Also he seems to be the opposite of charismatic.

Yeah, I guess I’m splitting hairs, cult leader is a very open ended job description after all.

Scott is hilariously uninformed

Elsewhere he is comparing their orwelian chipset distribution control scheme to health inspectors making sure supermarkets don’t sell spoiled milk. He just says whatever as long as he thinks it’ll help convince more people than it drives away, and his fanbase goes along with it because they think that’s how you get to be the normie whisperer.

This makes me feel there really is no telling what actual agenda the rationaltruists’ would enact if they ever get to dictate policy.

Siskind just posted a follow up to his coverage of ai2040, apparently he’s having a bit of a hard time selling his crowd on the really obvious totalitarian implications of instituting a global surveillance system to track and remotely disable chipsets to make sure rogue elements can’t secretly conjure the robot god prematurely.

It’s important too, chip registration is a big part of the ??? item in the to-do list, right before “China and US passionately french kiss, agree to pause AI research”

Enjoyed the writeup, thanks for gazing into the abyss!

This is a classic rationalist fallacy that we see repeated throughout the piece of assuming that ultimately if you express the argument properly everyone will agree on the right thing

This is complementary to their heterodoxy fetish, leading to fringe or outright bonkers but excruciatingly formalistic positions routinely sleight-of-handing themselves into prominence in the movement.

It’s fine for AIs to get better at using valid arguments and evidence to convince people of things for the right reasons. That kind of persuasion is asymmetric: it works much better when the argument pushes towards the truth.

That’s not how the postmodern condition works

That’s just rationalists believing that once you amass enough IQ/Mana points you unlock the mind control spell. Basically if you aren’t buying what the great-men-of-history-du-jour are selling the AIs will cast domination on you for the greater good.

Eliezer Yudkowsky - who totally isn’t a cult leader

He is definitely a cult enabler and a huge cult beneficiary, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen evidence he could lead shit to fuck.

Diversity and inclusion is suddenly great if it involves fascists doing entryism.

If your property is outside the solar system, you will need to either go into cryosleep or upload yourself to a computer to survive the journey.

Reminder that rationalists have developed a completely mysticalised conception of brain uploading that’s very functionally similar with old timey souls, mostly so they don’t need to deal with the SOMA problem of every instance of uploaded consciousness being a completely separate self-actualised entity.

Like how exactly is a digital impression of my personality being shipped to alpha centauri to inspect my holdings affect my personal experience? How is it supposed to be interchangeable with using some other made up technology that takes me there in person?

See, it works like this, no one knows what consciousness is, but it’s probably a mathematical object, and if your current conscious self is the same as the conscious self that will be inhabiting your body next friday, and also if a supreme being wants to torture you after you are dead…

Another OpenAI attempt at monetization has died an ignoble death.

OpenAI is already shutting down ChatGPT Atlas, its browser that could do tasks for you on your behalf, less than a year after launching it. Atlas was announced in October.

Nothing in my interactions with humanities types indicates they would be in a better position to handle either the educational slopnami or a slopped out job market.

As far as educational systems go, “human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning” were always left to natural selection instead of being actively pursued. Taking a philosophy course on the history of logic and ethics isn’t the same as having any.

The part about tasteless AI enthusiasts needing to be housetrained to not post slop on the forums because that’s borderline antisocial was also cool.

I like how Yud’s rogue data center air raid task force is gradually becoming another weird rationalist accepted truth.

There’s a corresponding siskind post also called something something plan A, I skimmed until the part where the US and China take de facto control of chip infrasrtucture and distribution (saying “nationalise” is haram for free market types), basically imagine having to write a letter to the government to formally justify upgrading your computer, and that’s all the AI fanfiction I can tolerate without ruining my breakfast.

Also clanker crankers appropriating the term ‘Golden Path’ from Dune is just distasteful.

Too many sneers while reading it, I did a full post: https://awful.systems/post/8886134

The Inside story of Leverage Research

This should be interesting, it’s about an organisation in the EA milieu that even other EAs though might be a bit too culty. Don’t know who the writer Lydia Laurenson is, but she does come off as a bit of a cult enthusiast herself, and is probably more than a bit rationalist adjacent.

edit: The companion piece about the background of why she wrote it is quite a ride, if only for the biographical tidbits: she is indeed very cult adjacent, she had a spiritual experience and now believes in capital G god, she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.

Also the Leverage article was contracted to appear in the New York Magazine but she pulled the story because of uh declining trust in the field of journalism, but then she goes on to imply that the real problem was that the article was shaping up as a bit too pro-Leverage:

I pulled the story once I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage, not to mention affiliated communities in Silicon Valley — and, more importantly to me, hostility towards a core spiritual sensibility that I see in both myself and in the people the story describes.

edit edit: Why can’t these people ever be normal: Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020

edit edit edit: Jesus fucking christ she’s Curtis Yarvin’s baby momma.

Does anyone actually believe this?

Current copium is that if it can solve Erdos problems after a fashion then the cancer annihilating molecular biology breakthroughs can’t be that far behind.

Also since just shovelling GPUs and reddit posts into a data center forever probably won’t do the trick they’ve settled on the questionmarks on the list before Profit! being Recursive Self Improvement, meaning that since automatic code generation is somewhat improving it follows that pretty soon LLMs will just code themselves out of their current predicament of being unsustainably resource intensive hallucination machines and build AGI on their own.

Kevin J Anderson

I’m so sorry.

Somone on bsky wrote that he always sounds like a -6 karma lesswrong post, which, ok.

Oh no: The Epstein Hysteria

tl;dr: ephebophilia actually, just another criminal case nothing to see here, won’t someone think of the non-offending pedophiles and the privacy of the people in the emails, especially those who even though they come off as obvious creeps who consorted with a known sex trafficker have not yet been found legally liable.

Somehow doesn’t mention the sitting president of the USA even once.

The shrimp stuff is objectionable insofar as the brain bug that makes you think that if you add up enough shrimp you get the moral entity equivalent of a person because consciousness stacks is the same as the one that makes stuff like longtermism palatable, and also for making the animal welfare movement at large seem unserious.

I mean as far as I can tell he’s one of the least objectionable prominent rationalists, if only because his main thing is pushing an extreme position wrt animal consciousness instead of being a eugenics and incelism dabbler.

edit: Nevermind… The Epstein Hysteria