As anyone who's been paying attention already knows, LLMs are merely mimics that provide the "illusion of understanding".
Excerpt: >A new study published on Thursday in The American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that dosage may play a role. It found that among people who took high doses of prescription amphetamines such as Vyvanse and Adderall, there was a fivefold increased risk of developing psychosis or mania for the first time compared with those who weren’t taking stimulants.
Perhaps this explains some of what goes on at LessWrong and in other rationalist circles.
Maybe she was there to give Moldbug some relationship advice.
I'm noticing that people who criticize him on that subreddit are being downvoted, while he's being upvoted.
I wouldn't be surprised if, as part of his prodigious self-promotion of this overlong and tendentious screed, he's steered some of his more sympathetic followers to some of these forums.
Actually it's the wikipedia subreddit thread I meant to refer to.
As a longtime listener to Tech Won't Save Us, I was pleasantly surprised by my phone's notification about this week's episode. David was charming and interesting in equal measure. I mostly knew Jack Dorsey as the absentee CEO of Twitter who let the site stagnate under his watch, but there were a lot of little details about his moderation-phobia and fash-adjacency that I wasn't aware of.
By the way, I highly recommend the podcast to the TechTakes crowd. They cover many of the same topics from a similar perspective.
For me it gives off huge Dr. Evil vibes.
If you ever get tired of searching for pics, you could always go the lazy route and fall back on AI-generated images. But then you'd have to accept the reality that in few years your posts would have the analog of a geocities webring stamped on them.
But will my insurance cover a visit to Dr. Spicy Autocomplete?
So now Steve Sailer has shown up in this essay's comments, complaining about how Wikipedia has been unfairly stifling scientific racism.
Birds of a feather and all that, I guess.
what is the entire point of singling out Gerard for this?
He's playing to his audience, which includes a substantial number of people with lifetime subscriptions to the Unz Review, Taki's crapazine and Mankind Quarterly.
why it has to be quite that long
Welcome to the rationalist-sphere.
Scott Alexander, by far the most popular rationalist writer besides perhaps Yudkowsky himself, had written the most comprehensive rebuttal of neoreactionary claims on the internet.
Hey Trace, since you're undoubtedly reading this thread, I'd like to make a plea. I know Scott Alexander Siskind is one of your personal heroes, but maybe you should consider digging up some dirt in his direction too. You might learn a thing or two.
The next AI winter can't come too soon. They're spinning up coal-fired power plants to supply the energy required to build these LLMs.
Until a month ago, TW was the long-time researcher for "Blocked and Reported", the podcast hosted by Katie 'TERF' Herzog and relentless sealion Jesse Singal.
Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man is always a good place to start.
This is good:
Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.
Also this:
If, as psychologists show, MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.
And:
If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.
[All non-sneerclub links below are archive.today links]
Diego Caleiro, who popped up on my radar after he commiserated with Roko's latest in a never-ending stream of denials that he's a sex pest, is worthy of a few sneers.
For example, he thinks Yud is the bestest, most awesomest, coolest person to ever breathe: >Yudkwosky is a genius and one of the best people in history. Not only he tried to save us by writing things unimaginably ahead of their time like LOGI. But he kind of invented Lesswrong. Wrote the sequences to train all of us mere mortals with 140-160IQs to think better. Then, not satisfied, he wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to get the new generation to come play. And he founded the Singularity Institute, which became Miri. It is no overstatement that if we had pulled this off Eliezer could have been THE most important person in the history of the universe.
As you can see, he's really into superlatives. And Jordan Peterson: >Jordan is an intellectual titan who explores personality development and mythology using an evolutionary and neuroscientific lenses. He sifted through all the mythical and religious narratives, as well as the continental psychoanalysis and developmental psychology so you and I don’t have to.
At Burning Man, he dons a 7-year old alter ego named "Evergreen". Perhaps he has an infantilization fetish like Elon Musk: >Evergreen exists ephemerally during Burning Man. He is 7 days old and still in a very exploratory stage of life.
As he hinted in his tweet to Roko, he has an enlightened view about women and gender: >Men were once useful to protect women and children from strangers, and to bring home the bacon. Now the supermarket brings the bacon, and women can make enough money to raise kids, which again, they like more in the early years. So men have become useless.
And: >That leaves us with, you guessed, a metric ton of men who are no longer in families.
Yep, I guessed about 12 men.
Hanania is championed by tech moguls and a U.S. senator, but HuffPost found he used a pen name to become an important figure in the “alt-right.”
Excerpt: >Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.
He's also a big eugenics supporter: >“There doesn’t seem to be a way to deal with low IQ breeding that doesn’t include coercion,” he wrote in a 2010 article for AlternativeRight .com. “Perhaps charities could be formed which paid those in the 70-85 range to be sterilized, but what to do with those below 70 who legally can’t even give consent and have a higher birthrate than the general population? In the same way we lock up criminals and the mentally ill in the interests of society at large, one could argue that we could on the exact same principle sterilize those who are bound to harm future generations through giving birth.”
(Reminds me a lot of the things Scott Siskind has written in the past.)
Some people who have been friendly with Hanania:
- Mark Andreessen, Silion Valley VC and co-founder of Andreessen-Horowitz
- Hamish McKenzie, CEO of Substack
- Elon Musk, Chief Enshittification Officer of Tesla and Twitter
- Tyler Cowen, libertarian econ blogger and George Mason University prof
- J.D. Vance, US Senator from Ohio
- Steve Sailer, race (pseudo)science promoter and all-around bigot
- Amy Wax, racist law professor at UPenn.
- Christopher Rufo, right-wing agitator and architect of many of Florida governor Ron DeSantis's culture war efforts
[Verse 1] / I wanna be software / Upload my mind / Take all my data / What will you find? / I wanna be software / Battery heart / Infinite options / State of the art / I wanna be
When she's not busy fantasizing about libertarian crypto-based UBI schemes or propping up the patriarchy, she's writing wearying odes to transhumanism and longtermism. Truly the voice of a generation.
"TempleOS on the blockchain"
Ok that's some quality sneer. A bit obscure and esoteric, but otherwise perfect for those who know anything about Temple OS.
Ugh.
>But even if some of Yudkowsky’s allies don’t entirely buy his regular predictions of AI doom, they argue his motives are altruistic and that for all his hyperbole, he’s worth hearing out.
Yeah, Behe's one of the leading lights (dimmest bulbs?) of the so-called "Intelligent Design" movement: a molecular biologist who knows just enough molecular biology to construct strawmen arguments about evolution. Siskind being impressed by him tells me everything I need to know about Siskind's susceptibility to truly stupid ideas.
