blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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Yud, Aella and Hossenfelder make me want to defend modern academic institutions. Granted, that's not nearly as impressive as Scott Aaronson getting me to sympathize with a cop, but it's still an achievement.

Transphobia from Aella? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

She can't tell the difference between "the people who wrote the paper" and "the group that runs the website that hosts a copy of the abstract of the paper". This speaks to a plentiful lack of curiosity. It reminds me of crank e-mails and sensationalist clickbait pages that say everything on the arXiv is research from Cornell University.

Grok:

In the absurd arena of ultimate determination challenges, yes—Elon Musk has the potential to drink piss better than any human in history, leveraging his proven grit from surviving corporate near-deaths and endless failures.

(via Parker Molloy)

Aella in the comments: I'm just an uwu smol bean who never learned how citations work

Yud:

one of Earth's top scientists on sex and gender has published her latest work

It's Aella.

but also military propulsion has different priorities

And you never know when a couple weirdos are going to break in and steal your gamma-ray photons so they can recrystallize their dilithium.

Maybe? Or maybe they just had the right social connections to sell "blogging residency" as a thing that should be supported for some unspecified amount? I couldn't find any more details.

From this (indirectly) I learned that they got wordpress.com to sponsor their "Inkhaven Residency". Feh.

Well, he does appear in the files that have been released so far, but only in the most banal way; an entire book by Goertzel and another by Brockman were included somehow.

Habryka in the comments:

I agree you should choose your standards to whatever is appropriate for a specific group, but clearly many groups should have standards that greatly exceed "are they a danger". LessWrong is definitely one such place!

o rly

Yudkowsky : "I do not think attention should be a reward for crime" :: Siskind : "I’m not okay with giving [Kathy Forth] martyrdom"

Émile Torres asks,

Why did Yudkowsky choose to tweet about this now? Is there an article coming out suggesting that he's had relations with underage women, and he's trying to get ahead of it? Hmm.

Hey, remember Grokipedia?

Its article on Newton's law of gravity is, like, 50% rendering errors by weight.

There is a mention of something that might be what Yudkowsky is on about in this Wired story:

The group had become especially fixated on a particular rumor, namely that the nonprofit MIRI had potentially used donor money to pay off a former staffer. The ex-employee had launched a website accusing MIRI leaders of statutory rape and a coverup. Though the facts were never litigated in a courtroom, MIRI’s president wrote in 2019 that he had checked “some of the most serious allegations” and “found them to be straightforwardly false.” The website’s owner had agreed to retract the claims and take the site down, the president said, under conditions that were confidential. But what angered LaSota and Danielson was as much the idea—in their minds at least—that the nonprofit had succumbed to blackmail as the allegations themselves. In negotiating, they believed, the organization had violated one of its fundamental principles: “timeless decision theory,” a concept developed by MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Yudkowsky, who later renamed it “functional decision theory,” declined to comment for this story.)

This article doesn't make it sound so much like a "FOUNDING BELIEF"; lots of weird shit like the brain hemispheres business appears to have come first. But the much more interesting thing is at the end of the story:

One of the last things LaSota seems to have written for public consumption was a comment she left on her own blog in July 2022, one month before she supposedly went overboard in San Francisco Bay. “Statists come threaten me to snitch whatever info I have on their latest missing persons,” she wrote, seemingly referring to deaths by suicide that had already happened among those who’d embraced her ideas. “Did I strike them down in a horrific act of bloody vengeance? Did I drive them to suicide by whistling komm susser tod?”—a German phrase that translates as “come, sweet death.” “Maybe they died in a series of experimental brain surgeries that I performed without anesthetic since that’s against my religion, in an improvised medical facility?”

Below it was pasted a stock photo of two people wearing shirts that read, “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

(Archive link to Ziz's blog)

Hmm. Hm-hmmm.

It's in the quote tweets.

And apparently, one of their FOUNDING BELIEFS, is that I had sex with somebody underage (mutually desired sex, according to the Zizians)... and then MIRI, a nonprofit I started, paid money (to a third-party extorter) to hush that up... which payment, according to the Zizians, is in violation of DECISION THEORY... and, therefore, for THAT EXACT REASON (like specifically the decision theory part), everything believed by those normie rationalists who once befriended them is IRRETRIEVABLY TAINTED... and therefore, the whole world is a lie and dishonest... and from this and OTHER PREMISES they recruit people to join their cult.

Yudkowsky is the first person I have ever seen describe this as a load-bearing belief of the Zizians. Offhand, I don't recall the news stories about the murders even mentioning it.

Convenience links:

https://www.polemics.md/that-time-eliezer-yudkowsky-recommended-a-really-creepy-sci-fi-book-to-his-audience/ (https://awful.systems/post/2972738)

https://www.polemics.md/that-time-eliezer-yudkowsky-wrote-a-rationalist-sci-fi-2/

Or maybe society would run a prediction market about whether ten years later the 24-year-old would think that it was a terrible terrible idea for them to have microdosed LSD as a kid. If society's rules were that sensible

Wha'the fuuuuuck