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GorillasAreForEating @awful.systems
Posts 14
Comments 64

That Time Eliezer Yudkowsky recommended a really creepy sci-fi book to his audience

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In which a Eugenicist Effective Altruist advocates becoming a cuckold for the greater good

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newrepublic.com The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco

If Balaji Srinivasan is any guide, then the Silicon Valley plutocrats are definitely not okay.

The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco

The article doesn't mention SSC directly, but I think it's pretty obvious where this guy is getting his ideas

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'It’s a common misconception that we recommend all EAs “marry to give,” or marry a high-net-worth individual with the intent of redirecting much of their wealth to effective causes'
  • If Caroline Ellison hadn't been in an actual relationship with a "high net-worth individual" I would have said it was just straightforward satire, but given the context I think she's using mask of irony to pretend she isn't revealing her true self.

    Her words may be satirical, but her actions were more like "this but unironically".

  • 'It’s a common misconception that we recommend all EAs “marry to give,” or marry a high-net-worth individual with the intent of redirecting much of their wealth to effective causes'

    web.archive.org 100,000 Hours Introduction

    The average marriage lasts for 100,000 hours. If used well, you can use this time to improve the lives of hundreds of people. A lot of people will tell you simply to “marry whoever you’re passionate...

    100,000 Hours Introduction

    An old post from Caroline Ellison's tumblr, since deleted.

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    SBF's effective altruism and rationalism considered an aggravating circumstance in sentencing
  • Here is the document that mentions EA as risk factor, some quotes below

    Fourth, the defendant may feel compelled to do this fraud again, or a version of it, based on his use of idiosyncratic, and ultimately for him pernicious, beliefs around altruism, utilitarianism, and expected value to place himself outside of the bounds of the law that apply to others, and to justify unlawful, selfish, and harmful conduct. Time and time again the defendant has expressed that his preferred path is the one that maximizes his version of societal value, even if imposes substantial short term harm or carries substantial risks to others... In this case, the defendant’s professed philosophy has served to rationalize a dangerous brand of megalomania—one where the defendant is convinced that he is above the law and the rules of the road that apply to everyone else, who he necessarily deems inferior in brainpower, skill, and analytical reasoning.

  • LOL, LMAO: Inside the first 'SEO heist' of the AI era. Web2 is going great!
  • SEO will pillage the commons.

    My personal conspiracy theory (not sure if I actually believe this yet):

    The idea that people would use generative AI to make SEO easier (and thus make search engine results worse) was not an unfortunate side effect of generative AI, it was the entire purpose. It's no coincidence that OpenAI teamed up with Google's biggest rival in search engines; we're now seeing an arms race between tech giants using spambot generators to overwhelm the enemy's filters.

    The decision to make chatGPT public was not about concern for openness (if it was they would have made the earlier versions of GPT public too), it's more that they had a business partner lined up and Google search had become enshittified enough that they thought they could pull off a successful "disruption".

  • The current TPOT implosion
  • edit: The first draft of this comment was inaccurate, I was confused about what happened before because of a misleading tweet but I think I understand now. Anyways I found the background check tweet they're referring to: https://nitter.net/mimi10v3/status/1737273351016525986

    Also the occultist sex bakery guy has been weighing in on the drama: https://nitter.net/Morphenius/status/1736956594582368429

    Since TPOT is defending sex offenders now I decided to go through more of Brent's old livejournal and archive everything that seemed sufficiently creepy for the purposes of documenting it:

    https://ialdabaoth.livejournal.com/6657.html

    https://ialdabaoth.livejournal.com/7199.html

    https://ialdabaoth.livejournal.com/7547.html

    https://ialdabaoth.livejournal.com/8829.html

    https://ialdabaoth.livejournal.com/11561.html

    https://ialdabaoth.livejournal.com/20142.html

  • "As always, pedophilia is not the same as ephebophilia." - Eliezer Yudkowsky, actual quote

    www.lesswrong.com Thought experiment: The transhuman pedophile — LessWrong

    Comment by Eliezer Yudkowsky - I may never actually use this in a story, but in another universe I had thought of having a character mention that... call it the forces of magic with normative dimension... had evaluated one pedophile who had known his desires were harmful to innocents and never acted...

    Thought experiment: The transhuman pedophile — LessWrong

    I somehow missed this one until now. Apparently it was once mentioned in the comments on the old sneerclub but I don't think it got a proper post, and I think it deserves one.

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    The SSC subreddit ponders the difference between Bayesianism and plain old bias

    old.reddit.com What's the difference between a Bayesian prior and pre-existing bias?

    What's the difference between a Bayesian prior and pre-existing bias?

    What's the difference between a Bayesian prior and pre-existing bias?
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    "Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions."

    blog.samaltman.com Successful people

    "Successful people create companies.  More successful people create countries.  The most successful people create religions." I heard this from Qi Lu; I'm not sure what the source is.  It got me...

    From Sam Altman's blog, pre-OpenAI

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    LW: [Request]: Use "Epilogenics" instead of "Eugenics" in most circumstances - people just don't like the word itself yes that must be it. Coined by Aella.
  • Here's the old sneerclub thread about the leaked emails linking Scott Alexander to the far right

    Scott Alexander's review of Seeing Like A State is here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/

    The review is mostly positive, but then it also has passages like this:

    Well, for one thing, [James C.] Scott basically admits to stacking the dice against High Modernism and legibility. He admits that the organic livable cities of old had life expectancies in the forties because nobody got any light or fresh air and they were all packed together with no sewers and so everyone just died of cholera. He admits that at some point agricultural productivity multiplied by like a thousand times and the Green Revolution saved millions of lives and all that, and probably that has something to do with scientific farming methods and rectangular grids. He admits that it’s pretty convenient having a unit of measurement that local lords can’t change whenever they feel like it. Even modern timber farms seem pretty successful. After all those admissions, it’s kind of hard to see what’s left of his case.

    and

    Professors of social science think [check cashing] shops are evil because they charge the poor higher rates, so they should be regulated away so that poor people don’t foolishly shoot themselves in the foot by going to them. But on closer inspection, they offer a better deal for the poor than banks do, for complicated reasons that aren’t visible just by comparing the raw numbers. Poor people’s understanding of this seems a lot like the metis that helps them understand local agriculture. And progressives’ desire to shift control to the big banks seems a lot like the High Modernists’ desire to shift everything to a few big farms. Maybe this is a point in favor of something like libertarianism?

  • LW: [Request]: Use "Epilogenics" instead of "Eugenics" in most circumstances - people just don't like the word itself yes that must be it. Coined by Aella.
  • Weirdly rationalists also sometimes read this book and take all the wrong lessons from it.

    Scott Alexander is a crypto-reactionary and I think he reviewed it as a way to expose his readers to neoreactionary ideas under the guise of superficial skepticism, in the same manner as the anti-reactionary FAQ. The book's author might be a anarchist but a lot of the arguments could easily work in a libertarian context.

  • www.aipanic.news Effective Altruism Funded the “AI Existential Risk” Ecosystem with Half a Billion Dollars

    The “AI Existential Safety” field did not arise organically. Effective Altruism invested $500 million in its growth and expansion.

    Effective Altruism Funded the “AI Existential Risk” Ecosystem with Half a Billion Dollars
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    "it’s like the stages of a rocket ship and racism was the first stage"

    Image taken from this tweet: https://twitter.com/softminus/status/1732597516594462840

    post title was this response: https://twitter.com/QuintusActual/status/1732615870613258694

    Sadly the article is behind a paywall and I am loath to give Scott my money

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    To what extent did Eliezer Yudkowsky invent the Effective Altruist movement?

    forum.effectivealtruism.org The history of the term 'effective altruism' — EA Forum

    Comment by Dale - Interesting history! However, I think you are being unfair to MIRI. Eliezer was using the term as as far back as 2007, four years before you mention it first being used in Oxford. So it wasn't originated in Oxford. And given that many CEA members have read LessWrong, including Tob...

    The history of the term 'effective altruism' — EA Forum

    I was wondering if someone here has a better idea of how EA developed in its early days than I do.

    Judging by the link I posted, it seems like Yudkowsky used the term "effective altruist" years before Will MacAskill or Peter Singer adopted it. The link doesn't mention this explicitly, but Will MacAskill was also a lesswrong user, so it seems at least plausible that Yudkowsky is the true father of the movement.

    I want to sort this out because I've noticed that a recently lot of EAs have been downplaying the AI and longtermist elements within the movement and talking more about Peter Singer as the movement's founder. By contrast the impression I get about EA's founding based on what I know is that EA started with Yudkowsky and then MacAskill, with Peter Singer only getting involved later. Is my impression mistaken?

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    www.forbes.com Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement?

    A former Google engineer and the founder of stealth AI startup Extropic, is behind the Twitter account leading the “effective accelerationism” movement sweeping Silicon Valley.

    Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement?

    >At various points, on Twitter, Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.” ...

    >When he’s not tweeting about e/acc, Verdon runs Extropic, which he started in 2022. Some of his startup capital came from a side NFT business, which he started while still working at Google’s moonshot lab X. The project began as an April Fools joke, but when it started making real money, he kept going: “It's like it was meta-ironic and then became post-ironic.” ...

    >On Twitter, Jezos described the company as an “AI Manhattan Project” and once quipped, “If you knew what I was building, you’d try to ban it.”

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    The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI

    Most of the article is well-trodden ground if you've been following OpenAI at all, but I thought this part was noteworthy:

    >Some members of the OpenAI board had found Altman an unnervingly slippery operator. For example, earlier this fall he’d confronted one member, Helen Toner, a director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, at Georgetown University, for co-writing a paper that seemingly criticized OpenAI for “stoking the flames of AI hype.” Toner had defended herself (though she later apologized to the board for not anticipating how the paper might be perceived). Altman began approaching other board members, individually, about replacing her. When these members compared notes about the conversations, some felt that Altman had misrepresented them as supporting Toner’s removal. “He’d play them off against each other by lying about what other people thought,” the person familiar with the board’s discussions told me. “Things like that had been happening for years."

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    www.wired.com Prominent Women in Tech Say They Don't Want to Join OpenAI's All-Male Board

    After internal chaos earlier this month, OpenAI replaced the women on its board with men. As it plans to add more seats, Timnit Gebru, Sasha Luccioni, and other AI luminaries tell WIRED why they wouldn't join.

    Prominent Women in Tech Say They Don't Want to Join OpenAI's All-Male Board

    non-paywall archived version here: https://archive.is/ztech

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    futurism.com OpenAI Employees Say Firm's Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims

    OpenAI chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever reportedly likes to burn effigies and lead ritualistic chants at the company.

    OpenAI Employees Say Firm's Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims
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