In a recent Hard Fork (Hard Hork?) episode, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose described attending the recent "The Curve" conference -- a conference in Berkeley organized and attended mostly by our very best friends. When asked about the most memorable session he attended at this conference, Casey said:

>That would have been a session called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, which was hosted by Eliezer Yudkowski. Eliezer is sort of the original doomer. For a couple of decades now, he has been warning about the prospects of super intelligent AI. > >His view is that there is almost no scenario in which we could build a super intelligence that wouldn't either enslave us or hurt us, kill all of us, right? So he's been telling people from the beginning, we should probably just not build this. And so you and I had a chance to sit in with him. > >People fired a bunch of questions at him. And we should say, he's a really polarizing figure, and I think is sort of on one extreme of this debate. But I think he was also really early to understanding a lot of harms that have bit by bit started to materialize. > >And so it was fascinating to spend an hour or so sitting in a room and hearing him make his case.

[...]

>Yeah, my case for taking these folks seriously, Kevin, is that this is a community that, over a decade ago, started to make a lot of predictions that just basically came true, right? They started to look at advancements in machine learning and neural networks and started to connect the dots. And they said, hey, before too long, we're going to get into a world where these models are incredibly powerful. > >And all that stuff just turned out to be true. So, that's why they have credibility with me, right? Everything they believe, you know, we could hit some sort of limit that they didn't see coming. > >Their model of the world could sort of fall apart. But as they have updated it bit by bit, and as these companies have made further advancements and they've built new products, I would say that this model of the world has basically held so far. And so, if nothing else, I think we have to keep this group of folks in mind as we think about, well, what is the next phase of AI going to look like for all of us?

Excerpt: >A new study published on Thursday in The American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that dosage may play a role. It found that among people who took high doses of prescription amphetamines such as Vyvanse and Adderall, there was a fivefold increased risk of developing psychosis or mania for the first time compared with those who weren’t taking stimulants.

Perhaps this explains some of what goes on at LessWrong and in other rationalist circles.

Maybe she was there to give Moldbug some relationship advice.

The New Yorker has a piece on the Bay Area AI doomer and e/acc scenes.

Excerpts:

>[Katja] Grace used to work for Eliezer Yudkowsky, a bearded guy with a fedora, a petulant demeanor, and a p(doom) of ninety-nine per cent. Raised in Chicago as an Orthodox Jew, he dropped out of school after eighth grade, taught himself calculus and atheism, started blogging, and, in the early two-thousands, made his way to the Bay Area. His best-known works include “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” a piece of fan fiction running to more than six hundred thousand words, and “The Sequences,” a gargantuan series of essays about how to sharpen one’s thinking.

[...]

>A guest brought up Scott Alexander, one of the scene’s microcelebrities, who is often invoked mononymically. “I assume you read Scott’s post yesterday?” the guest asked [Katja] Grace, referring to an essay about “major AI safety advances,” among other things. “He was truly in top form.”

>Grace looked sheepish. “Scott and I are dating,” she said—intermittently, nonexclusively—“but that doesn’t mean I always remember to read his stuff.”

[...]

>“The same people cycle between selling AGI utopia and doom,” Timnit Gebru, a former Google computer scientist and now a critic of the industry, told me. “They are all endowed and funded by the tech billionaires who build all the systems we’re supposed to be worried about making us extinct.”

In her sentencing submission to the judge in the FTX trial, Barbara Fried argues that her son is just a misunderstood altruist, who doesn't deserve to go to prison for very long.

Excerpt: >One day, when he was about twelve, he popped out of his room to ask me a question about an argument made by Derik Parfit, a well-known moral philosopher. As it happens, | am quite familiar with the academic literature Parfi’s article is a part of, having written extensively on related questions myself. His question revealed a depth of understanding and critical thinking that is not all that common even among people who think about these issues for a living. ‘What on earth are you reading?” I asked. The answer, it turned out, was he was working his way through the vast literature on utiitarianism, a strain of moral philosophy that argues that each of us has a strong ethical obligation to live so as to alleviate the suffering of those less fortunate than ourselves. The premises of utilitarianism obviously resonated strongly with what Sam had already come to believe on his own, but gave him a more systematic way to think about the problem and connected him to an online community of like-minded people deeply engaged in the same intellectual and moral journey.

Yeah, that "online community" we all know and love.

Pass the popcorn, please.

(nitter link)

They've been pumping this bio-hacking startup on the Orange Site (TM) for the past few months. Now they've got Siskind shilling for them.

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.

Not 7.5% or 8%. 8.5%. Numbers are important.

Non-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/9Hihf

In his latest NYT column, Ezra Klein identifies the neoreactionary philosophy at the core of Marc Andreessen's recent excrescence on so-called "techno-optimism". It wasn't exactly a difficult analysis, given the way Andreessen outright lists a gaggle of neoreactionaries as the inspiration for his screed.

But when Andreessen included "existential risk" and transhumanism on his list of enemy ideas, I'm sure the rationalists and EAs were feeling at least a little bit offended. Klein, as the founder of Vox media and Vox's EA-promoting "Future Perfect" vertical, was probably among those who felt targeted. He has certainly bought into the rationalist AI doomer bullshit, so you know where he stands.

So have at at, Marc and Ezra. Fight. And maybe take each other out.

Rationalist check-list:

1. Incorrect use of analogy? Check.
2. Pseudoscientific nonsense used to make your point seem more profound? Check.
3. Tortured use of probability estimates? Check.
4. Over-long description of a point that could just have easily been made in 1 sentence? Check.

This email by SBF is basically one big malapropism.

Representative take: >If you ask Stable Diffusion for a picture of a cat it always seems to produce images of healthy looking domestic cats. For the prompt "cat" to be unbiased Stable Diffusion would need to occasionally generate images of dead white tigers since this would also fit under the label of "cat".

[All non-sneerclub links below are archive.today links]

Diego Caleiro, who popped up on my radar after he commiserated with Roko's latest in a never-ending stream of denials that he's a sex pest, is worthy of a few sneers.

For example, he thinks Yud is the bestest, most awesomest, coolest person to ever breathe: >Yudkwosky is a genius and one of the best people in history. Not only he tried to save us by writing things unimaginably ahead of their time like LOGI. But he kind of invented Lesswrong. Wrote the sequences to train all of us mere mortals with 140-160IQs to think better. Then, not satisfied, he wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to get the new generation to come play. And he founded the Singularity Institute, which became Miri. It is no overstatement that if we had pulled this off Eliezer could have been THE most important person in the history of the universe.

As you can see, he's really into superlatives. And Jordan Peterson: >Jordan is an intellectual titan who explores personality development and mythology using an evolutionary and neuroscientific lenses. He sifted through all the mythical and religious narratives, as well as the continental psychoanalysis and developmental psychology so you and I don’t have to.

At Burning Man, he dons a 7-year old alter ego named "Evergreen". Perhaps he has an infantilization fetish like Elon Musk: >Evergreen exists ephemerally during Burning Man. He is 7 days old and still in a very exploratory stage of life.

As he hinted in his tweet to Roko, he has an enlightened view about women and gender: >Men were once useful to protect women and children from strangers, and to bring home the bacon. Now the supermarket brings the bacon, and women can make enough money to raise kids, which again, they like more in the early years. So men have become useless.

And: >That leaves us with, you guessed, a metric ton of men who are no longer in families.

Yep, I guessed about 12 men.

Excerpt: >Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

He's also a big eugenics supporter: >“There doesn’t seem to be a way to deal with low IQ breeding that doesn’t include coercion,” he wrote in a 2010 article for AlternativeRight .com. “Perhaps charities could be formed which paid those in the 70-85 range to be sterilized, but what to do with those below 70 who legally can’t even give consent and have a higher birthrate than the general population? In the same way we lock up criminals and the mentally ill in the interests of society at large, one could argue that we could on the exact same principle sterilize those who are bound to harm future generations through giving birth.”

(Reminds me a lot of the things Scott Siskind has written in the past.)

Some people who have been friendly with Hanania:

• Mark Andreessen, Silion Valley VC and co-founder of Andreessen-Horowitz
• Hamish McKenzie, CEO of Substack
• Elon Musk, Chief Enshittification Officer of Tesla and Twitter
• Tyler Cowen, libertarian econ blogger and George Mason University prof
• J.D. Vance, US Senator from Ohio
• Steve Sailer, race (pseudo)science promoter and all-around bigot
• Amy Wax, racist law professor at UPenn.
• Christopher Rufo, right-wing agitator and architect of many of Florida governor Ron DeSantis's culture war efforts

When she's not busy fantasizing about libertarian crypto-based UBI schemes or propping up the patriarchy, she's writing wearying odes to transhumanism and longtermism. Truly the voice of a generation.

Ugh.

>But even if some of Yudkowsky’s allies don’t entirely buy his regular predictions of AI doom, they argue his motives are altruistic and that for all his hyperbole, he’s worth hearing out.