this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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Short answer, yes, long answer yesssssssss.
Started somewhere in 1995 when he discovered the internet.
But yeah it reads like he has just discovered weight loss stories and is first principles reasoning out all the 'hypocrisy' in an 'I just learned logic from wikipedia' guy style. (I found an extreme focus on people being hypocritical or having flaws in their logical systems if you drag out the logic to extremes to be a very right libertarian thing, so that is worrying for the younger people in the Rationalist community ;) ).
It gets amusing as he talks about calories a lot but never really points to the whole 'how are calories actually measured' thing (they burn it and see how much it heats up water (or add up the various macronutrients)). As the Rationalists have a huge blindspot in not thinking hard about faulty measuring systems. He is this close to arguing that cows living on grass (pretty low in kcal (even zero effective ones for humans iirc)) violates the laws of physics.
(He prob is also losing his mind due to his lifework exploding all around him. He is starting to see (AGI doom denying) conspiracies, and even Musk (who they thought would be a techno savior) is building AI, and his solution to solving the AGI alignment problem is 'just give it human friendly rules' and 'weak grip strength'. Showing he understood nothing from the whole AGI alignment problem).
Best case for yud: his recent attempts at humour are evidence he is gaining self awareness and is on the road to shutting the fuck up
Worst case: always has been worst case my friend
Is this the "flying saucer fails to land" moment for him? AIs (large language models, ai-generated images, etc etc) are now within the experience or understanding of more and more people, and he can't just make stuff up about it anymore?
If he were a grifter, yeah. However, he's a true believer, so instead he rants about how modern machine-learning methods are dangerous and could escape at any moment; he genuinely believes that Skynet is being born inside some cloud right now.