Ah, of course it's a joke. Should have realized that he'd never sincerely post a bizarre and incorrect take.
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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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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Someone whose takes are all off-the-rails and illogical: “whyyyyy do you all fail to know when I am joking? It must be a You problem!”
A You problem or a Yud problem? Views differ!
I ain't reading all that.
Why does he have such a serious case of expertise (ok, "expertise") creep? Who gives a fuck what the AI weirdo thinks about diets?
Basically this https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Not like he's ever been a competent physicist but he has always had the attitude of STEM chauvinism down pat.
Everything obeys the laws of math and logic, right? Let's just Russel&Whitehead everything out of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. Or better yet, something I personally came up with based on vibes and NIH.
This also informs his anti-empiricism. Why bother actually looking or listenging when you can just work everything out from a handful of assumptions.
I had a coworker once who was vehemently opposed to lights on the bike path because, he showed us through a chain of impeccable logic, being able to see victims would make it easier to assault people.
But what about all these studies, I asked, showing empirically that lighting pedestrian/bikeways leads to less assault?
Nonsense data, he informed me. Correlation not causation.
Nothing at all to do with him living behind the path & not wanting lights. Nope. Just unassailable logic.
Why are so many people who aren't actually employed doing stem things stem chauvinists?
I think there's a big difference between scientists and what I call science enthusiasts.
Prior to actually trying to do science (or any other of the adjacent disciplines) you're exposed to a grossly simplified version. This simplified version is a combination of uncontroversial facts presented as obvious and propaganda about the correctness and virtue of the cartoon scientific method from whence those facts are alledges to have solely come from.
The propaganda is a result of how our institutions derive much of their authority from this notion of being ascendent by their obvious correctness according to the impartial and objective methods of cartoon science.
So if you believe that science is this magical set of practices that deliver solely objective truth, and those practices are clearly defined, and it feels to you like you are doing them: well it must be that you've arrived at objective truth. If anyone else is doing something different they, the poor fools, must simply be unenlightened.
If you actually practice science you realise that it's deeply political, stupidly time consuming and difficult, limited by cultural values, frequently full of bullshit, and largely composed of stuff that looks much more like obsessive measurement with intuition than the scientific method.
It makes you much more sympathetic to the idea that maybe you're wrong and other people know what they're doing. Even if often none of us can precisely articulate why we're doing it.
edit: this might come across too negative on science so to be clear it's awesome and way more useful than pulling things out your arse. It's just not the only way to know stuff and it is a human, and thus flawed, thing in practice.
Obviously lots of awesome stuff like antibiotics and vibrators owe their existence to science so yaaay. But also chemical weapons, terrible past abusive child rearing advice, and rapey prescriptions of vibrators so booo.
Problematic when treated dogmatically or when used by horrible people.
When you actually work in STEM things you often get to work and spend time with people outside STEM as well and often end up realizing their work is challenging, valuable and not something you can do better than them just because you still remember the quadratic formula long after high school.
because it's a source of authority and power
Okay seriously what the hell is he on about. Is he having some sort of breakdown
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.
Seems to be a/b testing a new posting style aimed at a... less discerning audience of technoilliterate anti-wokists, I think, while claiming that people missed the joke/deep philosophical point he was illustrating without actually meaning what he wrote every time a post falls embarrassingly flat.
Once he gets that nobody outside the handful of rat forums is actually bothering with his bizarre wall of texts rants, i think blue collar vlogging behind the wheel yud night be the logical next step.
Oh god, we’re gonna get a wave of rattubers aren’t we
Do you think he has a license? Somehow I doubt it.
He's working on his tight 5 (hours)
Someone should ask him how he thinks combustion engines work
…not me though. I ain’t going near that. Could get crazy on my shoes, and that takes ages to wash out
Academic prose is not known for its scintillating qualities, but reading meta-analyses and reviews about calorie restriction (for example) is easier than reading a Yud tweet.
Metformin works too.
I mean he's not wrong to criticise the super simple calories in calories out, or even how food calories are determined, but like nobody thinks that model is true except reply guys on reddit.
Our understanding of food has moved on, you don't have to be such a dork about saying "hey if you think this maybe read some more recent literature".
fuck me I’m getting flashbacks to the worst posts I’ve seen on the internet, all thanks to Reddit’s weird hangups: calorie reply guys, the fucking pitbull thing, vegans who read like fictional vegans made up by people who hate vegans, all the folks trying to convince you you’re abusing your pets
I still can't bring myself to believe that straw vegans exist. I know they *do*, but they don't resemble any real vegans I've ever met, so in my mind the straw vegans *must* be fictional vegans made up by people who hate vegans.
All vegans are awesome. Even annoying ones. It's wild how much flak people throw out. Like I wouldn't criticise an annoying peace activist in front of war hawks because no matter what they're doing they're way less disturbing than the war hawks.
The racist ones suck