She had found herself in both an intellectual community and a demimonde, with a running list of inside jokes and in-group norms. Some people gave away their savings, assuming that, within a few years, money would be useless or everyone on Earth would be dead.
More totally normal things in our definitely not a cult community.
Basically their only hope is that an AI under their control takes over the world.
They are pretty dominant in the LLM space and are already having their people fast tracked into positions of influence, while sinking tons of cash into normalizing their views and enforcing their terminology.
Even though they aren't trying to pander to religious americans explicitly, their millenialism with the serial numbers filed off worldview will probably feel familiar and cozy to them.
This was such a chore to read, it's basically quirk-washing TREACLES. This is like a major publication deciding to take an uncritical look at scientology focusing on the positive vibes and the camaraderie, while stark in the middle of operation snow white, which in fact I bet happened a lot at the time.
The doomer scene may or may not be a delusional bubble—we’ll find out in a few years
Fuck off.
The doomers are aware that some of their beliefs sound weird, but mere weirdness, to a rationalist, is neither here nor there. MacAskill, the Oxford philosopher, encourages his followers to be “moral weirdos,” people who may be spurned by their contemporaries but vindicated by future historians. Many of the A.I. doomers I met described themselves, neutrally or positively, as “weirdos,” “nerds,” or “weird nerds.” Some of them, true to form, have tried to reduce their own weirdness to an equation. “You have a set amount of ‘weirdness points,’ ” a canonical post advises. “Spend them wisely.”
The weirdness is eugenics and the repugnant conclusion, and abusing bayes rule to sidestep context and take epistimological shortcuts to cuckoo conclusions while fortifying a bubble of accepted truths that are strangely amenable to allowing rich people to do whatever the hell they want.
Writing a 7-8000 word insider expose on TREACLES without mentioning eugenics even once throughout should be all but impossible, yet here we are.
Yeah, a lot of these TESCREAL exposés seem to lean on the perceived quirkiness while completely failing to convey how deeply unserious their purported scientific and philosophical footing is, like virgin tzatziki with impossible gyros unserious.
EAs advocating for fish welfare is about the only thing yet to be seen in this country, awesome.
If you want to influence Greece just use some of the fabled EA obsquatumatillions to buy out the left part of our two party system, they're currently in such shambles they'd barely notice, and it's not like they could do much worse with shrimp rights as a flagship issue.
Looking through the reddit thread, the whole 'Peter Miller has great recall' thing feels off, like it's less an excuse for shoddy preparation and more a genuine grievance that he kept his superior memory genes skills purposefully hidden so they couldn't sent someone who had rolled equal or better brain stats to the debate.
This is in response to PM himself showing up in the thread to say rootclaim actually had his presentation 24 days in advance because the debate was delayed once:
This is true. I think the point is more that, even having seen all your own and your opponents information, a debater with greater recall / working memory can potentially "win" even if their argument is weaker.
Like, of course they lost, mere facts are nothing when the opponent has the IQ advantage, this is how the AI demons get us.
Judge 1 says they, just, uh, decided some past disease outbreaks were lab leaks and never looked to see if that’s actually scientifically debated or just weird Rat Accepted Truths.
Yes but see, an anthrax environment containment breach almost five decades ago at a sprawling soviet weapons facility with biosecurity protocols that consisted of a wink and a handshake totally strengthens our claim that in 2019 some chinese intern accidentally shot up a gm bat virus and wandered off. Bayesian inference is unintuitive like that, you plebs wouldn't understand.
Absolutely, you can't keep pandering to the so called anti-woke and not end up with a lot of incel-adjacent people in your spaces, and the eugenics undercurrent feeds directly into manosphere perceptions about optimizing dating and tying your self worth to your splachnocranium/neurocranium ratio.
Also worth noting that before the infamous EY editorial in TIME that called for airstrikes against foreign datacenters to prevent clippy from going rogue, the previous time they covered ea/rat was to report that they appear to have a serious sexual exploitation problem.
On a more speculative note, some staples of the movement like effective polyamory may have come about directly from early rationalist inability to get any on the regular. Apparently if you go reddit spelunking it appears they also went through a phase of trying to brainwash each other optimize into bisexuality to stave off sexual frustration.
in a world of greater legibility, romantic partners would have the conversation about “I’d trade up if I found somebody 10%/25%/125% better than you” in advance, and make sure they have common knowledge of the numbers
To the extent EA/rats perpetuate cult behavior, it's probably safe to say that neither EY nor any other high status individuals within the space are wanting for sex.
Last behind the bastards episode is this article expanded. Robert Evans is always very listenable and the more detailed CES reporting is interesting, but if you are a member here you probably won't be adding anything new to your TREACLES lore.
I wish journalists referencing the basilisk would go a in a bit more in depth, it's so much dumber than than it seems at a brief glance. Like, a lot of people immediately assume the alleged scary part is that we might already be living in the simulation and thus be eligible for permanent residence in basilisk Hell should we commit the cardinal sin of shit-talking AI, but no; the reason you can go to AI hell is because of transhumanist cope.
As in, if your last hope for immortality is brain uploads, you are kinda cornered into believing your sense of self gets shared between the physical and the digital instance, otherwise what's the point? EY appears to be in this boat, he's claimed something like there's no real difference between instances of You existing in different moments in time sharing a self and you sharing a self with a perfect digital copy, so yeah, it's obviously possible, unavoidable even.
As to how the basilisk will get your digital copy in the first place, eh, it'll just extrapolate it perfectly from whatever impression's left of you in the timeline by the time it comes into being, because as we all now, the S in ASI stands for Fucking Magical, Does Whatever It Wants. Remember, ASI can conjure up the entirety of modern physics just by seeing three frames of an apple falling, according to Yud.
I was hoping someone more knowledgeable on the subject might have chimed in to provide some context by now, like are bioelectric circuits legit or is this sheldrake all over again, and why can't I find anything on the very interesting phenomenon of deer antlers maintaining acquired deformities between fall off and growth cycles, and apparently trophic memory is an hapax legomenon to your linked article according to google.
The concentrated smarm in this bullshit JAQ off piece gave me psychic damage.
Fun to see him using the "IQ is mostly genetic [because heredity]" line, which is exactly what the schizophrenia literature he takes issue with claims is a woefully inadequate descriptor if we're going to usefully evaluate what is actually happening.
The way they always try to motte and bailey eugenics gives me the shits. No, eugenics isn't screening embryos for terrible incurable conditions, it's the whole deal of gatekeeping society according to arbitrary geneological norms, and the fact that they keep trying to rehabilitate the term instead of rebranding to something less awful, is certainly food for thought.
I didn't mean to sound too derisive, heritability is an actually useful metric as far as I can tell, it's just not as intuitive or monosemantic as a lot people will make it out to be, especially in the absence of significant correlating DNA evidence.
Siskind strawmans this into the alleged opposition desperately claiming that "it's not genetic unless there's a specific gene you can point to", aka the bitches dont know bout my poly/omnigenic traits argument.
Architeuthis @ Architeuthis @awful.systems Posts 16Comments 465Joined 2 yr. ago
In yet another part of the article:
More totally normal things in our definitely not a cult community.