Some of our very best friends (including Dan Hendrycks, Max Tegmark, Jaan Tallinn, and Yoshua Bengio) just uploaded to arxiv a preprint that attempts to define the term “artificial general intelligence”.
We often mix up two bloggers named Scott. One of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims says that she was abused by a white-haired psychology professor or Harvard professor named Stephen. In 2020, Vice observed that two Harvard faculty members with known ties to Epstein fit that description (a Steven and a Stephen). The older of the two taught the younger. The younger denies that he met or had sex with the victim. What kind of workplace has two people who can be reasonably suspected of an act like that?
“Anthropic cofounder admits he is now “deeply afraid” … “We are dealing with a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine … We need the courage to see things as they are.”
Jordan Peterson is in ICU again. This time it’s not experimental drug treatment in Russia, but apparently the result of mould exposure, and/or a spiritual attack by unknown evildoers. His daughter and fellow carnivore influencer has called for prayers.
An opposition between altruism and selfishness seems important to Yud. 23-year-old Yud said "I was pretty much entirely altruistic in terms of raw motivations" and his Pathfinder fic has a whole theology of selfishness. His protagonists have a deep longing to be world-historical figures and be admired by the world. Dreams of controlling and manipulating people to get what you want are woven into his community like mould spores in a condemned building.
So seeing the reaction on lesswrong to Eliezer's book has been interesting. It turns out, even among people that already mostly agree with him, a lot of them were hoping he would make their case better than he has (either because they aren't as convinced as him, or they are, but were hoping for something more palatable to the general public).
despite the error of postulating that Luigi was there for the CEO's coincidental bullet-involved collision, when he was at bible study with me, and you
I used to think that psychiatry-blogging was Scott Alexander's most useful/least harmful writing, because its his profession and an underserved topic. But he has his agenda to preach race pseudoscience and 1920s-type eugenics, and he has written in some ethical grey areas like stating a named friend's diagnosis and desired course of treatment. He is in a community where many people tell themselves that their substance use is medicinal and want proscriptions. Someone on SneerClub thinks he mixed up psychosis and schizophrenia in a recent post.
Bad people who spend too long on social media call normies NPCs as in video-game NPCs who follow a closed behavioural loop. Wikipedia says this slur was popular with the Twitter far right in October 2018. Two years before that, Maciej Ceglowski warned:
It might as well be my own hand on the madman’s lever—and yet, while I grieve for all innocents, my soul is at peace, insofar as it’s ever been at peace about anything.
this is Habryka talking about how his moderating skills are so powerful it takes lesswrong three fucking years to block a poster who's actively being a drain on the site
As found by @gerikson here, more from the anti anti TESCREAL crowd. How the antis are actually R9PRESENTATIONALism. Ottokar expanded on their idea in a blog post.
The rats would love to have a coherent position on the Palestinian genocide but there's just no one from the polycule that's written about it in their nerd blogs so they're all going to have to continue rejecting all evidence.
Original title 'What we talk about when we talk about risk'. article explains medical risk and why the polygenic embryo selection people think about it the wrong way. Includes a mention of one of our Scotts (you know the one). Non archived link: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about
Since Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is apparently still a thing, I figured I'd spend a few minutes before fediverse monster-movie night to collect relevant links:
Nate Soares and Big Yud have a book coming out. It's called "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies". From the names of the authors and the title of the book, you already know everything you need to know about its contents without having to read it. (In fact, given the signature prolixity of the rationalists, you can be sure that it says in 50,000 words what could just as easily have been said in 20.)
This is unironically the most interesting accidental showcase of their psyche I've seen 😭 all the comments saying this is a convincing sim argument when half of the points for it are not points
An excerpt has surfaced from the AI2027 podcast with siskind and the ex AI researcher, where the dear doctor makes the case for how an AGI could build an army of terminators in a year if it wanted.
Begrudgingly Yeast (@begrudginglyyeast.bsky.social) on bsky informed me that I should read this short story called 'Death and the Gorgon' by Greg Egan as he has a good handle on the subjects/subjects we talk about. We have talked about Greg before on Reddit.
I found a neat essay discussing the history of Doug Lenat, Eurisko, and cyc here. The essay is pretty cool, Doug Lenat made one of the largest and most systematic efforts to make Good Old Fashioned Symbolic AI reach AGI through sheer volume and detail of expert system entries. It didn't work (obviously), but what's interesting (especially in contrast to LLMs), is that Doug made his business, Cycorp actually profitable and actually produce useful products in the form of custom built expert systems to various customers over the decades with a steady level of employees and effort spent (as opposed to LLM companies sucking up massive VC capital to generate crappy products that will probably go bust).
So, lesswrong Yudkowskian orthodoxy is that any AGI without "alignment" will bootstrap to omnipotence, destroy all mankind, blah, blah, etc. However, there has been the large splinter heresy of accelerationists that want AGI as soon as possible and aren't worried about this at all (we still make fun of them because what they want would result in some cyberpunk dystopian shit in the process of trying to reach it). However, even the accelerationist don't want Chinese AGI, because insert standard sinophobic rhetoric about how they hate freedom and democracy or have world conquering ambitions or they simply lack the creativity, technical ability, or background knowledge (i.e. lesswrong screeds on alignment) to create an aligned AGI.
I am still subscribed to slatestarcodex on reddit, and this piece of garbage popped up on my feed. I didn't actually read the whole thing, but basically the author correctly realizes Trump is ruining everything in the process of getting at "DEI" and "wokism", but instead of accepting the blame that rightfully falls on Scott Alexander and the author, deflects and blames the "left" elitists. (I put left in quote marks because the author apparently thinks establishment democrats are actually leftist, I fucking wish).
Thinking about how the arsing fuck to explain the rationalists to normal people - especially as they are now a loud public problem along multiple dimensions.
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