SneerClub

Been waiting to come back to the steeple of the sneer for a while. Its good to be back. I just really need to sneer, this ones been building for a long time.

Now I want to gush to you guys about something thats been really bothering me for a good long while now. WHY DO RATIONALISTS LOVE WAGERS SO FUCKING MUCH!?

I mean holy shit, theres a wager for everything now, I read a wager that said that we can just ignore moral anti-realism cos 'muh decision theory', that we must always hedge our bets on evidential decision theory, new pascals wagers, entirely new decision theories, the whole body of literature on moral uncertainty, Schwitzgebels 1% skepticism and so. much. more.

I'm beginning to think its the only type of argument that they can make, because it allows them to believe obviously problematic things on the basis that they 'might' be true. I don't know how decision theory went from a useful heuristic in certain situations and economics to arguing that no matter how likely it is that utilitarianism is true you have to follow it cos math, acausal robot gods, fuckin infinite ethics, basically providing the most egregiously smug escape hatch to ignore entire swathes of philosophy etc.

It genuinely pisses me off, because they can drown their opponents in mathematical formalisms, 50 page long essays all amounting to impenetrable 'wagers' that they can always defend no matter how stupid it is because this thing 'might' be true; and they can go off create another rule (something along the lines of 'the antecedent promulgation ex ante expected pareto ex post cornucopian malthusian utility principle) that they need for the argument to go through, do some calculus declare it 'plausible' and then call it a day. Like I said, all of this is so intentionally opaque that nobody other than their small clique can understand what the fuck they are going on about, and even then there is little to no disagreement within said clique!

Anyway, this one has been coming for a while, but I hope to have struck up some common ground between me and some other people here

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.

I don't particularly disagree with the piece, but it's striking how little effort is put in to make this resemble a news piece or a typical Vox explainer. It's just blatant editorializing ("Please do this thing I want") and very blatantly carrying water for the--some how non-discredited--EA movement priorities.

he takes a couple pages to explain why he know that sightings of UFOs aren't alien because he can simply infer how superintelligent beings will operate + how advanced their technology is. he then undercuts his point by saying that he's very uncertain about both of those things, but wraps it up nicely with an excessively wordy speech about how making big bets on your beliefs is the responsible way to be a thought leader. bravo

@sneerclub

Greetings!

Roko called, just to say he's filed a trademark on Basilisk™ and will be coming after anyone who talks about it for licensing fees which will go into his special Basilisk™ Immanetization Fund and if we don't pay up we'll burn in AI hell forever once the Basilisk™ wakes up and gets around to punishing us.

Also, if you see your mom, be sure and tell her SATAN!!!!—

by Monkeon, from the b3ta Mundane Video Games challenge

Yudkowsky writes,

How can Effective Altruism solve the meta-level problem where almost all of the talented executives and ops people were in 1950 and now they're dead and there's fewer and fewer surviving descendants of their heritage every year and no blog post I can figure out how to write could even come close to making more people being good executives?

Because what EA was really missing is collusion to hide the health effects of tobacco smoking.

This totally true anecdote features a friend who "can't recall the names of his parents [but] remember[s] the one thing he'd be safer forgetting."

Discussion on AI starts at about 17mins. The Bas(ilisk) drop happens at 20:30. Sorry if ads mess up my time stamps. I think this is the second time it’s come up on the show.

Source Tweet

@ESYudkowsky: Remember when you were a kid and thought you might have psychic powers, so you dealt yourself face-down playing cards and tried to guess whether they were red or black, and recorded your accuracy rate over several batches of tries?

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And then remember how you had absolutely no idea to do stats at that age, so you stayed confused for a while longer?

Apologies for the usage of the japanese; but it is a very apt description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūnibyō,

really: https://archive.ph/p0jPI

Roko’s twitter is an absolutely reliable guide to how recently a woman with dyed hair and facial piercings kicked him in the nuts again

It will not surprise you at all to find that they protest just a tad too much.

See also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZjXtjRQaD2b4PAser/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning

I used to enjoy Ariely's books and others like him before I started reading better stuff. All that behavioural economics genre seems to be a good example of content that holds up as long as you don't read any more on the subject.

Ugh.

But even if some of Yudkowsky’s allies don’t entirely buy his regular predictions of AI doom, they argue his motives are altruistic and that for all his hyperbole, he’s worth hearing out.

Thought it worth sharing among so much very, very questionable material I've found in reading through the reference material of this book, I came across ths Blake Masters + Peter Thiel connection.

It's my obsession sneer because of how celebrated this god damn book is among the fight for the user UX community.

I’ve mostly been reading the material but need to back up and do an author background check for each one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200101054932/https://blakemasters.com/post/20582845717/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-2-notes-essay

There were five posts on r/sneerclub about our very good friends at Leverage Research and many interesting URLs linking off them.

• 04 Sep 2019: the rich sneering mines to be found by lifting the rock Leverage Research lives under, and the comments are amazing too (archive)
• EA forum (archive)
• a twitter thread of good bits (archive)
• 03 Oct 2019: shocked to see that white nationalist neoreactionary Jonah Bennett was in at Leverage Research. Must be coincidence. (archive) "So far Leverage’s greatest contribution to the EA / rationality movement was a genital herpes outbreak."
• Splinter News: Leaked Emails Show How White Nationalists Have Infiltrated Conservative Media (archive)
• this EA is sure that Bennett was just infiltrating the white nationalists! (archive) though he adds "I previously knew that Leverage has employed several neoreactionaries". In rationalism, an office with a pile of open fucking Nazis in it is just normal. Not everyone's a signed-up party member!
• 13 Oct 2021: First-Hand Account of the Leverage Cult (archive)
• Medium post (archive) by Zoe Curzi. "Many folks have reached out to me privately w/ their own stories about Leverage or Geoff. Some comments on facebook, twitter, Medium, and LessWrong have shared or implied further stories (& concerns about anonymity). So, here’s a place you can submit stories anonymously. It’ll be handled & vetted by Aella, who I trust." oh dear
• 26 Sep 2021: Leverage Research: shocked, shocked to discover that another LessWrong-associated rationalist group is actually a NXIVM-style sex cult (archive)
• LessWrong: Common knowledge about Leverage Research 1.0 (archive)
• Leverage had its own crypto shitcoin, Reserve Rights
• Geoff Anders of Leverage has been linked to another crypto thing that has been in the news lately, Arkham Intelligence (archive)
• 01 Jun 2023: "Serious" research from a "serious" research institute that reads like an SCP (archive) - just in case you thought Leverage wasn't comparable to Scientology.
• On Intention Research - Kerry Vaughan, Leverage Research, PDF (archive) - it's about using the forbidden knowledge you gain at Leverage to psychically hypnotise people into wanting to fuck you, though it doesn't come out and say so in those words

and here's the collected LessWrong on Leverage

Thanks for this, UN.

Occasionally you can find a good sneer on the orange site

this was last year when Aella was trying to do a survey of trans people for one of her darling little twitter poll writeups. I felt it was necessary to warn people off this shockingly awful person. Perhaps you will find it useful.

Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/davidgerard/status/1556391089124286467
Archive: https://archive.is/FZK1B

we actually declared an Aella moratorium on the old sneerclub because she just kept coming up with banger after banger