Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Yep, the usefulness of EA is over, they are next on the chopping block. Iād imagine a similar thing will happen to redscare/moldbug if they ever speak out against him.
E: And why would a rich guy be against a āwe are trying to convince rich guys to spend their money differentlyā organization. Esp a ālibertarianā āI get to do what I want or elseā one.
It always struck me as hilarious that the EA/LW crowd could ever affect policy in any way. Theyāre cosplaying as activists, have no ideas about how to move the public image needle other than weird movie ideas and hope, and are literally marinated in SV technolibertarianism which sees government regulation as Evil.
Thereās a mini-freakout over OpenAI deciding to keep GPT-4o active, despite it being more āsycophanticā than GPT-5 (and thus more likely to convince people to do Bad Things) but thereās also the queasy realization that if sycophantic LLMs is what brings in the bucks, nothing is gonna stop LLM companies from offering them. And thereās no way these people can stop it, because theyāve made the deal that LLM companies are gonna be the ones realizing that AI is gonna kill everyone and thatās never gonna happen.
It is kind of sad. They are missing the ideological pieces that would let them carry out activism effectually so instead theyāve gotten used as a free source of crit-hype in the LLM bubble. ā¦except not that sad because they would ignore real AI dangers in favor of their sci-fi scenarios, so I donāt feel too bad for them.
Brian Merchantās article about that lighthaven gathering really struck me.
The men who EAs think will end the earth were in the building with them, and rather than organize to throw them out a window (or even to just make them mildly uncomfortable), the bayes knowers all gormlessly moped around their twee boutique hotel and cried around some whiteboards.
Absolute hellish brainworms
Yeah that article was one of the things I had mind. Itās the peak of centrist liberalism where EAs and lesswrongers can think these people are literally going to cause mankindās extinction (or worse) and they canāt even bring themselves to be rude to them. OTOH, if they actually acted coherently on their nominal doomer beliefs, they would be carrying out terrorism on a far greater scale than the Zizians, so maybe it is for the best they are ideologically incapable of direct action.
The ideological version of Mr Burnsās diseases getting in each otherās way
Ooh, do you have a link to share?
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-disagreements
Wild, thank you!
Well when they are just passively trying to convince the rich guys, they can use the organization to launder reputation or boost ideologies they are in favor of. When the organization actually tries to get regulations passed, even ineffectually, well, that is a threat to the likes of Thiel.
That was what I meant, I was being a bit sarcastic there.