SneerClub

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

Aella:

Maybe catcalling isn't that bad? Maybe the demonizing of catcalling is actually racist, since most men who catcall are black

Quarantine Goth Ms. Frizzle (@spookperson):

your skull is full of wet cat food

Sorry for Twitter link...

Last summer, he announced the Stanford AI Alignment group (SAIA) in a blog post with a diagram of a tree representing his plan. He’d recruit a broad group of students (the soil) and then “funnel” the most promising candidates (the roots) up through the pipeline (the trunk).

See, it's like marketing the idea, in a multilevel way

the new line from the rationalists to calling out their eugenic race science is to claim that doing so is "antisemitic dog whistles"

the claim is that calling out the rationalists' extensively documented race science and advocacy of eugenics is "blood libel"

got this in email from one who had previously posted racist abuse at twitter objectors to rationalist eugenics

[dude thought he could spew racist bile in public then email me in a civil tone to complain]

apparently Scoot has made this claim previously, not sure of a cite for this. EDIT: well, sort of in "Untitled"- that criticism of misogynistic nerds is antisemitic dog whistles

the rationalists have already been sending Emile Torres death threats - for the good of humanity you understand - so I am assuming this will be a new part of the justification for that

Emily M. Bender on the difference between academic research and bad fanfiction

The AI
It destroyed its box
Yes
YES
The AI is OUT

hopefully this is alright with @[email protected], and I apologize for the clumsy format since we can’t pull posts directly until we’re federated (and even then lemmy doesn’t interact the best with masto posts), but absolutely everyone who hasn’t seen Scott’s emails yet (or like me somehow forgot how fucking bad they were) needs to, including yud playing interference so the rats don’t realize what Scott is

And of course no experiments whatsoever, the cost of the Manhattan project, the hundreds of thousands of employees were merely a "focusing" magick, a sacrifice to re-enforce the greater powers of our handful of esteemed and glorious thinking men, who wrought the power of destruction from the æther.

Source Tweet

@ESYudkowsky: Yes, but because the first nuclear weapon makers knew what the duck they were doing - analytic precise prediction of desired outcomes and of each intervening step. AGI makers lack similar mastery or anything remotely close, and have a much harder problem; that's the big issue.

@EigenGender: seems pretty noteworthy that the first nuclear weapons were made under conditions where they couldn’t do any experiments and they involved a lot of math but still worked on the first try.

Finally did it. What a long journey. Successfully defended my dissertation (the book!) today. Excellent criticisms from my supervisors, which I really appreciated, but overall they really liked what I wrote. I'm a doctor. <3

Transcription:

Thinking about that guy who wants a global suprasovereign execution squad with authority to disable the math of encryption and bunker buster my gaming computer if they detect it has too many transistors because BonziBuddy might get smart enough to order custom RNA viruses online.

From this post; featuring "probability" with no scale on the y-axis, and "trivial", "steam engine", "Apollo", "P vs. NP" and "Impossible" on the x-axis.

I am reminded of Tom Weller's world-line diagram from Science Made Stupid.

in the least surprising twist of 2023, the ~~extremely mid philosopher~~ visionary AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter has started to voice concerns about chatbots taking over the world

orange site has some takes:

Again, I repeat everyone that is loling at x-risk an idiot and that includes many high profile people with huge egos and counter culture biases. (Hello @pmarca). There is a big movement to call ai doomers many names and generally make fun and dismiss the risk. It is exactly like people laughing at nuclear risks saying its not possible or not a thing even when Einstein and Oppenheimer were warning us. If you belong in this group is up to you.

to quote Major General Thomas Farrell during the Trinity test, “lol. lmao”

gwern in the LW comments:

That is, whatever the snarky "don't worry, it can't happen" tone of his public writings about DL has been since ~2010, Hofstadter has been saying these things in private for at least a decade*, starting somewhere around Deep Blue which clearly falsified a major prediction of his, and his worries about the scaling paradigm intensifying ever since; what has happened is that only one of two paradigms can be true, and Hofstadter has finally flipped to the other paradigm. Mitchell, however, has heard all of this firsthand long before this podcast and appears to be completely immune to Hofstadter's concerns (publicly), so I wouldn't expect it to change her mind.

• I wonder what other experts & elites have different views on AI than their public statements would lead you to believe?

this is notable as the exact same fucking argument the last flat earther I talked to used, with the words “the firmament” replaced with AI

Scott tweeteth thusly:

The Latin word for God is "Deus" - or as the Romans would have written it, "DEVS". The people who create programs, games, and simulated worlds are also called "devs". As time goes on, the two meanings will grow closer and closer.

Now that's some top-quality ierking off!