our new piece on SBF gets stuck into the rationalists

How did Sam and Caroline get into taking high doses of ADHD medication? We think it was via Scott Alexander Siskind, the psychiatrist behind the rationalist blog Slate Star Codex.
Siskind occasionally writes up particular psychiatric drugs as public education. One popular piece was “Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know” from December 28, 2017.

Not to cast further aspersions or anything, but siskind did write a sort of follow up (titled psychopharmacology of ftx or something like that if you feel like googling it) where he explicitly denies ever having met the FTX psychiatrist/dealer, even though a) he admits they actually worked in the same hospital for a time and, perhaps more tellingly, b) no one asked.

Also according to the birdsite the ftx psychiatrist may have in fact been a huge creep.

A sleazy, woman-harassing psychiatrist who gives out dodgy prescriptions is the real face of EA. Just all the negative stereotypes associated with the 60s counterculture/New Left, with none of the redeeming features.
The little paranoid devil on Siskind’s shoulder screaming horrible compulsive thoughts in his ear is my favourite character in this whole decades long saga

At this point, if a rationalist says SBF is “smart” it’s probably out of shame/denial that they got duped by a junkie

My own self doubt asks: do rationalists feel shame, though?
- Some of them yes, or well most of them I gather. They are just people after all.
- Paradoxically, I think they literally are swimming in self shame. A lack of processing that shame is why dumping five more pounds of it into their psyche doesn't effectively alter any part of their behavior.
Though SBF was correct that if you wrote a book, you fucked up.
- Please explain (I am not well steeped in the SBF lore/tea)
- SBF is an idiot. He can’t be correct.

I'm reading the Zvi piece (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/book-review-going-infinite), which is quite entertaining , but once in a while you stub your toe over the fact that the author is a True Believer

Putting the $500 million into Anthropic was arguably the most important decision Sam ever made. I do not know if investing in Anthropic was a good or bad move for the chances of everyone not dying, but chances are this was either a massively good or massively bad investment. It dwarfs in impact the rest of his EA activities combined.

And the fact that SBF's observation that only $6.5B was spent on political campaigns was ludicrously low is blithely accepted as reasonable, not as an observation that campaign finance is broken.

ow fuck! my toe!
What happened with SBF will happen with an AI given a similar target, in terms of having misalignments that start out tolerable but steadily grow worse as capabilities increase and you face situations outside of the distribution, and things start to spiral to places very far than anything you ever would have intended.
Ah yes, one day someone will accidentally install the "I'm sorry, I can't let you do that Hal" plugin. Oops, I let the nuke launch AI override all of our control mechanisms, silly me!
I fucking hate x-risk people so much.
- Tangent to your point- what would happen if we started misusing tescreal terms to dilute their meaning? Some ideas:
  “I don’t want to go to that party. It’s an x-risk.”
  “No, I didn’t really like those sequel films. They were inscrutable Matrices.”
  “You know, holding down the A button and never letting up is a viable strategy as long as you know how to brake and mini-turbo in Mario Kart. Look up ‘effective accelerationism’.”
  Anyway I doubt it would do anything other than give us a headache from observing/using rat terms. Just wanted to have a lil fun.

I doubted whether it would be a good use of time to read Michael Lewis’s new book Going Infinite about Sam Bankman-Fried (hereafter SBF or Sam). What would I learn that I did not already know? Was Michael Lewis so far in the tank of SBF that the book was filled with nonsense and not to be trusted?
I set up a prediction market,

10/10 perfect LessWrong, no notes

The resulting book review is 28,776 words. It's 71 pages long in 12 point Calibri with normal spacing.
- lol, guess I made a good choice to go 'nah, not gonna read that' and closing the tab. That is like 3 SSCs.

Mowshowitz believes that Bankman-Fried says whatever the person he’s talking to wants to hear. He doesn’t care whether any statements he makes are true or false. Sam only cared about making the number go up — to win at EA as if it were a winnable game.

Mowshowitz is wrong, and Sam is right here. Remember: rationality is systematized winning

"Rationalists should win!" Not whine, win.
(Wonka voice) Strike that, reverse it

OMG he's gonna testify?! This is best thing that could happen, comedy-wise.

Apparently it did happen, and it was hilarious, but it was not in front of the jury (dunno why)
Thread starts here:
https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1717601265914409209?s=20
Update: the testimony was in front of the judge only, because there's disagreement on whether all of it should be presented to the jury. The judge will decide, and then there's a chance part of the testimony can be repeated in front of the jury, should SBF choose to do so.
- and Sam got out there and shot his mouth off at the jury today, and will do so even more on Monday

Seldom have I seen anyone who has drunk their own kool-aid deeper than SBF.