There’s a whole good commencement speech hidden there where the “AI ReVoLuTiOn” is likened to the industrial revolution. How it is all about turbocharging the exploitation of workers and the planet; how its promise is to make a few immensely rich and give them the power to oppress everyone; and how we need educated, empathetic young people – and especially the liberal arts – to express themselves creatively and push against the system and mainstream narratives, because the only way workers win this “revolution” is the same as always: by song and poem and book and painting that fuels movements and protests.

But what the fuck do I know, I’m not the Vice President of Strategic Alliances for Tavistock Development Company, a real estate firm. I would never be invited to do a commencement speech.

Turns out sneerclub is the superpredictor. 10/10 on going ‘this is a bad idea’.

Are prediction markets not actually useful? No, it is the reality who is wrong.

Also I want to rant once again about the stupid way these people evade the insider trading problem, because there’s a particular failure at play that I keep finding expressed in new and interesting ways.

So the argument goes that while insider trading may be bad for a financial market it actually just allows insiders to add their information to increase the predictive power of the market. Which would be true enough if we assume nothing else changes, but the same would also be true for price discovery in a normal asset market. Clearly we’re missing something.

So why is it insider trading bad? Because it turns people without insider info into the dumb money you can take advantage of. And people, very reasonably, aren’t going to participate in a system where their main role is being taken advantage of. Their departure means that the insiders don’t have access to a pool of dumb money to take so they stop interacting with the system, and the market itself breaks down.

Now if you assume that the majority of people are “NPCs” or aren’t very “agentic” or whatever then they’re not going to act in systemically meaningful ways no matter how obvious the incentives to do so. You could also cast it as a version of the libertarian-as-housecat notion that markets simply exist as a natural system, rather than being pieces of economic infrastructure that require a lot of management and work to keep functioning at all, even before we get to the question of whether they operate to the public’s benefit. So many of the problems with these ideologies spring from this belief that only some people actually matter in a systemic sense by dictating rules and Building Things and being big men, rather than systems being constantly created and shaped by all the people who interact with them through those interactions.

Even Scott’s fantasy dream scenario for what prediction markets could be like and what questions they could answer feels… …deliberately naive? …like libertarian brainrot? …disconnected from reality?

Ask yourself: what are the big future-prediction questions that important disagreements pivot around? When I try this exercise, I get things like:

Will the AI bubble pop? Will scaling get us all the way to AGI? Will AI be misaligned?

Huge amounts of money are being dumped into a bubble based on hype, so to hope a predict market would or could make better predictions than the existing business-idiot VCs funding this bubble feels hopelessly naive in a libertarian kind of way. There is already a method of aggregating the wisdom of the crowd and it is failing to incredibly lazy hype and PR.

Will Trump turn America into a dictatorship? Make it great again? Somewhere in between?

Again, there is already a mechanism for aggregating wisdom of the crowds, its called an election, and its also failed to get a answer predicated on reality or truth, so again, it seems incredibly naive to expect prediction markets to do better!

Will YIMBY policies lower rents? How much?

I mean, the councils and communities making these decision already ignore or overlook longer-term broader predictions of economic impact in favor of immediate home-owner value, I don’t see why Scott would expect prediction markets to help decision making go better here.

Overall, it feels like Scott is overlooking the way decision making often already ignores science and experts. Society doesn’t have a problem making decent predictions compared to the problems it has communicating expert opinions to the public effectively and crafting policy aligned with the public interest.

He was also perplexed that a prediction-market bet on “did COVID-19 come from a lab?” has declined from 85% yes in 2023 to 27% yes. If you click through you see its a bet on Manifold so bettors are rats and fellow travellers. Rationalists have spent $46,714 of real US dollars buying play money to bet on this.

As long as the offer’s open, it will be irresistible. So we need to close the offer. Only another god can kill Moloch. We have one on our side, but he needs our help. We should give it to him.

I’d write something here, but there’s nothing funnier I can say.

removed gambling

deleted by creator

they want your data and freshwater

it’s not approval they’re after, it’s reaffirmation of faith

The plagiarism, massive expenditure of venture capital, and unreliable slop output are all intrinsic to the technology, and they hate to be reminded of that because there isn’t much they can do about it. From a technological standpoint, even locally run community fine-tuned open-weight models still originated from plagiarism and big corporate investments, and still output slop. From a social standpoint, the most the can do is try to claim legitimacy through consensus building and we are a threat to that.

>box labeled “agentic AI revolution automation realignment innovation acceleration opportunity”

>looks inside

>layoffs

“we’re taking our primary product, a piece of tech used for collaborative development of software, and shitting some AI over it. You are all fired. Please clap.”

So in highschool, I was one of those annoying kids that went “why do we have to learn how to analyze poems? We’re never gonna need this in real life” in English (well… German, but doesn’t matter) class.

I’m deeply grateful for my teachers back then to patiently get me to do these things anyways, because there came a point in my life years later where I suddenly understood that those “useless” lessons and hours “wasted” analyzing Goethe and Borchert and Fitzgerald handed me the tools to understand media (and not just literature!) instead of just consuming it.

I hope it’s clear how that relates to the screenshot. More than that though, I sometimes feel like the slew of shit media over the past decade is at least in part to blame on writers/studios/… now assuming people do in fact merely consume. But that’s a rant that’s completely off-topic here, so I’ll shut up now.

No one is stopping any one from editing out jar jar, if they care that much, just do it. Put up or shut up. /s

This may be code for “I don’t want to see uppity women, brown people, and queer people in my shows.”

One of the motivations for fanfiction is that people want more “filler”. They like the characters and (often) the world those characters inhabit, and so they write a story that lets them (and other fans) spend more time with the fiction.

How is this possible? We included ‘do not treat sarcasm as serious’ in the prompt.

Damn prompt goblins again!

OMG I just installed it! Great to see.

You know, I kept expecting both this racist and the racist he was arguing with to start making the very obvious argument for why the racism is not only evil but also dumb. And instead they just kept being racist.

To summarize and spare anyone else curious, the argument is about immigration. Racist 1 argues that since some people are objectively better than others [citation desperately needed but not wanted] we should have free migration so that our superior quality of life can attract all the best people so that we can be the best place. He (correctly) notes the absurdity of Racist 2 arguing that although some people are objectively better than others we need to protect ourselves from all foreigners even if they are the best people because their foreignness would hurt our “magic dirt.” I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this criticism elsewhere and from a better and less obviously racist writer elsewhere because the phrase “magic dirt” sounds real familiar.

Also, because I am trying everything back to my particular bugbear today, I have to note that the fundamental and wrong argument that some traits being heritable makes some people objectively better than others is yet another manifestation and justification of what I’m going to start calling the Great Man Theory of Everything. If you start from the position that history, politics, economics, and basically all forms of human activity are fundamentally driven by the actions and decisions of a few people who are for one reason or another destined for power and greatness, you can derive an impressive amount of the libertarian/Rationalist worldview, and if you additionally accept that those people are disproportionately rich white dudes and we shouldn’t think too hard about that fact you can get most of the rest of the way there.

How the fuck do you get to the point of writing a line like “Some white nationalists … have, to their credit” without your own intestine leaping up to throttle your brain?

he just posted an entirely unnecessary amount of words

taking a quick look at it… it’s actually short by Scott’s standards, but still overly long, given that the only point he makes is claiming Lindy’s Law is applicable to predicting AI progress in absence of other information.

you-can’t-really-knows

Yeah, he straw-mans AI critics/skeptics as trying to make an argument from ignorance, then tries to argue against that strawman using Lindy’s Law (which assumes ignorance and a pareto distribution). He completely ignores that AI critics are actually making detailed arguments about LLM companies consuming all the good and novel training data, hitting the limits on what compute costs they can afford, running into problems of the long lead time for building datacenters, etc. Which is pretty ironic given his AI 2027 makes a nominal claim to accounting for all that stuff (in actuality it basically all rests on METR’s task horizons, and distorts even that already questionable dataset).

The idea of “the exponential curve goes up forever” has always been silly and an idea rooted in capitalism for me (“no bro you don’t get it we’re gonna get infinite money forever”). Limited resources exist, and people are already very fed up with the ludicrous amounts of water and electricity data centres take up. Making bigger models that need to run for longer is also probably going to take an exponential amount of resources (and also make people hate you more).

this is likely tomorrow’s Pivot

I think “probably-neurodivergent Jews with less sense than Isaac-frigging-Asimov about where ‘what if we are the master race?’” leads" and “they say its about self-perfection for anyone, but actually its about finding special people preordained from birth for greatness” are relatable themes. There have been a few essays recently about people who saw where SoCal tech ideology was going in the 1990s like The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism, another named a female writer for Wired or Byte who is mostly forgotten.

The overlap with ritual magic is also a deep dark pool and most people know someone purifying himself and issuing ritual incantations to a bot.

A quick glance at segfaults reactions seem to me like he operates on ‘if I just explain it enough to people they will agree with my side, and if they dont they have not properly heard all the facts’, and he (the dox people dropped seems to imply male pronouns) seems to really begrudge friends/people he knows irl for disagreeing with him. Which doesnt seem to be the most healthy place to be in in a conflict like this.

What a shitshow, always sad to see somebody have an online episode like that. (As an outsider I obv have no idea what is going on, and im not going to dig into all that).

oh my god this post and the comments are a disaster. if lesswrong had sane moderation it’d have been nuked in seconds but of course they need to believe the most important thing they can do is use reason and talk through it. don’t worry about all the private information we’re leaking!

best bit

also loving the part where he seems to say people should focus on saving the world from the robot menace instead of calling out his behaviour