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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our new piece on SBF gets stuck into the rationalists (davidgerard.co.uk)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm reading the Zvi piece (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/book-review-going-infinite), which is quite entertaining , but once in a while you stub your toe over the fact that the author is a True Believer

Putting the $500 million into Anthropic was arguably the most important decision Sam ever made. I do not know if investing in Anthropic was a good or bad move for the chances of everyone not dying, but chances are this was either a massively good or massively bad investment. It dwarfs in impact the rest of his EA activities combined.

And the fact that SBF's observation that only $6.5B was spent on political campaigns was ludicrously low is blithely accepted as reasonable, not as an observation that campaign finance is broken.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

ow fuck! my toe!

What happened with SBF will happen with an AI given a similar target, in terms of having misalignments that start out tolerable but steadily grow worse as capabilities increase and you face situations outside of the distribution, and things start to spiral to places very far than anything you ever would have intended.

Ah yes, one day someone will accidentally install the "I'm sorry, I can't let you do that Hal" plugin. Oops, I let the nuke launch AI override all of our control mechanisms, silly me!

I fucking hate x-risk people so much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Tangent to your point- what would happen if we started misusing tescreal terms to dilute their meaning? Some ideas:

“I don’t want to go to that party. It’s an x-risk.”

“No, I didn’t really like those sequel films. They were inscrutable Matrices.”

“You know, holding down the A button and never letting up is a viable strategy as long as you know how to brake and mini-turbo in Mario Kart. Look up ‘effective accelerationism’.”

Anyway I doubt it would do anything other than give us a headache from observing/using rat terms. Just wanted to have a lil fun.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At this point, if a rationalist says SBF is “smart” it’s probably out of shame/denial that they got duped by a junkie

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My own self doubt asks: do rationalists feel shame, though?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some of them yes, or well most of them I gather. They are just people after all.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My impression is that, as a group, on average, rationalists tend to both feel and repress more intense feelings of shame and guilt than the rest of society can be bothered dealing with, and I say that as somebody who has spent nearly two years doing addiction recovery

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

LessWrong and EA can help people to understand logical fallacies, but they can't help people to actually understand their emotions. In fact, the culture around them encourages adherents to feel contempt for their "irrational" emotions and for people who are led by emotion.

Of course it is extremely unpleasant to repress all your emotions, and it is ultimately impossible to do so all the time. How did the LessWrong community solve this problem? Its users limited their emotional expression to acceptable forms and acceptable targets, and expressed their emotions through cult accepted techniques like taking drugs, having sex, cyberbullying leftists and writing really long blogposts.

Like most subcultures, it's the powerful and respected people in EA who determine the dominant norms. With pretty much every leading EAist a middle-class dominant-culture American man who works in tech and wishes feminists would quit whining, it should be no surprise that the norms they created are stereotypically, nay, toxically white and masculine.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I doubted whether it would be a good use of time to read Michael Lewis’s new book Going Infinite about Sam Bankman-Fried (hereafter SBF or Sam). What would I learn that I did not already know? Was Michael Lewis so far in the tank of SBF that the book was filled with nonsense and not to be trusted?

I set up a prediction market,

10/10 perfect LessWrong, no notes

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The resulting book review is 28,776 words. It's 71 pages long in 12 point Calibri with normal spacing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

lol, guess I made a good choice to go 'nah, not gonna read that' and closing the tab. That is like 3 SSCs.