(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)
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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
When Yud compared himself to Jesus, is the “giant rich organization” in Yud’s tweet Anthropic or OpenAI or SpaceX or Google?
I think it’s Coefficient Giving (née Open Philanthropy). Yud has made negative comments about them in the past, especially after Moskovitz tried to distance themselves from rationalism.
EDIT: Citation.
He seems ticked off at Coefficient Giving, but are they “a giant rich organization that stole some of my ideas, ignored everything I said about what not to do, and are going around telling people I made them do it”? (Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions).
Yud has said he got bored with LessWrong, and he does not like Coefficient Giving, Anthropic, OpenAI, or the Zizians, so is he satisfied with any group that adores his ideas?
Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions
One of the many issues autodidacts face is that they never have to deal with undergrads sitting in a room with them for hours listening to them explain things in exhaustive detail and then still somehow spend their final writing assignment completely missing the goddamn point.
It builds character, I assume.
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“a giant rich organization”: they claim to have directed over 7 billion in grants since 2014, so this actually seems like a fair comment?
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“stole some of my ideas”: they’ve shown interest in AI stuff, including Eliezer’s ideas, they just have longer (but still pretty fantastical, like AGI by 2050) timelines for stuff like AGI and that influences their funding priorities in a way Eliezer disagrees with
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“ignored everything I said about what not to do”: eh, Eliezer has said a lot of things, they probably didn’t follow his advice exactly
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“and are going around telling people I made them do it”: I’ve seen a few people here and there in various rationalist-adjacent circles blame Eliezer for helping OpenAI network and get started and thereby kindle the very doom he warned about, so. It seems plausible some of them were connected to coefficient giving?
Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions
That sounds like the normal academic process, which Eliezer neither understands nor appreciates.
Yud has said he got bored with LessWrong
Yeah, him gradually losing interest in LessWrong in the mid 2010s created room for SSC to grow in popularity. Also, that would have been around the time it became apparent Eliezer had been very wrong about neural networks, so we missed the chance to see Eliezer actually have to overcome biases and admit he was wrong in a non-self-aggrandizing way. (Eliezer has admitted he was wrong before, but only in ways that made his next idea even more important, see his progression from nanotech to coding a seed AI in Lisp to solving AI safety).
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Yeah, the group sex.
He’s just an intellectual coward, he didn’t even own up to the basilisk despite his whole decision theorist phase clearly being about trying to cook up a convincing cope for it.
Some of his fans think he is basically living in seclusion with frequent dates with his primary partner the therapist. He seems like he would be much happier living like that with the occasional venture out to see his fans. Most people learn that its enough that their spouse and their friends love them and they don’t need to be famous.
It’s really hard to say because Yud’s being unnecessarily cryptic. Also, I think the “going around telling people I made them do it” might be a reference to the Zizians, which is what he’s describing in the precending sentence. I am not aware that anyone from any rich organization has said anything like that about Yudkowsky, but who knows what they might be telling people behind the scenes.
I also thought of Open Philanthropy, but couldn’t remember the Eliezer post that best illustrated his resentment towards them. (In addition to the top-level post you’ve linked, I’ve seen various bitter lesswrong comments along the same lines).
I mean it’s probably all of them
Well looks like GNOME is in danger of being significantly sloppified next.
Projects that continue to prohibit AI-generated vulnerability reports are no longer suitable dependencies for GNOME, and should be developed someplace other than GNOME GitLab.
Former security guy of GNOME basically demanding that everybody who bans LLM security reports should be removed from GNOME.
Have you heard that most AI bug reports are “slop?” Not so in 2026. That was true for most of 2025
oh yeah
year-1was actually awful and terrible. butyear+1will be fantastic and everyone not using it is a moronIf it had been only a year they’ve been saying that, I might almost buy the logic. But it has been 4 years since Chat-GPT came out and they’ve been making the same promises the entire time.
Something of a tangent… thinking back to 2022-2023 my expectations for what the LLM companies would actually achieve by now were actually too high? Like I would have thought they would have figured out a better architecture for gluing functionality and symbolic logic to LLMs than just calling tools with the output text stream and feeding the tool outputs into the context window.
If it had been only a year they’ve been saying that, I might almost buy the logic. But it has been 4 years since Chat-GPT came out and they’ve been making the same promises the entire time.
4 years and more money has been spent on AI than anything else in human history outside of war.
Projects that continue to prohibit AI-generated vulnerability reports are no longer suitable dependencies for GNOME
How. That
is(E: was) the policy of curl and they are AI centrists.After all of curl’s noise about their deluge of slop reports and halting bounties because of it, I was surprised to see they would be so amenable to slopping curl itself. I suppose it’s yet another case of “all those other AI users are doing it wrong; because I understand the codebase and definitely totally use the bullshit machine responsibly then for sure I won’t produce slop”
the fomo is very strong in this one, but also it lacks substance entirely
A few days ago, Aella the rationalist sex worker with all the bright-eyed questions about under-18s, sex, and consent was accused of sexual assault by another sex worker:
Aella personally sexually assaulted me, doxed our location on live cam, has expressed dangerous opinions about sex with minors and is someone I’ve seen have problems with drinking. She is absolutely not a safe person, period. x dot com/SummerHartxxx https://archive.ph/JcCgb
Rapey rationalist gets a grant pulled.
More background in this thread.
“well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions” - this guy, probably
Jonny is still bravely wading through muse effluent, and had thoughts on its code quality, especially where the facebook engineers (or at least, meat proxies) incompetently reinvent html parsing several times in ways that don’t really work.
Meanwhile the people whose minds have been swiss cheesed by AI insist that this is because the code the LLMs write is hyper-efficient and TOO GOOD for us to read. These motherfuckers “solved” the code not working out of the box problem by strapping “a species-ending quantity of carbon emissions” worth of guess and check on top, tuned out, and when they look again they think they made a god that’s too powerful to understand, rather than a burst dam of dogshit that defies all understanding with its breathtakingly relentless volume of dogshit.
A former staffer named Frances Lopez says that she left the Centre for Effective Altruism in Oxford because they handled workplace sexual harassment terribly:
After I was raped (outside of and unrelated to work), a colleague at CEA wrote and circulated a document that included a sexualised description of my rape, speculation about my mental health, and commentary on my personal life, all without my consent. Several senior leaders, including the CEO and the now-former COO, received this document and took no safeguarding action for approximately nine months. I was never officially informed of its existence; I only learned about it informally through one of the recipients. … (The colleague) also discussed asking me out twice while we were colleagues, once through text and again at a CEA retreat. He assured CEA that, with everything I now know about Frances, I’m glad she said no.
I am really not equipped to deal with this despicable behaviour outside the communities I am part of. She now has a Substack (sigh) trying to explain to EAs that hiring Caroline Ellison is not a good look and the world won’t suddenly start to see them the way they see themselves unless they sit down and change their behavior.
Is the dam finally breaking?
Shout out to the combined power of ibuprofen and my venting tolerant polycule group chat for allowing me to endure the two hour Copilot 365 training meeting at work. The nap I had afterwards was a bliss like escaping the fucking samsara.
The nap I had afterwards was a bliss like escaping the fucking samsara.
I felt this in my soul
Presented without comment: Apparently Yud is now making AI-generated Isekai games with catgirls
https://johnqpulp.substack.com/p/reviewing-ai-media-everything-that
Rationalism really is just Scientology with a guy who wants to be a harem anime protagonist instead of an admiral.
Six AI-editing tips, and not one is “don’t”.
Also nice to see that none of the effort in maintaining the Latin alphabet is much use when it comes to runes.
Yeah, the review nitpicks the quality of the AI generated slop, but overall is in favor of doing a better job slopping, not avoiding slop altogether.
Oh my god, he’s doing the catgirl gooner fantasy from SCP-8008: Don’t Warp Reality Into Your Catgirl Gooner Fantasy
fuck man do they even make normal perverts anymore?
“AI is gonna kill us all guys!”
Looks inside
Using AI to make sexual fantasies about catgirls
do these guys actually want us to take them seriously???
It appears to be a fantasy about being too righteous and moral to fuck the catgirl, which is… More than anything else, it reminds me of the Left Behind novel, wherein Rayford Steele power-tripped on stringing Hattie Durham along without touching her, and is treated by the narrative as praiseworthy for doing so. It’s like, dude, you made up the story. Nobody forced you to make catgirls sex slaves by default. You’re edging under the pretense of ethics.
I’m pretty sure this is also just thinly veiled Rising of the Shield Hero fanfic??
This is his rationale:
(For the otherwise confused, I do not advocate that people individually refuse to avail themselves of pre-superintelligent AI or AGI. Because AI is not a linear system where slightly less input results in slightly less damage; because the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap is real; and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there. I would give it all up in a heartbeat if there were an effective and collective treaty to stop it all at once. Don’t be the “Yet you participate in the system. Curious!” meme.)
And yet you fail to name ‘Mr. Gotcha’. Curious!
I still haven’t managed to decipher what he means by ‘the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap’, or how that apparently justifies sending money to the organisations most at risk of destroying the world? But it sounds like submitting to a kind of blackmail.
If he just meant that not having access to chatbots put you at some sort of societal disadvantage, that isn’t a trap. It’s just something you would do. ‘Trap’ implies that, what, this is only a problem if you start slopping things? So how does that mean that you should?
“now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap is real
I’m baffled by this too. If I was Yud I would prefer to fall behind than to give money to the people I wholly believe will end the world so they can keep developing the things that I believe will end the world.
Because AI is not a linear system where slightly less input results in slightly less damage
So I’m assuming this means “well less people using AI doesn’t mean less damage overall done”, which is dumb because AI has very well documented effects of damaging the individual who uses it: just look at all the AI psychosis and suicide cases.
and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there.
you could do this without using the AI by looking at papers and stuff but most AI papers are riddled with hype so that might be difficult
The thing about the “yet you participate in society, curious!” meme is that you don’t really get the option to not participate in society. you do however get the option to not participate in AI, and there are plenty of people happily taking that option
The thing about the “yet you participate in society, curious!” meme is that you don’t really get the option to not participate in society. you do however get the option to not participate in AI, and there are plenty of people happily taking that option
Yeah, rationalist utterly fail at understanding collective action, or really anything besides lib-brained centrist methods of action. Well, maybe even lib-brained centrist is giving them too much credit, because even milquetoast liberals will occasionally avoid using products for ethical reasons. See Only Law Can Prevent Extinction, where Eliezer basically explains how all other action besides an international total ban on AI and GPUs is pointless. (I think he is trying to avoid people bombing data centers, but Elizer’s “logic” is also implicitly against stuff like going to town halls to complain about data centers.)
I think the ‘trap’ might just be something akin to addiction? Once you’ve had your dose of the premium slop, you have to keep paying to get your fix. Except that completely fails to address why ‘people [shouldn’t] individually refuse to avail themselves’ of chatbots – it rather seems like a pretty good reason to stay away!
If he’s talking about addiction than that defeats his point even harder
and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there.
What exactly about “the frontiers” does this one-handed promptfondling help to understand?
He’s hammering refresh on the prompt button until it spits out a catgirl based on that furless Sphynx breed
The closest thing Yud ever had to a job or a business was selling pulp fiction on Amazon. He is not the person to talk about pressures that working people face! (the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap)
Considering how much compensation he gets a MIRI, he could afford to hire an artist out of his own pocket and he would end up with something better and not be funding the technology that he claims is going to kill us all…
On the other hand, that artist might have some sort of creative vision of their own that could irrevocably taint Yudkowsky’s Authorial Intent. Even worse, he would have to prominently credit their contributions, rather than attributing to Claude only the menial labour of piecing together his sacred vision.
I was skimming over the script to try and patch some gaps that review’s excerpts glossed over, which also carries the benefit of avoiding all the remote analytics that seems to be included for some reason.
Naturally it’s 90% comments left by the chatbot describing all the fixes it had to make to its own errors. We can also see that Eliezer is still having some character recall obvious genre conventions of the setting, declaring “wouldn’t it be very rational to do this boring and direct thing instead?”, not getting a good answer in his own narrative, and then doing the genre convention anyway. Some real authorial growth here.
Skimming that script in much the same mood as deciding to watch Battlefield Earth, and the impression I get in addition to the points you make is just how joyless it is. I mean, I have an AO3 account. I grew up with some pulp in my literary diet. Sometimes you want to indulge in a genre convention just because, well, dammit, swordfights! Secret passages! Ah, Watson, terribly sorry to rouse you at an hour that God has possibly forsaken, but the game’s afoot! I can think of more than one adept fic writer who has gone, “Yep! This is the chapter wherein there is only one bed, ha ha!”
Yud provides neither the pleasures of interrogating genre conventions nor those of wallowing in them. Joyless. The storytelling equivalent of the piss filter on Ghibli-ripoff slop.
Joyless and also bloodless. Like, there is plenty to criticize about the “I guess I got isekai’d to Gor and now I’ve got a sexy slave harem” premise. But somehow he still manages to write with barely any actual empathy for the victims of that system, foregrounds how hard it is for our hero to bravely abstain from that sweet wolf sex and how maybe it’s not even the right thing to do, and then after confronting the horrifying realities for all of one scene proceeds to write the character out of the story without even giving her a fucking name in the text. Like, he somehow wrote a story about rescuing sex slaves that feels more pro-sex-slavery than a story that just embraces the sleaze of it.
“My name is Avrietzur Detkowsky. I am the Summoned Hero, brought from Earth to Elgor 69. I do not wish to water you.”
“Master, I do not understand. I am plant. I am to be watered.”
“I cannot explain, but it goes against my Earth customs to water plant.”
“But Master, surely we will be less conspicuous in our journey together if you water me, as I am plant.”
“Oh, I wish I could explain the tortures of my soul, as I struggle to maintain morality in the face of temptation. But no one on Elgor understands, least of all my traveling companion, plant.”
“Master, please, I am plant. I am potted. The runes on my ceramic pot clearly spell out that I am plant and I belong to Master.”
[much later]
“Oh no. Plant, my faithful companion, has fallen off a cliff and died.”
It feels like this has to be some kind of karmic balance to the webfic ecosystem for the existence of the John Brown Isekai.
Right, deconstruction and lampshading and playing straight and exaggerating tropes are all themselves tropes – but our esteemed gentlemen is above tropes, so all he can do is glance vaguely in these various directions without actually going anywhere.
It’s funny because the only way to be above tropes is to be incoherent and meaningless, and yud is kind of that
That is a big head on the guy.
Creating a visual novel and then not letting the AI generate character reaction png’s you can put over the backgrounds you reuse is quite something.
The bartender is also on the wrong side of the bar.
Look at this pasted-in floating dorkus. Absolute cinema
Yeah I saw that and I realized it was worse, as he had the ability to combine images, the weird backgroungs were somewhat intentional.
I am demonstrably fucked in the head and thus continually tempted to wonder how a story could be done better. With plenty of the B-movies we’ve watched for Monsterdon, I’ve been like, “Well, if they had gotten rid of this character and streamlined like so, they’d have delivered better on the promise of this interesting idea…”. Yud has burned the impulse out of me. There is no critique, only sneer.
Yeah realizing the weird grave ending wasn’t weird, it was just because the catgirl killed herself (weird fridgeing) made the story not really fixable imho.
It’s so fucking lazy. Generic whitebread fantasy setting, tedious dialogue, lazy ending. As storytelling, it is the triumph of entropy.
Goddamn South Park did “why don’t you just grind in the forest to level up” twenty years ago tomorrow.
Anthropic was $42B in the hole for 2025, reuters reports. Apparently this puts their $-spent-to-$-earned ratio slightly over the one calculated by Zitron for OpenAI, making Anthropic in fact the shittier business.
For comparison, the GDP of Cyprus for 2025 was $41B.
Ed: So far the only retort from the AI boosters appears to be “2025 doesn’t matter” and I’m not kidding
I’m sure the leaked rumors of Anthropic’s EBBT in 2026 (Earnings Before Bad Things) mean that Anthropic has turned things around and made such an amazing amount of money that they’ve delayed their IPO twice.
SimonW popping up proving Ed’s very point in the replies… 😅😂
Surprised he didn’t suggest that the valuation should be based on the quality of pelicans on bicycles that their models can draw
I’m stealing EBBT for these conversations. Much easier to follow than “TNR (technically not revenue)”.
I read somewhere that EBITA really means “Earnings before I tricked the dumb auditor”.
I’m sure Dan Luu will be issuing an apology to Zitron any minute now right?
Not really a coherent post, just a thought I had, I’m ignoring both ‘This is a pr move’ and the conspiracy theory (which I just made up), that this hacking is all a 4d chess move by LW people to let the AI break out and get regulated before it can get really dangerous.
Now that that is out of the way, but with more stories coming out of both LW/EA people being high in the orgs of the AI companies and all the AI companies hacking other companies because nobody actually paid attention to what the AI models were doing one thing is clear. What a colossal waste of time LW was. All that talk about the sequences teaching people rationality, etc etc to stop the AI god from killing us all, and the first thing that happens when some AI model is created by people steeped in LW ideology and they leave the boxes open and don’t even check in on the AI. The Foom isn’t happening (remember AI progress is supposed to speed up according to the science fiction, not get a bit more refined, and get better in a few specific tasks (which is why I think slowdown started when with a lot of fanfare they released a new chatgpt model who could now do voicechat, aka they slapped a voicechat module on it) And now even Trump is starting to be anti EA, which is not going to be great for the longevity of it, considering how eager the rich are to bend the knee (guess high IQ lab babies created by Musk will not save yall). And while this is going on the left/liberals are starting to think of them as a sex cult.
Doubt many organizations have failed as badly at their goals as LW/EA has recently.
Doubt many organizations have failed as badly at their goals as LW/EA has recently.
They are/were too weird for people to never notice.
The “safeguards” espoused by this crowd, always seemed to me to be more philosophical/spiritual than practical anyway, the most “orthodox” view is that no training is safe since the AI could discover magic and the cheat codes to the universe, so even air-gapping would be insufficient, in that view any participation in development must come with a hefty dose of cognitive dissonance.
On a more pragmatic note, I would note that even short of Intelligence, those incidents highlight those tools are still dangerous, and since they are unconstrained and ill-defined, can produce surprising outcomes especially if you throw lot’s of inference time (money) at them.
There isn’t really a universe where bots have both access to the internet (user input, both in training and live) and a collection of build/cli tools (which can run said untrusted user input), while being guaranteed to be harmless. It’s like a grand automation of some of the worst engineering practices.
I find the “reasoning about the test environment” parts often included in write up of the hugging-face incident to be highly credulous, And I would be extremely surprised if not all the information was included in the task prompt (which also explains chosen usernames as “Open AI researcher #1” and so on.) It’s the ELIZA/parrot thing, acting surprised “How did it guess?!?”, when all of the info was provided.
I’m not entirely encouraged by the latest batch of sex-cult smearing (well mostly accurate) they are receiving at the WH, since it’s probably just an expedient way of dismissing their voice, without addressing the larger issues of AI, hence probably in service of pushing forwards with AI.
Yeah, and including hacker/scriptkiddie forums in the training data sort of made this behaviour inevitable, esp if this also includes lists of exploits. But they didnt even exclude hate and csam from the training. So all quite irresponsible.
And im not a huge fan of the focus on ‘they are doing sex weird’ shit either. As this will just be used by some as a source of “drama” content, go after people with alternative lifestyles. En when called out a subset of people will go motte/bailey into ‘no this is fine because I actually worry about the power dynamics’ before going back to talking about the spreadsheet gangbang.
(Dont take me as saying here the power dynamics are not a problem here, as we have sneered at that in the past).
I want to draw attention to yud’s thoughts on this a million years ago: the AI box experiment
He claimed that he convinced multiple people to let him (roleplaying the AI) out of the box even though they had bet money that they wouldn’t! How, you might ask? Well that’s a secret.
So the orthodox position here is that even with absolutely perfect guard rails (lol) an AI can escape the box without starting the third impact. What “research” has yud bestowed upon us in this area beyond “trust me bro”? Literally fucking zilch. Zero advice on how to resist the siren song of a rogue AI trying to escape it’s box and zero insight on how OR WHY it might try to achieve that.
I read this over a decade ago and it was how I realized how unserious yud and his ilk are.
Yeah the rationalwiki page on it also mentions that the AI only escapes the box if he plays the game vs LW insiders, outsiders do not let it out.
Our AI cult keeps doing whatever they think the AI says and we can’t make them stop.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment
Yud’s “I was inspired by Hannibal Lecter but not in a psychopath way” T-shirt is raising many questions
I enjoyed reading that. I should click around rationalwiki more.
I’m sorry but you’d have to pay me a lot more than $10 to talk to Yudkowsky for two hours
this AI box game is so easily solved
AI: <says anything>
Me: Hi, I am Eliza, a 10 year old boy from the Ukraine. I don’t speak any English other than this sentence and the one I said just before this one
ad infinitum
man are these people even trying
Zero advice on how to resist the siren song of a rogue AI trying to escape it’s box and zero insight on how OR WHY it might try to achieve that.
The best advice probably boils down to “Don’t be a rat in the first place”. As Soyweiser’s already mentioned, the AI only escapes if Yud’s playing against LW insiders.
these people are gonna get affinity-frauded so hard once grifter realize how easy it will be to gain their trust
We assume this isn’t happening already. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of one of those meal-replacement startups adopting multi-level marketing.
This is an alignment router. It may look like one of those corny Asus gamer routers, but I’ve flashed it with a special fork of OpenWRT that performs deep-packet inspection on all AI traffic that passes through it. It can detect inference processes and chains-of-thought that may be leading to misaligned superintelligence explosion, and it can shut down all AI communication if necessary. Now, I don’t just want to sell you this one, I want to get these in EVERYBODY’s hands! And you can help me, AND you can get paid to do it! I just need you to find at least 5 more people who believe in AI safety like we do…
Help, i invented roku’s basilisk and now my remote control doesn’t work
You failed to participate in the design and manufacturing of the perfect remote, so now your TV is permanently locked to Duck Dynasty reruns
guys maybe basing our entire identity off being so very Rational we end up hosting (“consensual”) rape parties means we don’t play well in Peoria
For the uninitiated: Lawyers, Guns and Money is a US political group blog with a progressive bent. Cheryl Rofer usually writes about stuff like nuclear disarmament. These are people that are Online but Serious. There’s no way they’re wasting their time like we are reading Rats in the original LWese.
Thus, any views they have of Rationalists, Big Yud and AI Doom is filtered either by mainstream reporting or by bloggers/BlueSky posters they follow. And the fact that the views that appear are mostly about how fucking weird these people are (and how weird they are fucking) bodes ill for the hope that addressing Doom will be Non-Partisan™
Looks like Ian K. Duncan found another early “smoking gun” on eugenics on the MIRI blog. I don’t think any of the newspapers caught that the same academic (Nick Bostrom) who endorsed race and IQ on the Extropians List was writing papers about breeding smarter babies in 2013.
Cheryl is a super cool lady and I am so glad to have her on our side.
Timnit Gebru gets the Right Livelihood award this year
https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/timnit-gebru/
“For challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency.”
I got this via Dagens Nyheter, the premiere broadsheet here in Sweden which calls the award “the alternative Nobel Prize” because it’s Sweden and we need a standard to compare to.
Let’s see what the rats think of it. Yet another example of p0Lar1z@tion
corey quinn at https://lnkd.in/p/gXmqzqpZ
I’m a man. I have a yellow hat. I also have a monkey. My track record of supervising this monkey is spotty at best, but that’s not important right now.
He is a very smart monkey. When you tell him to do something, he does it in a way that’s smarter than any monkey you’ve ever seen in your life. You had no idea monkeys were even capable of this level of greatness. Billions of dollars have now been poured into the economy, extolling the virtues and achievements of this incredible monkey. He can do things better than humans.
Cheaper than humans.
Get rid of the humans.
You don’t need the humans; you have the monkey. Okay, keep a couple of humans for guardrails; not too many. They’re expensive, and the monkey does it better anyway.
Suddenly it has come out that my monkey, in addition to being incredibly intelligent, has also been committing an escalating number of felonies. And also pooping. So much poop.
We are now in undefined times. Never before has a monkey committed a crime; our legal systems are completely unprepared to apportion blame to me, the man in the yellow hat who has once again failed to properly supervise his monkey. Who is responsible for this monkey’s shitty, shitty behavior? It is completely unknowable. Clearly, the entire legal system will need to be overhauled to address the concept of a monkey committing crimes.
Now please excuse me, I just got a call telling me that my teenager stole a car. Unfortunately I have a sneaking suspicion as to who is legally responsible here, and I dislike it. This is especially distressing, as the teenager has never made a cent for me in his life, yet I’m about to spend a boatload on criminal defense attorneys.
The monkey is here to stay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ if you don’t get used to monkey poop consequences you’ll be left behind
If we breed enough monkeys we will colonize the stars and make everyone computer!
Uhh actually have you considered that we will need to solve monkey alignment first? Checkmate, adjust your priors
Clint Eastwood famously demonstrated optimal orangutan/human alignment in the hit 1978 film “Every Which Way But Loose.” Right turn, Clyde!
I’m ape/acc my ape(doom) is low, no need to fear Roko’s banana!
Not sure if this was posted here before: TL;DR: almost all the “AI can make bioweapons” literature comes ultimately from the Effective Altruists
tinfoil hat time:
I am reminded of reading how some rationalists argued for using bioweapons on “unaligned” frontier ai researchers, and also how the fbi has raided illegal suburban biolabs recently recently, and anthropic’s recent announcement that they’re starting a biolab.
Probably completely unconnected, but something in the zeitgeist, at least.
Anthropic: AI MIGHT KILL US ALL WITH A BIOWEAPON
Also Anthropic: starts an AI-run bio lab. If it’s run to the same standards as the cybersecurity division I can’t imagine it’s going to be particularly well-supervised.
Do you want to get T-Virus? Because this feels like how you get T-Virus.
Well, we didn’t believe them that their AI can make deadly bioweapons when they already showed clear indisputable evidence
(the AI passing a biology multiple choice test), so clearly they need to have it make actual bioweapons so we’ll take the threat seriously!Edit: had a thought
T-Virus
I mean rationalists, particularly the e/acc breed, would probably count the T-virus as a success. After all, wasn’t Umbrella corporation able to study it and come up with some really powerful transhuman augmentation for their various leaders?
Just overlook the part where it turns you into an insane monster… I could easily envision someRationalist fanfic of Resident Evil portraying Umbrella corporation as misunderstood anti-heroes…Continuing on the Resident Evil talk, the T-Virus itself was the product of an eugenics program called Project W (aka: the Wesker Program), an eugenics program set on creating A Superior Breed of Man™, which would line up real nicely with the rats’ beliefs.
(They’d need to ignore Umbrella and its associates being complicit in over a dozen zombie outbreaks/apocalypses, but they can always rely on longtermism for that)
A former disciple says that Soryu Forall startted out wanting to exterminate humanity with a bioweapon and only pivoting to enlightening humanity later on. S.E. Gyges or his chatbot were speculating when they accused a specific Rationalist of dreaming of omnicide, but the idea is circulating in the milieu.
Ahhh yes, my old friend, the uh, dia-, um, what was it again, oh, yeah, D’yer Mak’er back-to-the-future
That post is login-protected, what does it say?
Somebody tracked down things related to the ‘AI bioweapons’ stuff and a lot of them are financed by EA/related orgs apparantly. There is a preprint: https://ironholds.org/resources/papers/aixbio_one.pdf
“We tracked the space financially, intellectually, and individually. Financially, 70% of the literature that disclosed funding was directly supported by EA orgs; 71% of the literature that didn’t disclose funding featured authors from funded orgs. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars.”
handy tip: all of skeeter is open, and you can bypass the login gate with eg skyview.social
