I stumbled onto that vid a while back, watched the first minute or so, lol'ed at the glazing of kokotajlo, and stopped the vid. I did think about posting it here to be torn apart but forgot about it. I watched a little bit further and got "they chose to write this as a narrative" of course they fucking did. It's their one thing. Write a shitty 10k word story that amounts to some combination of "really makes you think" and "big if true".

Here's a story: Once upon a time there was a world. In it people were sad. Then one day swlabr was elected supreme benevolent ruler and then nobody was sad again :) the end. Wow make u think. Many experts agree

I recently searched “shtetl” on facebook to see what my friends had ever shared from the blog, literally only three posts:

• A 2014 post titled “eigenmorality” which I skimmed just now, appears to be a rationalist coded social credit system, this is probably not what students are looking for
• A post titled “NSA in P/poly: The Power of Precomputation”. This appears to have useful information about cryptography that I don’t have the expertise or energy to parse, also it’s from 2015.
• A 2016 post about the 8000th busy beaver number, bringing us full circle.

So in terms of the content worth sharing and alternatives, it appears it’s just the CS based stuff.

E: Joke answer: clearly the go-to contrablog is Scott’s nemesis Arthur Chu’s archived twitter feed, or just watching Jeopardy episodes.

Author works on ML for DeepMind but doesn’t seem to be an out and out promptfondler.

Quote from this post:

I found myself in a prolonged discussion with Mark Bishop, who was quite pessimistic about the capabilities of large language models. Drawing on his expertise in theory of mind, he adamantly claimed that LLMs do not understand anything – at least not according to a proper interpretation of the word “understand”. While Mark has clearly spent much more time thinking about this issue than I have, I found his remarks overly dismissive, and we did not see eye-to-eye.

Based on this I'd say the author is LLM-pilled at least.

However, a fruitful outcome of our discussion was his suggestion that I read John Searle’s original Chinese Room argument paper. Though I was familiar with the argument from its prominence in scientific and philosophical circles, I had never read the paper myself. I’m glad to have now done so, and I can report that it has profoundly influenced my thinking – but the details of that will be for another debate or blog post.

Best case scenario is that the author comes around to the stochastic parrot model of LLMs.

E: also from that post, rearranged slightly for readability here. (the [...]* parts are swapped in the original)

My debate panel this year was a fiery one, a stark contrast to the tame one I had in 2023. I was joined by Jane Teller and Yanis Varoufakis to discuss the role of technology in autonomy and privacy. [[I was] the lone voice from a large tech company.]* I was interrupted by Yanis in my opening remarks, with claps from the audience raining down to reinforce his dissenting message. It was a largely tech-fearful gathering, with the other panelists and audience members concerned about the data harvesting performed by Big Tech and their ability to influence our decision-making. [...]* I was perpetually in defense mode and received none of the applause that the others did.

So also author is tech-brained and not "tech-fearful".

You’ve fallen for one of the classic blunders: assuming that OP thinks that humans can grow and develop with nurturing

Pinker tries not to be a total caricature of himself challenge: profoundly impossible

specifically this caricature:

David Gerard: keikaku.jpg

Tracing Woodgrains: malding

A few years ago, maybe a few months after moving to the bay area, a guy from my high school messaged me on linkedin. He was also in the bay, and was wanting to network, I guess? I ghosted him, because I didn’t know him at all, and when I asked my high school friends about him, he got some bad reviews. Anyway today linkedin suggests/shoves a post down my throat where he is proudly talking about working at anthropic. Glad I ghosted!

PS/E: Anthro Pic is definitely a furry term. Is that anything?

You are right, but the Wronger chuds are way too far up their own buttholes to figure this out

in the slatestar club. straight up 'sleight of mouthing it'. and by 'it', haha, well. let's justr say. My peanits.

not sure if this is entirely ignorable as a tactic or if the counter-tactic is to post similar stickers but with references/QR codes to classic shock sites.

Oh yeah to be clear: I also find this kind of reporting to be disingenuous and disgusting.

"I'm going to double down on not reading this article herpa derpa gerpa poop" that's you. Please fuck off