Not that I have a leg to stand on
Mal Reynolds yeah um hmm wait err hmm.gif
First reaction: "Wait, that was in Nature?"
Second reaction: "Oh, Nature Scientific Reports. The 'we have Nature at home' of science journals."
Among many insights, Davis (politely) points out that one of the AI-generated Chaucer poems is just "the opening of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales."
Whan that Aprille with the fuck?
Throwback Thursday: Atlas Shrugged: The Cobra Commander Dialogues
(Based on blog posts now available here.)
From page 17:
Rather than encouraging critical thinking, in core EA the injunction to take unusual ideas seriously means taking one very specific set of unusual ideas seriously, and then providing increasingly convoluted philosophical justifications for why those particular ideas matter most.
ding ding ding
Abstract: This paper presents some of the initial empirical findings from a larger forth-coming study about Effective Altruism (EA). The purpose of presenting these findings disarticulated from the main study is to address a common misunderstanding in the public and academic consciousness about EA, recently pushed to the fore with the publication of EA movement co-founder Will MacAskill’s latest book, What We Owe the Future (WWOTF). Most people in the general public, media, and academia believe EA focuses on reducing global poverty through effective giving, and are struggling to understand EA’s seemingly sudden embrace of ‘longtermism’, futurism, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, and ‘x-risk’ reduction. However, this agenda has been present in EA since its inception, where it was hidden in plain sight. From the very beginning, EA discourse operated on two levels, one for the general public and new recruits (focused on global poverty) and one for the core EA community (focused on the transhumanist agenda articulated by Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others, centered on AI-safety/x-risk, now lumped under the banner of ‘longtermism’). The article’s aim is narrowly focused onpresenting rich qualitative data to make legible the distinction between public-facing EA and core EA.
From the linked Andrew Molitor item:
Why Extropic insists on talking about thermodynamics at all is a mystery, especially since “thermodynamic computing” is an established term that means something quite different from what Extropic is trying to do. This is one of several red flags.
I have a feeling this is related to wanking about physics in the e/acc holy gospels. They invoke thermodynamics the way that people trying to sell you healing crystals for your chakras invoke quantum mechanics.
They take a theory that is supposed to be about updating one's beliefs in the face of new evidence, and they use it as an excuse to never change what they think.
The existence of a Wikipedia page for dinosaur erotica must prove that back in the days when humans co-existed with stegosaurs, the ones who fucked them lived better.
Erin go Bleagh.
Fun Blake fact: I was one bureaucratic technicality away from getting a literature minor to go along with my physics major. I didn't plan for that; we had a Byzantine set of course requirements that we had to meet by mixing and matching whatever electives were available, and somehow, the electives I took piled up to be almost enough for a lit minor. I would have had to take one more course on material written before some cutoff year — I think it was 1900 — but other than that, I had all the checkmarks. I probably could have argued my way to an exemption, since my professors liked me and the department would have gotten their numbers that little bit higher, but I didn't discover this until spring semester of my senior year, when I was already both incredibly busy and incredibly tired.