The really annoying thing is, the people behind AI surely ought to know all this already. I remember just a few years ago when DALL-E mini came out, and they'd purposefully not trained it on pictures of human faces so you couldn't use it to generate pictures of human faces -- they'd come out all garbled. What's changed isn't that they don't know this stuff -- it's that the temptation of money means they don't care anymore

My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, "okay, in a world where the rationalists weren't closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren't known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people's money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut..."

But the system isn’t designed for that, why would you expect it to do so?

It, uh... sounds like the flaw is in the design of the system, then? If the system is designed in such a way that it can't help but do unethical things, then maybe the system is not good to have.

RationalWiki is an index maintained by the Rationalist community

Lies and slander! I get why he'd assume this based on the name, but it would be pretty funny if the rationalists were responsible for the rational wiki articles on Yudkowsky et al, since iirc they're pretty scathing

I think they were responding to the implication in self's original comment that LLMs were claiming to evaluate code in-model and that calling out to an external python evaluator is 'cheating.' But actually as far as I know it is pretty common for them to evaluate code using an external interpreter. So I think the response was warranted here.

That said, that fact honestly makes this vulnerability even funnier because it means they are basically just letting the user dump whatever code they want into eval() as long as it's laundered by the LLM first, which is like a high-school level mistake.

Look, you gotta forgive this guy for coming up with an insane theory that doesn't make sense. After all, his brain was poisoned by testosterone, so his thinking skills have atrophied. An XXL hat size can only do so much, you know.

Like, seriously, get a hobby or something.

For real. I don't even necessarily disagree with the broad-strokes idea of "if you're comfortable, it's good to take on challenges and get outside of your comfort zone because that's how you grow as a person," but why can't he just apply this energy to writing a terrible novel or learning to paint watercolors or something, like a normal person? Why does the fact his life is comfortable mean he has to become a Nazi? :/

I love this unhinged Yudkowsky quote buried in here:

This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.

Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish[...]

Zack is actually correct that this is a pretty wild thing to say... "Rest assured that I considered all possible counterarguments against my position which I was able to generate with my mega super brain. No, I haven't actually looked at the arguments against my position, but I'm confident in my ability to think of everything that people who disagree with me would say."

It so happens that Yudkowsky is on the 'right side' politically in this particular case, but man, this is real sloppy for someone who claims to be on the side of capital-T truth.

The problem is... well, Zack correctly recognizes Yudkowsky is maybe not as world-changingly smart as he presents himself, and may be engaging in motivated reasoning rather than disinterested truth-seeking, but then his solution (a) doesn't involve questioning his belief in the rest of the robot apocalypse mythos, and (b) does involve running crying directly into the arms of Moldbug and a bunch of TERFs, which like, dude. Maybe consider critically interrogating those people's arguments too??

And who doesn’t want to be younger for longer?

Oh, of course it's about this. Is it ever not about this with Thiel?

Feel like the very beginning of this is not completely crazy (I've also thought in the past that straight people often perform "attractiveness" more for the approval of their same-sex friends) but it seems to kind of jump off the evo-psych deep end after that, lol

Also you can't build a bunch of assumptions about "we should organize society this way" while ignoring the existence of LGBT people, and then go "yeah I know I ignored them but it simplified my analysis." Like yeah it simplifies the analysis to ignore a bunch of stuff that actually exists in reality, but... then that means maybe your conclusions about how to structure society are wrong??

edit: also this quote is choice:

I don't know if this really happens. But even if not, the fiction does a great job of highlighting the dynamic I'm thinking of.

It’s not like a pig that can do calculus would suddenly become a reasonable romantic partner haha.

as a pig that can do calculus, this explains why I'm still single

why are the comments on this post such a disaster. who are these people