Effective Obfuscation
Effective Obfuscation
Silicon Valley's "effective altruism" and "effective accelerationism" only give a thin philosophical veneer to the industry's same old impulses.
Molly White is best known for shining a light on the silliness and fraud that are cryptocurrency, blockchain and Web3. This essay may be a sign that she's shifting her focus to our sneerworthy friends in the extended rationalism universe. If so, that's an excellent development. Molly's great.
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For example, the inaugural Substack post defining effective accelerationisms’s “principles and tenets” name-drops the “Jarzynski-Crooks fluctuation dissipation theorem”
To echo a comment from old!SneerClub: That's not a thing. There are three separate but related ideas (the Crooks fluctuation theorem, the Jarzynski equality and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem) which the author doesn't know are separate, because he hasn't a clue what he's talking about.
got a link to it btw?
A link to what?
(The link in the Substack post is to the Wikipedia page for the Crooks result, disguising — intentionally or not — the fact that the writer is just smashing together science words.)
the apparently original e/acc post, i think i've seen it but can't find it
Seems like it's this: https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets
I think that's it — it's the one Timnit Gebru linked to back in February which prompted the old!SneerClub discussion I mentioned, and Molly White's newsletter links to the same place.
I found this earlier one, which it cites as its source:
All that's before that is these few guys throwing the term around on Twitter
There is a fractal optimization algorithm that created life, intelligence, and every meta-organism we know.
I'm wanking at the speed of light / wanna make a meta-fractal brain out of you
(Don't torture me now) I'm having such a productive time, I'm having a QALY!
@earthquake @dgerard I just read some of this and it made me substantially stupider
It's important to stretch before reading their stuff. A good stretch is to find the latest fad and argue how it's an addiction.
Then, afterwards, you need to cool off and detox. I recommend some Quake, but finding a new favorite album also works.
quake is still fucking awesome and the remasters of 1 and 2 are great for an impromptu steam deck lan party