For my money, 2015/16 Adams trying to sell Trump as a “master persuader” while also desperately pretending not to be an explicit Trump supporter himself was probably the most entertaining he’s ever been. Once he switched from skimmable text blogging to livestreaming, though, he wanted to waste too much of my time to be interesting anymore.
“This Is What Yudkowsky Actually Believes” seems like a subtitle that would get heavy use in a future episode of South Park about Cartman dropping out after one semester at community college.
Yes, Kurzweil desperately trying to create some kind of a scientific argument, as well as people with university affiliations like Singer and MacAskill pushing EA, are what give this stuff institutional strength. Yudkowsky and LW are by no means less influential, but they’re at best a student club that only aspires to be a proper curriculum. It’s surely no coincidence that they’re anchored in Berkeley, adjacent to the university’s famous student-led DeCal program.
FWIW, my capsule summary of TPOT/“post-rationalists” is that they’re people who thought that advanced degrees and/or adjacency to VC money would yield more remuneration and influence than they actually did. Equally burned out, just further along the same path.
I’ve been contemplating this, and I agree with most everyone else about leaning heavily into the cult angle and explaining it as a mutant hybrid between Scientology-style UFO religions and Christian dispensationalist Book of Revelation eschatology. The latter may be especially useful in explaining it to USians. My mom (who works in an SV-adjacent job) sent me this Vanity Fair article the other day about Garry Tan grifting his way into non-denominational prosperity gospel Christianity: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/christianity-was-borderline-illegal-in-silicon-valley-now-its-the-new-religion She was wondering if it was “just another fad for these people,” and I had to explain no, not really, it is because their AI bullshit is so outlandish that some of them feel the need to pivot back towards something more mainstream to keep growing their following.
I also prefer to highlight Kurzweil’s obsession with perpetual exponential growth curves as a central point. That’s often what I start with when I’m explaining it all to somebody. It provides the foundation for the bullshit towers that Yudkowsky and friends have erected. And I also think that long-term, the historiography of this stuff will lean more heavily on Kurzweil as a source than Yudkowsky, because Kurzweil is better-organized and professionally published. It’ll most likely be the main source in the lower-division undergraduate/AP high school history texts that highlight this stuff as a background trend in the 2010s/2020s. Right now, we live in the peak days of the LessWrong bullshit volcano plume, but ultimately, it will probably be interpreted by the specialized upper-division texts that grow out of peoples’ PhD theses.
awful.systems
Huh, 2 paradigm shifts is about what it takes to get my old Beetle up to freeway speed, maybe big Yud is onto something
It is what happened to look good in the valley between the Adderall comedown and yesterday evening’s edible really starting to hit
Just had a video labeled “auto-dubbed” pop up in my YouTube feed for the first time. Not sure if it was chosen by the author or not. Too bad, it looks like a fascinating problem to see explained, but I don’t think I’m going to trust an AI feature that I just saw for the first time to explain it. (And perhaps more crucially, I’m a bit afraid of what anime fans will have to say about this.)
And the photos from a previous event are an ocean of whiteness. Hard to argue that they’re not, uh, cultivating a certain demographic…
I propose we pool funds, buy an old motel on the other side of the city limits in Oakland, and rename it Farthaven
Notwithstanding the subject matter, I feel like I’ve always gotten limited value from these Oxford-style university debates. KQED used to run a series called Intelligence Squared US that crammed it into an hour, and I shudder to think what that’s become in the era of Trump and AI. It seems like a format that was developed to be the intellectual equivalent of intramural sports, complete with a form of scoring. But that contrivance renders it devoid of nuance, and also means it can be used to platform and launder ugly bullshit, since each side has to be strictly pro- or anti-whatever.
Really, it strikes me as a forerunner of the false certainty and point-scoring inherent in Twitter-style short-form discourse. In some ways, the format was unconsciously pared down and plopped online, without any sort of inquiry into its weaknesses. I’d be interested to know if anyone feels any different.
Time magazine is, of course, now a property of Salesforce bobblehead Marc Benioff. So one wonders if there are editorial decisions being made at a high level, much like the Washington Post.
so an alternative, somewhat weaker fireball spell
Butt
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There aren’t really many other options besides Springer and self-publishing for a book like that, right? I’ve gotten some field-specific article compilations from CRC Press, but I guess that’s just an imprint of Routledge.
Considering Tesla’s well-documented issues with functional door handles, this may be more accurate than you think
Marginally related, but I was just served a YouTube ad for chewing gum (yes, I’m too lazy to setup ad block).
“Respawn, by Razer. They didn’t have gaming gum at Pompeii, just saying.”
I think I felt part of my frontal lobe die to that incomprehensible sales pitch, so you all must be exposed to it as well.
Yeah, Phoronix is somehow a tier below even below HN. The Gamergate freaks of Linux enthusiasts. At least on Slashdot or HN, you might occasionally get someone with actual technical expertise posting. Phoronix just seems like a playground to push whatever the latest “I got this software for free and I hate it” grievance is, which is a profoundly pathetic thing indeed.
The “system prompt” phenomenon is one of the most flatly dopey things to come out of this whole mess. To put it politely, this seems like, uh, a very loosely causal way to set boundaries in high-dimensional latent spaces, if that’s really what you’re trying to do.
I put this prompt into my local Ollama instance, and suddenly Amazon is constantly delivering off-brand MOLLE vests and random stuff meant to attach to Picatinny rails, plus I also have nineteen separate subscriptions to the Black Rifle Coffee Company brew-of-the-month club. Help?
Another thread worth pulling is that biotechnology and synthetic biology have turned out to be substantially harder to master than anticipated, and it didn’t seem like it was ever the primary area of expertise for a lot of these people anyway. I don’t have a copy of any of Kurzweil’s books at hand to look at his predicted timelines for that stuff, but they’re surely way off.
Faulty assumptions about the biological equivalence of digital neural network algorithms have done a lot of unexamined heavy lifting in driving the current AI bubble, and keeping the harder stuff on the fringes of the conversation. That said, I don’t doubt that a few refugees from the bubble-burst will attempt to inflate the next bubble on the back of speculative biotech, and I’ve seen a couple of signs of that already.