The way that they use that term makes it synonymous with Orthodox (“right practices/thinking”).

I mean objectivism was already taken so...

This is firmly in the 'what if in the future there is a boot so big that we must start licking it now' school of hot takes, like literally arguing for a future where the AI sucks at its job and you can't do anything about it.

Forall ...

Never seen a gullibility filter in the form of eyebrows before:

::: spoiler transcript Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans) "Americans like two-day delivery but dislike being promised that a Robot God will render them Paupers Forever. The fickle whims of the median voter continue to perplex me." :::

Start your week with a bsky thread of Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans discovering rationalist funded data center apologist and friend of the instance Andy Masley.

Bonus: the poll that is meant to show how much americans love tech companies conveniently leaves Meta out and is sourced from The Argument.

He's not exactly hiding it:

https://andymasley.com/

I really like the self perpetuating optimism loop thing in the reply to Aella, it's like a whole new cognitive bias I hadn't thought applied to rationalists.

I also still believe academia is a deeply broken culture. I believe this in large part because most academics have told me this.

You seem to believe uncritically what they tell you here. The truth is, everyone LOVES to complain but if you tell them "THEN LEAVE??" they'd rather keep their position. And it's very normal, actually. most systems (idk, liek law, healthcare, environmental protection) are “deeply broken.”

Maybe you think that only systems worth engaging with are those with self-perpetuating optimism loops? where everyone is so happy and satisfied with the community and activities? If so, it matches really well the intellectual environment I think you are in.

Liuson told managers that AI “should be part of your holistic reflections on an individual’s performance and impact.”

who talks like this

"not on squeaking terms"

by the way I first saw this in the stubsuck

::: spoiler transcript I know this is about rationalism but the unexpanded uncapitalized "rat" name really makes this post. Imagining a world where this is a callout post about a community of rodents being racist. We're not on squeaking terms right now cause they're being problematic :/ :::

In every RAG guide I've seen, the suggested system prompts always tended to include some more dignified variation of "Please for the love of god only and exclusively use the contents of the retrieved text to answer the user's question, I am literally on my knees begging you."

Also, if reddit is any indication, a lot of people actually think that's all it takes and that the hallucination stuff is just people using LLMs wrong. I mean, it would be insane to pour so much money into something so obviously fundamentally flawed, right?

So many low-hanging fruits. Unbelievable fruits. You wouldn’t believe how low they’re hanging.

This was such a chore to read, it's basically quirk-washing TREACLES. This is like a major publication deciding to take an uncritical look at scientology focusing on the positive vibes and the camaraderie, while stark in the middle of operation snow white, which in fact I bet happened a lot at the time.

The doomer scene may or may not be a delusional bubble—we’ll find out in a few years

Fuck off.

The doomers are aware that some of their beliefs sound weird, but mere weirdness, to a rationalist, is neither here nor there. MacAskill, the Oxford philosopher, encourages his followers to be “moral weirdos,” people who may be spurned by their contemporaries but vindicated by future historians. Many of the A.I. doomers I met described themselves, neutrally or positively, as “weirdos,” “nerds,” or “weird nerds.” Some of them, true to form, have tried to reduce their own weirdness to an equation. “You have a set amount of ‘weirdness points,’ ” a canonical post advises. “Spend them wisely.”

The weirdness is eugenics and the repugnant conclusion, and abusing bayes rule to sidestep context and take epistimological shortcuts to cuckoo conclusions while fortifying a bubble of accepted truths that are strangely amenable to allowing rich people to do whatever the hell they want.

Writing a 7-8000 word insider expose on TREACLES without mentioning eugenics even once throughout should be all but impossible, yet here we are.

It feels more like a toy project that snowballed fueled by ideology and get-rich-quick schemes.

There's an actual explanation in the original article about some of the wardrobe choices. It's even dumber, and it involves effective altruism.

It is a very cold home. It’s early March, and within 20 minutes of being here the tips of some of my fingers have turned white. This, they explain, is part of living their values: as effective altruists, they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). “Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,” says Malcolm. This explains Simone’s clothing: her normal winterwear is cheap, high-quality snowsuits she buys online from Russia, but she can’t fit into them now, so she’s currently dressing in the clothes pregnant women wore in a time before central heating: a drawstring-necked chemise on top of warm underlayers, a thick black apron, and a modified corset she found on Etsy. She assures me she is not a tradwife. “I’m not dressing trad now because we’re into trad, because before I was dressing like a Russian Bond villain. We do what’s practical.”

I'm not spending the additional 34min apparently required to find out what in the world they think neural network training actually is that it could ever possibly involve strategy on the part of the network, but I'm willing to bet it's extremely dumb.

I'm almost certain I've seen EY catch shit on twitter (from actual ml researchers no less) for insinuating something very similar.

It's useful insofar as you can accommodate its fundamental flaw of randomly making stuff the fuck up, say by having a qualified expert constantly combing its output instead of doing original work, and don't mind putting your name on low quality derivative slop in the first place.

Apparently genetically engineering ~300 IQ people (or breeding them, if you have time) is the consensus solution on how to subvert the acausal robot god, or at least the best the vast combined intellects of siskind and yud have managed to come up with.

So, using your influence to gradually stretch the overton window to include neonazis and all manner of caliper wielding lunatics in the hope that eugenics and human experimentation become cool again seems like a no-brainer, especially if you are on enough uppers to kill a family of domesticated raccoons at all times.

On a completely unrelated note, adderall abuse can cause cardiovascular damage, including heart issues or stroke, but also mental health conditions like psychosis, depression, anxiety and more.

Wow, I expected to read about people voting themselves out of healthcare so bitcoin mines can operate at 1% cheaper, instead I got data center induced Havana Syndrome.

edit: I love that throughout the article they keep referring to the police chief who's fighting the mining installation as a former oath keeper, the fuck-one-monkey principle at work.

- I wish people would finally start calling me the anti-crypto police chief.

- Whatever you say Monkeyfucker Joe.

Nobody's using datasets made of copyrighted literature and 4chan to teach robots how to move, what are you even on about.

Man wouldn't it be delightful if people happened to start adding a 1.7 suffix to whatever he calls himself next.

Also, Cremieux being exposed as a fake ass academic isn't bad for a silver lining, no wonder he didn't want the entire audience of a sure to become viral NYT column immediately googling his real name.

edit: his sister keeps telling on him on her timeline, and taking her at her word he seems to be a whole other level of a piece of shit than he'd been letting on, yikes.