oh boy do i have notes on this fucker, going back to jan 2025

We don’t need more of mathematics to look like the Four Color Theorem (“proved”, but with no insight gained), with the added problems that the “proofs” are now far more laborious to check even for technical correctness, theorem-proving software is less reliable, and oh yeah, we’re holding the population of Memphis to the exhaust pipe of a diesel bus to make it work.

terry tao grimly climbing into the hotdog suit

I guess given the demographics of the diehard Bernie bros this isn’t necessarily a surprising turn, but it’s still disappointing.

Also, hat tip to Dr. Rasmussen for cogently articulating the frustration of the hour. Why in the hell are we talking about whether the acausal robot God is going to endanger our ability to trade galaxies like Pokemon cards when so much of the world is both literally and figuratively on fucking fire?

I don’t even get where Marcus is coming from. He worries that this is a total ban on definitely very useful research, and protests:

I could support the pause; I cannot support a permanent ban on research that might benefit humanity. We may need a temporary pause, maybe even one that lasts for a number of years, until such time as we have much better ideas about regulation and alignment.

So just repeal or amend the total ban once those better ideas are available?

Also that’s a very big MIGHT benefit humanity

Turns out the only cause of inequality in the world is that there’s just too much progress. Once the Best GPU has finally been designed, it’ll just keep rolling off the production line, and those charitable manufacturers will gladly distribute them at bargain prices to all the impoverished masses. Who all have a reliable source of energy to devote to churning out slop.

So I love Neal’s books, I think he’s a fun story-teller and anathems orbital mechanics scene has loads more tension than any slop in something like interstellar.

But whenever he gets involved in social-technological commentary I am reminded of Ursala Le Guinn’s remarks on SciFi authors being professional liars, not prophets.

Anyway, scour the submissions for little Lytton contest entrants

writing a story that looks like it’s about everyone having their own LLMs but it’s actually about the predicted state of clime catastrophe by 2040 and the consequences of the fascist turn in world politics, and the GPUs don’t make the slightest difference to anything and don’t really matter for the plot

What the hell kind of prompt is this oh my god. I’m getting bored just contemplating the idea of trying to think up a story.

AI Use: LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group—unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.

Lol. Lmao.

but, who the hell gave them $100k for this?

the third name is a vc-type, and I bet it won’t take much scratching to find that linked to our good friends and the ongoing public image adjustment campaign that’s seeing funding from a few corners

s/gpu/Butt-Face Chester Cheeks/g and you got yourself a deal.

“The year is 2040. Everybody has access to a Butt-Face Chester Cheeks. What happens in this butt-business as usual future?”

I suppose my only-half-joking grant proposal I talk about with linguist friends in which you run an entire large text through a base-model LLM, extract the residual stream, and score every token according to perplexity compared to the ground truth reality in order to ask and answer super interesting questions about information theory in human communication doesn’t count?

Ah fuck, they’re also funding {ungeskripted}. He’s a way too big german “free speech” type podcaster. I’ve got him on my shitlist recently, after wonky BSW-type supposed leftists were sharing his clips in a political group chat.

What would people recommend as an alternative email provider that funds fewer (ideally zero) fascists?

I remember this showing up here a while back

In the ancestral environment, infection was a top killer. Today it’s a rounding error. Our immune systems are therefore set by evolution to be far too sensitive for the modern environment.

Bro what. We keep producing stronger bacteria.

Somehow I’m hoping that this is the usual eugenics rather than abject stupidity.

I don’t think any of the words on that shirt are in the Bible.

Nonzero chance AI kills us before we reach the end of this probably-years-long-process, but we plant trees in whose shade we may never sit.

You know, I didn’t think it would be necessary to discuss the meaning of that line in a space where people ostensibly take long-termism seriously.

Remove one or two of those reward circuits, especially if they’re poorly adapted to the modern environment, and the human becomes more generally capable. I suspect that my own inability to feel love is one example, the amygdalectomy is another, and the general pattern of high-IQ people being somewhat autistic is a third.

I managed not to click on the linked blog post about the author’s inability to feel love.

S.R. Constantin’s after-action report on MetaMed had a lot of this, like what happened when they decided that doctors were statistically illiterate and did not know about the power of checklists:

Some of our founding inspirations were the work of Gerd Gigerenzer and Atul Gawande, who showed that medical errors were the cause of many deaths, that doctors tend to be statistically illiterate, and that systematizing tools like checklists and statistical prediction rules save lives. … Many of the improvements in systematization that were clearly “good buys” have, in fact, been implemented in hospitals since Gawande and Gigerenzer first wrote about them. We never saw a clear-cut case of a patient whose doctors had “dropped the ball” by giving them an obviously wrong treatment, except where the patient was facing financial hardship and had to transfer to substandard medical care. I think doctors don’t make true unforced errors in diagnosis or treatment plan that often; and medical errors like “operating on the wrong leg” that happen in fast-paced decisionmaking environments were necessarily outside our scope.

They also found that base rates work much better than personalized medicine which is exactly what Kahneman and Tversky find.

TL;DR it’s much harder than they thought it would be

Every time. The only succes they had in the wider space seems to be the EA nets. (And even those had some hiccups when people used the toxic nets to fish).

Re brain surgery.

Finally we are reaching The Expanse level of plans from LW, where they did brain surgery on people to remove their empathy.

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eq2aJt8ZqMaGhBu3r/zach-stein-perlman-s-shortform?commentId=a2xgz7bevKKHQ8BEj

WTF

Definitely not a cult

Time for ‘if you planned this trip using a chatbot, turn back now’ signs at hiking trails.

“GPS will stop people reading maps!” buddy you ain’t seen nothing yet. Technology is allowing people to get lost better, faster, and at scale.

@rook @BlueMonday1984 “Earlier this summer, rangers with Shasta-Trinity National Forest found a woman camping in an off-limits area on the south side of Shasta clearly marked with “no camping” signage, Meyers said. She told rangers she had asked ChatGPT where she could camp in the forest”
I mean, wild life (the one that eats you) is gonna be sooo happy with Ai chatgpt. 😁

@rook @BlueMonday1984 👉 @fanta

they argued that the TESCREAL thesis is little more than a leftist conspiracy theory

The thing about leftist conspiracy theories… right wing conspiracy theories tend to be things like “the (((lizard people))) are kidnapping and harvesting the adrenochrome from white children”, whereas leftist conspiracy theories tend to be things like “the CIA illegally funded right-wing Latin American militias by illegally selling arms to a country that had in recent memory held US diplomats hostage but was, at least, anticommunist”. Leftist conspiracy theories tend to get validated in substance if not in details a few years after it’s too late for the knowledge to be useful.

I dunno, I didn’t get much out of it because I found all the connections hard to follow. That article might actually need a diagram showing all the connections between the people featured, but that probably wouldn’t help with the claims that TESCREAL critics are conspiracy theorists…

Some on Reddit called Mollie Gleiberman a conspiracy theorist when I cited her argument that these people always wanted to build Computer God and conquer the universe. I did not know that our friends tried that gambit as soon as Emile introduced the TESCREAL concept.

Anyone know when and why polyamory became a Rationalist shibboleth?

I had short odds for that entire submission being nuked but apparently there’s enough non-bad stuff there for the mods to keep it up.

My first thought was maybe one of them isn’t focused enough on doomerism and is too concerned with practical shit, which in lesswrong and AI doomer spaces is a nono (practical concerns about GenAI and data centers are okay as a way to draw in normies, but they want to make sure you speak the shibboleths that indicate your real concern is Skynet). Thus whichever one is the less doomer one would get a smidgen of credit in my eyes.

I was disappointed to learn the real reason…

We endorse pointing out harmful actions. But we condemn attacks on people’s character.

…although it is probably a good thing that someone is willing to call Sam Altman a slimeball and Anthropic lying hypocrites? So I’ll give PauseAI-US a tiny bit of credit for that.

…or maybe not

When I read Holly’s Twitter feed, I get why someone would have a gut reaction like “this is an unhinged person who’s stooping to the level of personal attacks on people who seem nice and are just trying to do their best”.

Whatever credit this PauseAI-US person gets for willingness to call people out, they lose for doing so through twitter.

Not sure about the Libertarian connection, but the comments feature Eliezer Yudkowsky and at least one member of the MAPLE cult (Goldenberg).

A “no attacks on people’s characters” policy seems like a terrible idea in this space because so many people are grifters, liars, and apocalyptic cultists. At some point you have to say “you are a bad person who uses false words to do bad things.”

This is terrible, absolutely horrible, disendorsement is only a few short steps from defenestration. How could these people do this

Just in time for Irreplaceable to show up!