

It turns out he's started a new venture: a "think-tank" called the "Center for Educational Progress." What's this think-tank's focus? Introducing eugenics into educational policy. Of couse they don't put it in those exact words, but that's the goal. The co-founder of the venture is Lillian Tara, former executive director of Pronatalist.org, the outfit run by creepy Harry Potter look-a-likes (and moderately frequent topic in this forum) Simone and Malcolm Collins. According to the anti-racist activist group Hope Not Hate:

The Collinses enlisted Lillian Tara, a pronatalist graduate student at Harvard University. During a call with our undercover reporter, Tara referred three times to her work with the Collinses as eugenics. “I don’t care if you call me a eugenicist,” she said.

Naturally, the CEP is concerned about IQ and want to ensure that mentally superior (read white) individuals don't have their hereditarily-deserved resources unfairly allocated to the poors and the stupids. They have a reading list on the substack, which includes people like Arthur Jensen and LessWrong IQ-fetishist Gwern.

So why are Trace and Lillian doing this now? I suppose they're striking while the iron is hot, probably hoping to get some sweet sweet Thiel-bucks as Elon and his goon-squad do their very best to gut public education.

And more proof for the aphorism: "Scratch a rationalist, find a racist".

19

In a recent Hard Fork (Hard Hork?) episode, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose described attending the recent "The Curve" conference -- a conference in Berkeley organized and attended mostly by our very best friends. When asked about the most memorable session he attended at this conference, Casey said:

That would have been a session called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, which was hosted by Eliezer Yudkowski. Eliezer is sort of the original doomer. For a couple of decades now, he has been warning about the prospects of super intelligent AI.

His view is that there is almost no scenario in which we could build a super intelligence that wouldn't either enslave us or hurt us, kill all of us, right? So he's been telling people from the beginning, we should probably just not build this. And so you and I had a chance to sit in with him.

People fired a bunch of questions at him. And we should say, he's a really polarizing figure, and I think is sort of on one extreme of this debate. But I think he was also really early to understanding a lot of harms that have bit by bit started to materialize.

And so it was fascinating to spend an hour or so sitting in a room and hearing him make his case.

[...]

Yeah, my case for taking these folks seriously, Kevin, is that this is a community that, over a decade ago, started to make a lot of predictions that just basically came true, right? They started to look at advancements in machine learning and neural networks and started to connect the dots. And they said, hey, before too long, we're going to get into a world where these models are incredibly powerful.

And all that stuff just turned out to be true. So, that's why they have credibility with me, right? Everything they believe, you know, we could hit some sort of limit that they didn't see coming.

Their model of the world could sort of fall apart. But as they have updated it bit by bit, and as these companies have made further advancements and they've built new products, I would say that this model of the world has basically held so far. And so, if nothing else, I think we have to keep this group of folks in mind as we think about, well, what is the next phase of AI going to look like for all of us?

31

Excerpt:

A new study published on Thursday in The American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that dosage may play a role. It found that among people who took high doses of prescription amphetamines such as Vyvanse and Adderall, there was a fivefold increased risk of developing psychosis or mania for the first time compared with those who weren’t taking stimulants.

Perhaps this explains some of what goes on at LessWrong and in other rationalist circles.

23

Maybe she was there to give Moldbug some relationship advice.

[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 27 points 1 year ago

So now Steve Sailer has shown up in this essay's comments, complaining about how Wikipedia has been unfairly stifling scientific racism.

Birds of a feather and all that, I guess.

[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 20 points 1 year ago

why it has to be quite that long

Welcome to the rationalist-sphere.

[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 27 points 1 year ago

Scott Alexander, by far the most popular rationalist writer besides perhaps Yudkowsky himself, had written the most comprehensive rebuttal of neoreactionary claims on the internet.

Hey Trace, since you're undoubtedly reading this thread, I'd like to make a plea. I know Scott Alexander Siskind is one of your personal heroes, but maybe you should consider digging up some dirt in his direction too. You might learn a thing or two.

31
OK doomer (www.newyorker.com)

The New Yorker has a piece on the Bay Area AI doomer and e/acc scenes.

Excerpts:

[Katja] Grace used to work for Eliezer Yudkowsky, a bearded guy with a fedora, a petulant demeanor, and a p(doom) of ninety-nine per cent. Raised in Chicago as an Orthodox Jew, he dropped out of school after eighth grade, taught himself calculus and atheism, started blogging, and, in the early two-thousands, made his way to the Bay Area. His best-known works include “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” a piece of fan fiction running to more than six hundred thousand words, and “The Sequences,” a gargantuan series of essays about how to sharpen one’s thinking.

[...]

A guest brought up Scott Alexander, one of the scene’s microcelebrities, who is often invoked mononymically. “I assume you read Scott’s post yesterday?” the guest asked [Katja] Grace, referring to an essay about “major AI safety advances,” among other things. “He was truly in top form.”

Grace looked sheepish. “Scott and I are dating,” she said—intermittently, nonexclusively—“but that doesn’t mean I always remember to read his stuff.”

[...]

“The same people cycle between selling AGI utopia and doom,” Timnit Gebru, a former Google computer scientist and now a critic of the industry, told me. “They are all endowed and funded by the tech billionaires who build all the systems we’re supposed to be worried about making us extinct.”

35

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.

Excerpt:

One day, when he was about twelve, he popped out of his room to ask me a question about an argument made by Derik Parfit, a well-known moral philosopher. As it happens, | am quite familiar with the academic literature Parfi’s article is a part of, having written extensively on related questions myself. His question revealed a depth of understanding and critical thinking that is not all that common even among people who think about these issues for a living. ‘What on earth are you reading?” I asked. The answer, it turned out, was he was working his way through the vast literature on utiitarianism, a strain of moral philosophy that argues that each of us has a strong ethical obligation to live so as to alleviate the suffering of those less fortunate than ourselves. The premises of utilitarianism obviously resonated strongly with what Sam had already come to believe on his own, but gave him a more systematic way to think about the problem and connected him to an online community of like-minded people deeply engaged in the same intellectual and moral journey.

Yeah, that "online community" we all know and love.

[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 31 points 1 year ago

Eats the same bland meal every day of his life. Takes an ungodly number of pills every morning. Uses his son as his own personal blood boy. Has given himself a physical appearance that can only be described as "uncanny valley".

I'll never understand the extremes some of these tech bros will go to deny the inevitability of death.

71
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

Pass the popcorn, please.

(nitter link)

[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 20 points 2 years ago

Imagine thinking there is actually some identifiable thing called "white culture". As if a skin color defines a culture.

Yeah, sounds like a Nazi.

24

They've been pumping this bio-hacking startup on the Orange Site (TM) for the past few months. Now they've got Siskind shilling for them.

42
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.

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TinyTimmyTokyo

joined 2 years ago