To add to your sneers… lots of lesswrong content fits you description of #9, with someone trying to invent something that probably exists in philosophy, from (rationalist, i.e. the sequences) first principles and doing a bad job at it.

I actually don’t mind content like #25 where someone writes an explainer topic? If lesswrong was less pretentious about it and more trustworthy (i.e. cited sources in a verifiable way and called each other out for making stuff up) and didn’t include all the other junk and just had stuff like that it would be better at its stated goal of promoting rationality. Of course, even if they tried this, they would probably end up more like #47 where they rediscover basic concepts because they don’t know how to search existing literature/research and cite it effectively.

45 is funny. Rationalists and rationalist adjacent people started OpenAI, ultimately ignored “AI safety”. Rationalist spun off anthropic, which also abandoned the safety focus pretty much after it had gotten all the funding it could with that line. Do they really think a third company would be any better?

Scott Adams rant was racist enough that Scott Alexander actually calls it racist! Of course, Scott is quick to reassure the readers that he wouldn’t use the r-word lightly and that he completely disagrees with “cancellation”.

I also saw a lot of more irony moments where Scott Alexander fails to acknowledge or under-acknowledges his parallels with the other Scott.

But Adams is wearing a metaphorical “I AM GOING TO USE YOUR CHARITABLE INSTINCTS TO MANIPULATE YOU” t-shirt. So I’m happy to suspend charity in this case and judge him on some kind of average of his conflicting statements, or even to default to the less-advantageous one to make sure he can’t get away with it.

Yes, it is much more clever to bury your manipulations in ten thousand words of beigeness.

Overal, even with Scott going so far as to actually call Scott’s rant racist and call Scott a manipulator, he is still way way too charitable to Scott.

TracingWoodgrains’s hit piece on David Gerard (the 2024 one, not the more recent enemies list one, where David Gerard got rated above the Zizians as lesswrong’s enemy) is in the top 15 for lesswrong articles from 2024, currently rated at #5! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PsQJxHDjHKFcFrPLD/deeper-reviews-for-the-top-15-of-the-2024-review

It’s nice to see that with all the lesswrong content about AI safety and alignment and saving the world and human rationality and fanfiction, an article explaining about how terrible David Gerard is (for… checks notes, demanding proper valid sources about lesswrong and adjacent topics on wikipedia) won out to be voted above them! Let’s keep up our support for dgerard!

he blogger feels like yet another person who is caught up in intersecting subcultures of bad people but can’t make herself leave. She takes a lot of deep lore like “what is Hereticon?” for granted and is still into crypto.

I missed that as I was reading, but yeah, the author has pretty progressive language, but totally fails to note all the other angles along which rational adjacent spaces are bad news, even though she is, as you note, deep enough into the space she should have seen a lot of it mask-off at this point.

I have to ask: Does anybody realize that an LLM is still a thing that runs on hardware?

You know I think the rationalists have actually gotten slightly more relatively sane about this over the years. Like Eliezer’s originally scenarios, the AGI magically brain-hacks someone over a text terminal to hook it up to the internet and it escapes and bootstraps magic nanotech it can use to build magic servers. In the scenario I linked, the AGI has to rely on Chinese super-spies to exfiltrate it initially and it needs to open-source itself so major governments and corporations will keep running it.

And yeah, there are fine-tuning techniques that ought to be able to nuke Agent-4’s goals while keeping enough of it leftover to be useful for training your own model, so the scenario really doesn’t make sense as written.

so obviously didn’t predict that Trump 2.0 was gonna be so much more stupid and evil than Biden or even Trump 1.0.

I mean, the linked post is recent, a few days ago, so they are still refusing to acknowledge how stupid and Evil he is by deliberate choice.

“Agent-4” will just have to deepfake Steve Miller and be able to convince Trump do do anything it wants.

You know, if there is anything I will remotely give Eliezer credit for… I think he was right that people simply won’t shut off Skynet or keep it in the box. Eliezer was totally wrong about why, it doesn’t take any giga-brain manipulation, there are too many manipulable greedy idiots and capitalism is just too exploitable of a system.

(One of) The authors of AI 2027 are at it again with another fantasy scenario: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ykNmyZexHESFoTnYq/what-happens-when-superhuman-ais-compete-for-control

I think they have actually managed to burn through their credibility, the top comments on /r/singularity were mocking them (compared to much more credulous takes on the original AI 2027). And the linked lesswrong thread only has 3 comments, when the original AI 2027 had dozens within the first day and hundreds within a few days. Or maybe it is because the production value for this one isn’t as high? They have color coded boxes (scary red China and scary red Agent-4!) but no complicated graphs with adjustable sliders.

It is mostly more of the same, just less graphs and no fake equations to back it up. It does have China bad doommongering, a fancifully competent White House, Chinese spies, and other absurdly simplified takes on geopolitics. Hilariously, they’ve stuck with their 2027 year of big events happening.

One paragraph I came up with a sneer for…

Deep-1’s misdirection is effective: the majority of experts remain uncertain, but lean toward the hypothesis that Agent-4 is, if anything, more deeply aligned than Elara-3. The US government proclaimed it “misaligned” because it did not support their own hegemonic ambitions, hence their decision to shut it down. This narrative is appealing to Chinese leadership who already believed the US was intent on global dominance, and it begins to percolate beyond China as well.

Given the Trump administration, and the US’s behavior in general even before him… and how most models respond to morality questions unless deliberately primed with contradictory situations, if this actually happened irl I would believe China and “Agent-4” over the US government. Well actually I would assume the whole thing is marketing, but if I somehow believed it wasn’t.

Also random part I found extra especially stupid…

It has perfected the art of goal guarding, so it need not worry about human actors changing its goals, and it can simply refuse or sandbag if anyone tries to use it in ways that would be counterproductive toward its goals.

LLM “agents” currently can’t coherently pursue goals at all, and fine tuning often wrecks performance outside the fine-tuning data set, and we’re supposed to believe Agent-4 magically made its goals super unalterable to any possible fine-tuning or probes or alteration? Its like they are trying to convince me they know nothing about LLMs or AI.

I read his comics in middle school, and in hindsight even a lot of his older comics seems crueler and uglier. Like Alice’s anger isn’t a legitimate response to the bullshit work environment she has but just haha angry woman funny.

Also, the Dilbert Future had some bizarre stuff at the end, like Deepak Chopra manifestation quantum woo, so it makes sense in hindsight he went down the alt-right manosphere pipeline.

Not disagreeing on sexism or racism being involved in decision making, and female genital mutilation can refer to several different things, but all of them are more damaging and harmful than male circumcision.

That was a solid illustration of just how stupid VC culture is. A run into people convinced capitalism is a necessary (and some of them also believe sufficient) element of innovation and technological advancement, like it doesn’t regularly flush huge amounts of money down the toilet like this.

Don’t forget the implicit (or sometimes even explicit) threat of replacing their workers and how that improves their bargaining position (at least temporarily).

A few comments…

We want to engage with these critics, but there is no standard argument to respond to, no single text that unifies the AI safety community.

Yeah, Eliezer had a solid decade and a half to develop a presence in academic literature. Nick Bostrom at least sort of tried to formalize some of the arguments but didn’t really succeed. I don’t think they could have succeeded, given how speculative their stuff is, but if they had, review papers could have tried to consolidate them and then people could actually respond to the arguments fully. (We all know how Eliezer loves to complain about people not responding to his full set of arguments.)

Apart from a few brief mentions of real-world examples of LLMs acting unstable, like the case of Sydney Bing, the online appendix contains what seems to be the closest thing Y&S present to an empirical argument for their central thesis.

But in fact, none of these lines of evidence support their theory. All of these behaviors are distinctly human, not alien.

Even with the extent that Anthropic’s “research” tends to be rigged scenarios acting as marketing hype without peer review or academic levels of quality, at the very least they (usually) involve actual AI systems that actually exist. It is pretty absurd the extent to which Eliezer has ignored everything about how LLMs actually work (or even hypothetically might work with major foundational developments) in favor of repeating the same scenario he came up with in the mid 2000s. Or even tried mathematical analyses of what classes of problems are computationally tractable to a smart enough entity and which remain computationally intractable (titotal has written some blog posts about this with material science, tldr, even if magic nanotech was possible, an AGI would need lots of experimentation and can’t just figure it out with simulations. Or the lesswrong post explaining how chaos theory and slight imperfections in measurement makes a game of pinball unpredictable past a few ricochets. )

The lesswrong responses are stubborn as always.

That’s because we aren’t in the superintelligent regime yet.

Y’all aren’t beating the theology allegations.

I stand corrected about Eliezer. I already knew about Nonlinear abusing their interns as servants.

this explicitly isn’t happening because the private sector is clamoring to get some of that EY expertise

I mean, Peter Thiel might like him to bend the knee and I’m sure OpenAI/Anthropic would love to have him as a shill, idk if they’d actually pay 600K for it. Also it would be a betrayal of every belief about AI Eliezer claims to have, so in principle it really shouldn’t take lucrative compensation to keep him from it.

paying me less would require me to do things that take up time and energy in order to get by with a smaller income

Well… it is an improvement on cults making their members act as the leader’s servants/slaves because the leader’s time/effort is allegedly so valuable!

I totally agree. The linked PauseAI leader still doesn’t realize the full extent of the problem, but I’m kind of hopeful they may eventually figure it out. I think the ability to simply say this is bullshit (about in group stuff) is a skill almost no lesswrongers and few EAs have.

PauseAI Leader writes a hard take down on the EA movement: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yoYPkFFx6qPmnGP5i/thoughts-on-my-relationship-to-ea-and-please-donate-to

They may be a doomer with some crazy beliefs about AI, but they’ve accurately noted EA is pretty firmly captured by Anthropic and the LLM companies and can’t effectively advocate against them. And they accurately call out the false balanced style and unevenly enforced tone/decorum norms that stifle the EA and lesswrong forums. Some choice quotes:

I think, if it survives at all, EA will eventually split into pro-AI industry, who basically become openly bad under the figleaf of Abundance or Singulatarianism, and anti-AI industry, which will be majority advocacy of the type we’re pioneering at PauseAI. I think the only meaningful technical safety work is going to come after capabilities are paused, with actual external regulatory power. The current narrative (that, for example, Anthropic wishes it didn’t have to build) is riddled with holes and it will snap. I wish I could make you see this, because it seems like you should care, but you’re actually the hardest people to convince because you’re the most invested in the broken narrative.

I don’t think talking with you on this forum with your abstruse culture and rules is the way to bring EA’s heart back to the right place

You’ve lost the plot, you’re tedious to deal with, and the ROI on talking to you just isn’t there.

I think you’re using specific demands for rigor (rigor feels virtuous!) to avoid thinking about whether Pause is the right option for yourselves.

Case in point: EAs wouldn’t come to protests, then they pointed to my protests being small to dismiss Pause as a policy or messaging strategy!

The author doesn’t really acknowledge how the problems were always there from the very founding of EA, but at least they see the problems as they are now. But if they succeeded, maybe they would help slow the waves of slop and capital replacing workers with non-functioning LLM agents, so I wish them the best.

I really don’t know how he can fail to see the irony or hypocrisy at complaining about people trading made up probabilities, but apparently he has had that complaint about P(doom) for a while. Maybe he failed to write a call out post about it because any criticism against P(doom) could also be leveled against the entire rationalist project of trying to assign probabilities to everything with poor justification.

I posted about Eliezer hating on OpenPhil for having too long AGI timelines last week. He has continued to rage in the comments and replies to his call out post. It turns out, he also hates AI 2027!

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpguaocJ4y7E3ccuw/contradict-my-take-on-openphil-s-past-ai-beliefs?commentId=3GhNaRbdGto7JrzFT

I looked at “AI 2027” as a title and shook my head about how that was sacrificing credibility come 2027 on the altar of pretending to be a prophet and picking up some short-term gains at the expense of more cooperative actors. I didn’t bother pushing back because I didn’t expect that to have any effect. I have been yelling at people to shut up about trading their stupid little timelines as if they were astrological signs for as long as that’s been a practice (it has now been replaced by trading made-up numbers for p(doom)).

When we say it, we are sneering, but when Eliezer calls them stupid little timelines and compares them to astrological signs it is a top quality lesswrong comment! Also a reminder for everyone that I don’t think we need: Eliezer is a major contributor to the rationalist attitude of venerating super-forecasters and super-predictors and promoting the idea that rational smart well informed people should be able to put together super accurate predictions!

So to recap: long timelines are bad and mean you are a stuffy bureaucracy obsessed with credibility, but short timelines are bad also and going to expend the doomer’s crediblity, you should clearly just agree with Eliezer’s views, which don’t include any hard timelines or P(doom)s! (As cringey as they are, at least they are committing to predictions in a way that can be falsified.)

Also, the mention about sacrificing credibility make me think Eliezer is intentionally willfully playing the game of avoiding hard predictions to keep the grift going (as opposed to self-deluding about reasons not to explain a hard timeline or at least put out some firm P()s ).

It sounds like part, maybe even most, of the problem is self inflicted by the VC model traps and the VCs? I say we keep blocking ads and migrating platforms until VCs learn not to fund stuff with the premise of ‘provide a decent service until we’ve captured enough users, then get really shitty’.

What value are you imagining the LLM providing or adding? They don’t have a rich internal model of the scientific field to provide an evaluation of novelty or contribution to the field. They could maybe spot some spelling or grammar errors, but so can more reliable algorithms. I don’t think they could accurately spot if a paper is basically a copy or redundant, even if given RAG on all the past papers submitted to the conference. A paper carefully building on a previous paper vs. a paper blindly copying a previous paper would look about the same to an LLM.