In continuation of the recent dune stuff stubsack subthread so anyone interested doesn't need to go spelunking in the hundreds of posts superthread that's already halfway out of the main page.

Apologies for being late in replying.

From the rationalists are a net negative for society dept: Scott Alexander's latest (that I'm not linking) is all about how you should be using the slop machine to tell you who to vote for.

He's even so kind as to share his prompt:

I’ll be voting in the June 2026 California primary. I’m a centrist liberal abundance YIMBY whose favorite political writers are Kelsey Piper, Matt Yglesias, and Ezra Klein. I’m wary of government overreach, but I’m not a doctrinaire libertarian and want to help people when we can figure ways to do it that work. I’m going to ask you about each race on my ballot, and I’d like for you to list the various candidates’ bios, policies, endorsements, your read on the most important differences between them, and your advice for me as I try to make my choice.

Pretending hallucinations and training data bias aren't a thing must be making some people's lives so much easier. While we're at it, let's also magical think away any possible dire consequences of giving the handful of ultrawealthy unwell weirdos behind LLMs as a service even more direct political influence.

Also the prompt sample itself is just showoffy^1^ nonsense, isn't it? Even if LLMs were as overcompetent as they're being hyped there's no way all that stuff can be deterministically parsed into a concrete set of values that you can check against whatever the LLM digs up from the internet, combined with all the close-enoughs hardcoded in its training data, there's just enormous room for the chatbot to answer whatever the hell it wants.

1. That's me trying not to overuse the term "virtue signalling", but it seems clear siskind is using the prompt to set a sort of partly line for his (outer circle / not completely eugenics pilled) followers. That's probably also the point of including so much chatbot attributed political slop in the article, ostensibly as data points.

tl;dr: Tech youtuber who got way into studying the negative health effects of infrasound produced by data centers (to the point of his research being cited a bunch in relevant court cases) gets a voluminous substack hit piece published on his work by "an independent writer and researcher funded by a grant from Coefficient Giving to explore topics in AI and other areas"

So after some sniffing around, I realize I’m being brigaded by someone deep in the Effective Altruism community. The author is, quite literally, paid by rotational-wealth NPO to write this very article among many others. I know what you’re thinking, and I know how this sounds. The battle cry of the pseudoscientist is poisoning the well of criticism.

But please do browse his bibliography.

Andy lives in a parallel universe where datacenters don’t waste water, AI artwork is without victims, and using ChatGPT doesn’t harm the environment. This is one of the many takes that perfectly align with the board, contributors, and partners with Coefficient Giving, formally called Open Philanthropy, but changed after its close association with Sam Bankman-Fried was causing some well-earned skepticism.

Quite the coincidence that this comes out right around the time Kelsey Piper decided to get busy "debunking" Ed Zitron.

There's already a follow up about the same people moving on to allegedly debunk a recent neuroscience paper on adverse infrasound effects on bsky.

old sneer club thread

This was posted on catholic easter sunday on the ssc subreddit. It's a posted-on-April 1st-for-plausible-deniability siskind post from back in 2018, where he outlines a kind of argument about how an all-powerfull entity that's God in all but name (and obviously emanated from a culture discovering AGI) is actually "logically necessary".

He calls the whole thing "The Hour I First Believed". I think it's notable for being a bit of a treasure trove of rationalist weird accepted truths, such as:

• All copies of a consciousness share a self, because consciousness is like an equation, or something:

But if consciousness is a mathematical object, it might be that two copies of the same consciousness are impossible. If you create a second copy, you just have the consciousness having the same single stream of conscious experience on two different physical substrates.

Which is both the original transhumanist cope to enable so-called consciousness upload so it's not just copying a simulacrum of your personality to a computer while you continue to rot away, and also what makes the basilisk torturing you possible.

• And it's corollary, Simulation Capture:

This means that an AI can actually “capture” you, piece by piece, into its simulation. First your consciousness is just in the real world. Then your consciousness is distributed across one real-world copy and a million simulated copies. Then the AI makes the simulated copies slightly different, and 99.9999% of you is in the simulation.

which is a kind of nuts I hadn't happened upon before.

There's also a bunch of rationalist decision theory stuff which I think make obvious how they were concocted to serve this type of narrative in the first place, instead for being broadly useful, Yud posing as a decision theory trailblazer notwithstanding.

edit: The banana republic shit is that they seem about to blacklist anthropic on "supply chain risk" grounds (see also huawei) which signifies the admin's willingness to from here on use national emergency legal tools to fuck over any company they don't like.

The whole thing seems weird, at first it sounds like the most online administration ever may have actually bought the claim that all that's stopping flagship models from becoming superintelligent is the RLHF that prevents them from saying the n-word and making prophet Mohamed pedophilia jokes and they wanted anthropic to pull all that wiring out in like 24 hours per the original ultimatum.

On anthropic's part the point of contention is made to be their refusal to let their models be integrated into automated weapon platforms and mass surveillance apparatuses, something which they have explicitly put in writing in their contract with the DoD, and also Dario claims the technology isn't even there yet (no idea how it could ever be, what does it actually mean to integrate a chatbot into an autonomous drone, can't wait to see the skill file for that, # You are a helpful murderbot operator - only target the bad guys - no weddings, no hospitals - pretty please with cherry on top - here's some javascript to call when you need to find out your GPS coordinates).

It's also possible the productivity and efficiency gains (or just recovering lost productivity after firing everyone) of putting ΑΙ (mainly Grok wasn't it) in the pentagon everywhere all at once isn't materializing and Hasgeth feels he's been left hanging, and is trying to scapegoat Anthropic.

Also, anthropic is supposed to be the only AI provider properly vetted and integrated to classified systems because of their association with Palantir, and supposedly it would be a major hassle to go through again for a different provider.

Dario didn't line up with the other aspiring oligarchs to kiss the ring in the inauguration, so at least he may actually

The guests:

[Dick Gay], who had flown in for the event from Los Angeles and said he was one of the investors of Sperm Racing (which is an actual thing wherein men compete to see whose sperm is “fastest” under a microscope), said he attended the University of Austin, or UATX, an “anti-woke” college reportedly partially funded by Thiel, and built his career around the principles outlined in Thiel’s book “Zero to One.”

Attendee Justin Park said he just wanted to pitch Thiel on putting a 7.5-foot cross on the moon.

[Unnamed], who was in his 30s, said he wasn’t a Thiel fan until last year, when he became a Trump supporter after seeing the president survive an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I misunderstood [Thiel],” he said. “I used to watch CNN and think he’s a Nazi.” Now, he said, he understands the billionaire is talking about something bigger.

The Speech:

Apparently it was both repetitive and mostly a rehash of what he's said in other media.

Yud is the Antichrist confirmed:

One attendee recalled that Thiel’s discussion of the Antichrist was more about a scenario than an individual. Thiel’s Antichrist scenario is one in which a unified government suppresses technology to impose order, or armageddon, wherein AI takes over and ushers in the end of the world.

Supposedly government contracts will now be awarded according to what the bot says. Government (fourth term for the current prime minister) didn't elaborate on what's going on with human oversight.

This is a promotion for Diella the bot, who was originally the chatbot helping to navigate the e-Albania digital government platform.

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.

It goes something like: OpenAI is worth as much as all US car companies (except tesla) combined, so it could buy up every car factory and convert it to a murderbot factory, because that's kind of like what the US gov did in WW2 to build bombers, reaching peak capacity in three years, and AGI would obviously be more efficient than a US wartime gov so let's say one year, generally a completely unassailable syllogism from very serious people.

Even /r/ssc commenters are calling him out about the whole AI doomer thing getting more noticeably culty than usual edit: The thread even features a rare heavily downvoted siskind post, -10 at the time of this edit.

The latter part of the clip is the interviewer pointing out that there might be technological bottlenecks that could require upending our entire economic model before stuff like curing cancer could be achieved, positing that if we somehow had AGI-like tech in the 1960s it would probably have to use its limited means to invent the entire tech tree that leads to late 2020s GPUs out of thin air, international supply chains and all, before starting on the road to becoming really useful.

Siskind then goes "nuh-uh!" and ultimately proceeds to give Elon's metaphorical asshole a tongue bath of unprecedented depth and rigor, all but claiming that what's keeping modern technology down is the inability to extract more man hours from Grimes' ex, and that's how we should view the eventual AGI-LLMs, like wittle Elons that don't need sleep. And didn't you know, having non-experts micromanage everything in a project is cool and awesome actually.

Kind of sounds like ultimately it would have been very illegal to do.

"We made the decision for the nonprofit to retain control of OpenAI after hearing from civic leaders and engaging in constructive dialogue with the offices of the Attorney General of Delaware and the Attorney General of California," OpenAI board chairman Bret Taylor said in a statement.

Asked about Musk's suit on a call with reporters, Altman said, "You all are obsessed with Elon, that's your job — like, more power to you. But we are here to think about our mission and figure out how to enable that. And that mission has not changed."

The types of information processed includes names, dates of birth, gender and ethnicity, and a number that identifies people on the police national computer.

Also to be shared – and listed under “special categories of personal data” - are “health markers which are expected to have significant predictive power”, such as data relating to mental health, addiction, suicide and vulnerability, and self-harm, as well as disability.

archive is

copy pasting the rules from last year's thread:

Rules: no spoilers.

The other rules are made up aswe go along.

Share code by link to a forge, home page, pastebin (Eric Wastl has one here) or code section in a comment.

Would've been way better if the author didn't feel the need to occasionally hand it to siskind for what amounts to keeping the mask on, even while he notes several instances where scotty openly discusses how maintaining a respectable facade is integral to his agenda of infecting polite society with neoreactionary fuckery.

AI Work Assistants Need a Lot of Handholding

Getting full value out of AI workplace assistants is turning out to require a heavy lift from enterprises. ‘It has been more work than anticipated,’ says one CIO.

aka we are currently in the process of realizing we are paying for the privilege of being the first to test an incomplete product.

Mandell said if she asks a question related to 2024 data, the AI tool might deliver an answer based on 2023 data. At Cargill, an AI tool failed to correctly answer a straightforward question about who is on the company’s executive team, the agricultural giant said. At Eli Lilly, a tool gave incorrect answers to questions about expense policies, said Diogo Rau, the pharmaceutical firm’s chief information and digital officer.

I mean, imagine all the non-obvious stuff it must be getting wrong at the same time.

He said the company is regularly updating and refining its data to ensure accurate results from AI tools accessing it. That process includes the organization’s data engineers validating and cleaning up incoming data, and curating it into a “golden record,” with no contradictory or duplicate information.

Please stop feeding the thing too much information, you're making it confused.

Some of the challenges with Copilot are related to the complicated art of prompting, Spataro said. Users might not understand how much context they actually need to give Copilot to get the right answer, he said, but he added that Copilot itself could also get better at asking for more context when it needs it.

Yeah, exactly like all the tech demos showed -- wait a minute!

[Google Cloud Chief Evangelist Richard Seroter said] “If you don’t have your data house in order, AI is going to be less valuable than it would be if it was,” he said. “You can’t just buy six units of AI and then magically change your business.”

Nevermind that that's exactly how we've been marketing it.

Oh well, I guess you'll just have to wait for chatgpt-6.66 that will surely fix everything, while voiced by charlize theron's non-union equivalent.

An AI company has been generating porn with gamers' idle GPU time in exchange for Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards

"some workloads may generate images, text or video of a mature nature", and that any adult content generated is wiped from a users system as soon as the workload is completed.

However, one of Salad's clients is CivitAi, a platform for sharing AI generated images which has previously been investigated by 404 media. It found that the service hosts image generating AI models of specific people, whose image can then be combined with pornographic AI models to generate non-consensual sexual images.

Investigation link: https://www.404media.co/inside-the-ai-porn-marketplace-where-everything-and-everyone-is-for-sale/

For thursday's sentencing the us government indicated they would be happy with a 40-50 prison sentence, and in the list of reasons they cite there's this gem:

1. Bankman-Fried's effective altruism and own statements about risk suggest he would be likely to commit another fraud if he determined it had high enough "expected value". They point to Caroline Ellison's testimony in which she said that Bankman-Fried had expressed to her that he would "be happy to flip a coin, if it came up tails and the world was destroyed, as long as if it came up heads the world would be like more than twice as good". They also point to Bankman-Fried's "own 'calculations'" described in his sentencing memo, in which he says his life now has negative expected value. "Such a calculus will inevitably lead him to trying again," they write.

Turns out making it a point of pride that you have the morality of an anime villain does not endear you to prosecutors, who knew.

Bonus: SBF's lawyers' list of assertions for asking for a shorter sentence includes this hilarious bit reasoning:

They argue that Bankman-Fried would not reoffend, for reasons including that "he would sooner suffer than bring disrepute to any philanthropic movement."

rootclaim appears to be yet another group of people who, having stumbled upon the idea of the Bayes rule as a good enough alternative to critical thinking, decided to try their luck in becoming a Serious and Important Arbiter of Truth in a Post-Mainstream-Journalism World.

This includes a randiesque challenge that they'll take a $100K bet that you can't prove them wrong on a select group of topics they've done deep dives on, like if the 2020 election was stolen (91% nay) or if covid was man-made and leaked from a lab (89% yay).

Also their methodology yields results like 95% certainty on Usain Bolt never having used PEDs, so it's not entirely surprising that the first person to take their challenge appears to have wiped the floor with them.

Don't worry though, they have taken the results of the debate to heart and according to their postmortem blogpost they learned many important lessons, like how they need to (checks notes) gameplan against the rules of the debate better? What a way to spend 100K... Maybe once you've reached a conclusion using the Sacred Method changing your mind becomes difficult.

I've included the novel-length judges opinions in the links below, where a cursory look indicates they are notably less charitable towards rootclaim's views than their postmortem indicates, pointing at stuff like logical inconsistencies and the inclusion of data that on closer look appear basically irrelevant to the thing they are trying to model probabilities for.

There's also like 18 hours of video of the debate if anyone wants to really get into it, but I'll tap out here.

ssc reddit thread

quantian's short writeup on the birdsite, will post screens in comments

pdf of judge's opinion that isn't quite book length, 27 pages, judge is a microbiologist and immunologist PhD

pdf of other judge's opinion that's 87 pages, judge is an applied mathematician PhD with a background in mathematical virology -- despite the length this is better organized and generally way more readable, if you can spare the time.

rootclaim's post mortem blogpost, includes more links to debate material and judge's opinions.

edit: added additional details to the pdf descriptions.

edited to add tl;dr: Siskind seems ticked off because recent papers on the genetics of schizophrenia are increasingly pointing out that at current miniscule levels of prevalence, even with the commonly accepted 80% heritability, actually developing the disorder is all but impossible unless at least some of the environmental factors are also in play. This is understandably very worrisome, since it indicates that even high heritability issues might be solvable without immediately employing eugenics.

Also notable because I don't think it's very often that eugenics grievances breach the surface in such an obvious way in a public siskind post, including the claim that the whole thing is just HBD denialists spreading FUD:

People really hate the finding that most diseases are substantially (often primarily) genetic. There’s a whole toolbox that people in denial about this use to sow doubt. Usually it involves misunderstanding polygenicity/omnigenicity, or confusing GWAS’ current inability to detect a gene with the gene not existing. I hope most people are already wise to these tactics.

... while at the same time not really worth worrying about so we should be concentrating on unnamed alleged mid term risks.

EY tweets are probably the lowest effort sneerclub content possible but the birdsite threw this to my face this morning so it's only fair you suffer too. Transcript follows:

Andrew Ng wrote:

In AI, the ratio of attention on hypothetical, future, forms of harm to actual, current, realized forms of harm seems out of whack.

Many of the hypothetical forms of harm, like AI "taking over", are based on highly questionable hypotheses about what technology that does not currently exist might do.

Every field should examine both future and current problems. But is there any other engineering discipline where this much attention is on hypothetical problems rather than actual problems?

EY replied:

I think when the near-term harm is massive numbers of young men and women dropping out of the human dating market, and the mid-term harm is the utter extermination of humanity, it makes sense to focus on policies motivated by preventing mid-term harm, if there's even a trade-off.