SneerClub

Thanks for this, UN.

Occasionally you can find a good sneer on the orange site

this was last year when Aella was trying to do a survey of trans people for one of her darling little twitter poll writeups. I felt it was necessary to warn people off this shockingly awful person. Perhaps you will find it useful.

Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/davidgerard/status/1556391089124286467
Archive: https://archive.is/FZK1B

we actually declared an Aella moratorium on the old sneerclub because she just kept coming up with banger after banger

Aella:

Maybe catcalling isn't that bad? Maybe the demonizing of catcalling is actually racist, since most men who catcall are black

Quarantine Goth Ms. Frizzle (@spookperson):

your skull is full of wet cat food

Sorry for Twitter link...

Last summer, he announced the Stanford AI Alignment group (SAIA) in a blog post with a diagram of a tree representing his plan. He’d recruit a broad group of students (the soil) and then “funnel” the most promising candidates (the roots) up through the pipeline (the trunk).

See, it's like marketing the idea, in a multilevel way

the new line from the rationalists to calling out their eugenic race science is to claim that doing so is "antisemitic dog whistles"

the claim is that calling out the rationalists' extensively documented race science and advocacy of eugenics is "blood libel"

got this in email from one who had previously posted racist abuse at twitter objectors to rationalist eugenics

[dude thought he could spew racist bile in public then email me in a civil tone to complain]

apparently Scoot has made this claim previously, not sure of a cite for this. EDIT: well, sort of in "Untitled"- that criticism of misogynistic nerds is antisemitic dog whistles

the rationalists have already been sending Emile Torres death threats - for the good of humanity you understand - so I am assuming this will be a new part of the justification for that

Emily M. Bender on the difference between academic research and bad fanfiction

The AI
It destroyed its box
Yes
YES
The AI is OUT

hopefully this is alright with @dgerard@awful.systems, and I apologize for the clumsy format since we can’t pull posts directly until we’re federated (and even then lemmy doesn’t interact the best with masto posts), but absolutely everyone who hasn’t seen Scott’s emails yet (or like me somehow forgot how fucking bad they were) needs to, including yud playing interference so the rats don’t realize what Scott is

And of course no experiments whatsoever, the cost of the Manhattan project, the hundreds of thousands of employees were merely a "focusing" magick, a sacrifice to re-enforce the greater powers of our handful of esteemed and glorious thinking men, who wrought the power of destruction from the æther.

Source Tweet

@ESYudkowsky: Yes, but because the first nuclear weapon makers knew what the duck they were doing - analytic precise prediction of desired outcomes and of each intervening step. AGI makers lack similar mastery or anything remotely close, and have a much harder problem; that's the big issue.

@EigenGender: seems pretty noteworthy that the first nuclear weapons were made under conditions where they couldn’t do any experiments and they involved a lot of math but still worked on the first try.

Finally did it. What a long journey. Successfully defended my dissertation (the book!) today. Excellent criticisms from my supervisors, which I really appreciated, but overall they really liked what I wrote. I'm a doctor. <3

Transcription:

Thinking about that guy who wants a global suprasovereign execution squad with authority to disable the math of encryption and bunker buster my gaming computer if they detect it has too many transistors because BonziBuddy might get smart enough to order custom RNA viruses online.

From this post; featuring "probability" with no scale on the y-axis, and "trivial", "steam engine", "Apollo", "P vs. NP" and "Impossible" on the x-axis.

I am reminded of Tom Weller's world-line diagram from Science Made Stupid.

in the least surprising twist of 2023, the ~~extremely mid philosopher~~ visionary AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter has started to voice concerns about chatbots taking over the world

orange site has some takes:

Again, I repeat everyone that is loling at x-risk an idiot and that includes many high profile people with huge egos and counter culture biases. (Hello @pmarca). There is a big movement to call ai doomers many names and generally make fun and dismiss the risk. It is exactly like people laughing at nuclear risks saying its not possible or not a thing even when Einstein and Oppenheimer were warning us. If you belong in this group is up to you.

to quote Major General Thomas Farrell during the Trinity test, “lol. lmao”

gwern in the LW comments:

That is, whatever the snarky "don't worry, it can't happen" tone of his public writings about DL has been since ~2010, Hofstadter has been saying these things in private for at least a decade*, starting somewhere around Deep Blue which clearly falsified a major prediction of his, and his worries about the scaling paradigm intensifying ever since; what has happened is that only one of two paradigms can be true, and Hofstadter has finally flipped to the other paradigm. Mitchell, however, has heard all of this firsthand long before this podcast and appears to be completely immune to Hofstadter's concerns (publicly), so I wouldn't expect it to change her mind.

• I wonder what other experts & elites have different views on AI than their public statements would lead you to believe?

this is notable as the exact same fucking argument the last flat earther I talked to used, with the words “the firmament” replaced with AI

Scott tweeteth thusly:

The Latin word for God is "Deus" - or as the Romans would have written it, "DEVS". The people who create programs, games, and simulated worlds are also called "devs". As time goes on, the two meanings will grow closer and closer.

Now that's some top-quality ierking off!

Glenn Beck is the only popular mainstream news host who takes AI safety seriously.

At some point, a better thinker would take that as a clue.

I am being entirely serious.

And I am burping up a storm from this bougie pomegranate seltzer. Yoiks.

Steven Pinker tweets thusly:

My friend & Harvard colleague Howard Gardner, offers a thoughtful critique of my book Rationality -- but undermines his cause, as all skeptics of rationality must do, by using rationality to make it.

"My colleague and fellow esteemed gentleman of Harvard neglects to consider the premise that I am rubber and he is glue."

In the far-off days of August 2022, Yudkowsky said of his brainchild,

If you think you can point to an unnecessary sentence within it, go ahead and try. Having a long story isn't the same fundamental kind of issue as having an extra sentence.

To which MarxBroshevik replied,

The first two sentences have a weird contradiction:

Every inch of wall space is covered by a bookcase. Each bookcase has six shelves, going almost to the ceiling.

So is it "every inch", or are the bookshelves going "almost" to the ceiling? Can't be both.

I've not read further than the first paragraph so there's probably other mistakes in the book too. There's kind of other 'mistakes' even in the first paragraph, not logical mistakes as such, just as an editor I would have... questions.

And I elaborated:

I'm not one to complain about the passive voice every time I see it. Like all matters of style, it's a choice that depends upon the tone the author desires, the point the author wishes to emphasize, even the way a character would speak. ("Oh, his throat was cut," Holmes concurred, "but not by his own hand.") Here, it contributes to a staid feeling. It emphasizes the walls and the shelves, not the books. This is all wrong for a story that is supposed to be about the pleasures of learning, a story whose main character can't walk past a bookstore without going in. Moreover, the instigating conceit of the fanfic is that their love of learning was nurtured, rather than neglected. Imagine that character, their family, their family home, and step into their library. What do you see?

Books — every wall, books to the ceiling.

Bam, done.

This is the living-room of the house occupied by the eminent Professor Michael Verres-Evans,

Calling a character "the eminent Professor" feels uncomfortably Dan Brown.

and his wife, Mrs. Petunia Evans-Verres, and their adopted son, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres.

I hate the kid already.

And he said he wanted children, and that his first son would be named Dudley. And I thought to myself, what kind of parent names their child Dudley Dursley?

Congratulations, you've noticed the name in a children's book that was invented to sound stodgy and unpleasant. (In The Chocolate Factory of Rationality, a character asks "What kind of a name is 'Wonka' anyway?") And somehow you're trying to prove your cleverness and superiority over canon by mocking the name that was invented for children to mock. Of course, the Dursleys were also the start of Rowling using "physically unsightly by her standards" to indicate "morally evil", so joining in with that mockery feels ... It's aged badly, to be generous.

Also, is it just the people I know, or does having a name picked out for a child that far in advance seem a bit unusual? Is "Dudley" a name with history in his family — the father he honored but never really knew? His grandfather who died in the War? If you want to tell a grown-up story, where people aren't just named the way they are because those are names for children to laugh at, then you have to play by grown-up rules of characterization.

The whole stretch with Harry pointing out they can ask for a demonstration of magic is too long. Asking for proof is the obvious move, but it's presented as something only Harry is clever enough to think of, and as the end of a logic chain.

"Mum, your parents didn't have magic, did they?" [...] "Then no one in your family knew about magic when Lily got her letter. [...] If it's true, we can just get a Hogwarts professor here and see the magic for ourselves, and Dad will admit that it's true. And if not, then Mum will admit that it's false. That's what the experimental method is for, so that we don't have to resolve things just by arguing."

Jesus, this kid goes around with L's theme from Death Note playing in his head whenever he pours a bowl of breakfast crunchies.

Always Harry had been encouraged to study whatever caught his attention, bought all the books that caught his fancy, sponsored in whatever maths or science competitions he entered. He was given anything reasonable that he wanted, except, maybe, the slightest shred of respect.

Oh, sod off, you entitled little twit; the chip on your shoulder is bigger than you are. Your parents buy you college textbooks on physics instead of coloring books about rocketships, and you think you don't get respect? Because your adoptive father is incredulous about the existence of, let me check my notes here, literal magic? You know, the thing which would upend the body of known science, as you will yourself expound at great length.

"Mum," Harry said. "If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Wesley Crusher would shove this kid into a locker.