Jinsatsu Zetsubō (人殺・絶望, but his thralls call him Ginny) was not your ordinary vampire goth demon lord... He delighted in his garments of true terror and dread, what better source of inescapable despair than his beige ulster coat, barely held together by off-yellow gold pins, with a salmon pink napkin in the over pocket, an ensemble designed to inspire trudgery sucking all soul and joy from any passerby...
A glorious snippet:
The movement ~~connected to~~ attracted the attention of the founder culture of Silicon Valley and ~~leading to many shared cultural shibboleths and obsessions, especially optimism about the ability~~ of intelligent capitalists and technocrats to create widespread prosperity.
At first I was confused at what kind of moron would try using shibboleth positively, but it turns it's just terribly misquoting a citation:
Rationalist culture — and its cultural shibboleths and obsessions — became inextricably intertwined with the founder culture of Silicon Valley as a whole, with its faith in intelligent creators who could figure out the tech, mental and physical alike, that could get us out of the mess of being human.
Also lol at insiting on "exonym" as descriptor for TESCREAL, removing Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres and the clear intention of criticism from the term, it doesn't really even make sense to use the acronym unless you're doing critical analasis of the movement(s). (Also removing mentions of the espcially strong overalap between EA and rationalists.)
It's a bit of a hack job at making the page more biased, with a very thin verneer of still using the sources.
Not surprised, still very disappointed, I feel sick.
No no no it's fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle the—eloquently—shuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep the—much more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasis—hallucinated ones.
And also closing with:
Nvidia insists that it “wins on merit, as reflected in our benchmark results and value to customers.” And Nvidia does have the best stuff — but that’s not what the DOJ, Warren, or France are concerned about, is it?
To tie the bow nicely.
Quinn enters the dark and cold forest, crossing the threshold, an omnipresent sense of foreboding permeates the air, before being killed by a grue.
“Once we get AGI, we’ll turn the crank one more time—or two or three more times—and AI systems will become superhuman—vastly superhuman. They will become qualitatively smarter than you or I, much smarter, perhaps similar to how you or I are qualitatively smarter than an elementary schooler. “
Also this doesn't give enough credit to gradeschoolers. I certainly don't think I am much smarter (if at all) than when I was a kid. Don't these people remember being children? Do they think intelligence is limited to speaking fancy, and/or having the tools to solve specific problems? I'm not sure if it's me being the weird one, to me growing up is not about becoming smarter, it's more about gaining perspective, that is vital, but actual intelligence/personhood is a pre-requisite for perspective.
Hi, I'm going to be that OTHER guy:
Thank god not all dictionaries are prescriptivists and simply reflect the natural usage: Cambridge dictionary: Beg the question
On a side rant "begging the question" is a terrible name for this bias, and the very wikipedia page you've been so kind to offer provides the much more transparent "assuming the conclusion".
If you absolutely wanted to translate from the original latin/greek (petitio principii/τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ αἰτεῖσθαι): "beginning with an ask", where ask = assumption of the premise. [Which happens to also be more transparent]
Just because we've inherited terrible translations does not mean we should seek to perpetuate them though sheer cultural inertia, and much less chastise others when using the much more natural meaning of the words "beg the question". [I have to wonder if begging here is somehow a corruption of "begin" but I can't find sources to back this up, and don't want to waste too much time looking]
I feel mildly better, thanks.
Meanwhile some of the comments are downright terrifying, also the whole "research" output is overly-detailed yet lacking any substance, and deeply deeply in fantasy land, but all the comments a debating in favour of or against what is perceived as "real work", and in terms of presentation "vibes".
I mean my parents always said that fascist/cultish movements have issues distinguishing signified and signifier, but good grief. (Yes too much Lacan in the household)
And yet they can spit out copyrighted material verbatim, or near-verbatim, how strange and peculiar.
Not every rationalist I've met has been nice or smart ^^.
I think it's hard to grow up in our society, without harboring a kernel of fascism in our hearts, it's easy to fall into the constantly sold "everything would work better if we just put the right people in charge". With varying definitions of who the "right people" are:
- Racism
- Eugenics
- Benevolent AI
- Fellow tribe,
- The enlightened who can read "the will of the people" or who are able to "carve reality at the joints"
- Some brands of "sovereign citizen" or corporate libertarianism (I'm the best person in charge of me!).
- The positivist invokers of ScientificProgress™
Do they deserve better? Absolutely, but you can't remove their agency, they ultimately chose this. The world is messy and broken, it's fine not to make too much peace with that, but you have to ponder your ends and your means more thoughtfully than a lot of EAs/Rationalists do. Falling prey to magical thinking is a choice, and/or a bias you can overcome (Which I find extremely ironic given the bias correction advertising in Rationalists spheres)
zogwarg
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✨The Vibe✨ is indeed getting increasingly depressing at work.
It's also killing my parents' freelance translation business, there is still money in live interpreting, and prestige stuff or highly technical accuracy very obviously matters stuff, but a lot of stuff is drying up.