Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th August 2025
scruiser @ scruiser @awful.systems Posts 6Comments 326Joined 2 yr. ago
scruiser @ scruiser @awful.systems
Posts
6
Comments
326
Joined
2 yr. ago
promptfarmers, for the "researchers" trying to grow bigger and bigger models.
/r/singularity redditors that have gotten fed up with Sam Altman's bs often use Scam Altman.
I've seen some name calling using drug analogies: model pushers, prompt pushers, just one more training run bro (for the researchers); just one more prompt (for the users), etc.
I could imagine a lesswronger being delusional/optimistic enough to assume their lesswrong jargon concepts have more academic citations than a handful of arXiv preprints... but in this case they just admitted otherwise their only sources are lesswrong and arXiv. Also, if they know wikipedia's policies, they should no the No Original Research rule would block their idea even overlooking single source and conflict of interest.
Yeah that article was one of the things I had mind. It's the peak of centrist liberalism where EAs and lesswrongers can think these people are literally going to cause mankind's extinction (or worse) and they can't even bring themselves to be rude to them. OTOH, if they actually acted coherently on their nominal doomer beliefs, they would be carrying out terrorism on a far greater scale than the Zizians, so maybe it is for the best they are ideologically incapable of direct action.
Yall ready for another round of LessWrong edit wars on Wikipedia? This time with a wider list of topics!
On the very slightly merciful upside... the lesswronger recommends "If you want to work on a new page, discuss with the community first by going to the talk page of a related topic or meta-page." and "In general, you shouldn't post before you understand Wikipedia rules, norms, and guidelines." so they are ahead of the previous calls made on Lesswrong for Wikipedia edit-wars.
On the downside, they've got a laundry list of lesswrong jargon they want Wikipedia articles for. Even one of the lesswrongers responding to them points out these terms are a bit on the under-defined side:
Speaking as a self-identified agent foundations researcher, I don't think agent foundations can be said to exist yet. It's more of an aspiration than a field. If someone wrote a wikipedia page for it, it would just be that person's opinion on what agent foundations should look like.
They’re cosplaying as activists, have no ideas about how to move the public image needle other than weird movie ideas and hope, and are literally marinated in SV technolibertarianism which sees government regulation as Evil.
It is kind of sad. They are missing the ideological pieces that would let them carry out activism effectually so instead they've gotten used as a free source of crit-hype in the LLM bubble. ...except not that sad because they would ignore real AI dangers in favor of their sci-fi scenarios, so I don't feel too bad for them.
And why would a rich guy be against a “we are trying to convince rich guys to spend their money differently” organization.
Well when they are just passively trying to convince the rich guys, they can use the organization to launder reputation or boost ideologies they are in favor of. When the organization actually tries to get regulations passed, even ineffectually, well, that is a threat to the likes of Thiel.
The quirky eschatologist that you’re looking for is René Girard, who he personally met at some point. For more details, check out the Behind the Bastards on him.
Thanks for the references. The quirky theology was so outside the range of even the weirder Fundamentalist Christian stuff I didn't recognize it as such. (And didn't trust the EA summary because they try so hard to charitably make sense of Thiel).
In this context, Thiel fears the spectre of AGI because it can’t be influenced by his normal approach to power, which is to hide anything that can be hidden and outspend everybody else talking in the open.
Except the EAs are, on net, opposed to the creation of AGI (albeit they are ineffectual in their opposition). So going after the EAs doesn't make sense if Thiel is genuinely opposed to inventing AGI faster. So I still think Thiel is just going after the EA's because he's libertarian and EA has shifted in the direction of trying to get more government regulation. (As opposed to a coherent theological goal beyond libertarianism). I'll check out the BtB podcast and see if it changes my mind as to his exact flavor of insanity.
So... apparently Peter Thiel has taken to co-opting fundamentalist Christian terminology to go after Effective Altruism? At least it seems that way from this EA post (warning, I took psychic damage just skimming the lunacy). As far as I can tell, he's merely co-opting the terminology, Thiel's blather doesn't have any connection to any variant of Christian eschatology (whether mainstream or fundamentalist or even obscure wacky fundamentalist), but of course, the majority of the EAs don't recognize that, or the fact that he is probably targeting them for their (kind of weak to be honest) attempts at getting AI regulated at all, and instead they charitably try to steelman him and figure out if he was a legitimate point. ...I wish they could put a tenth of this effort into understanding leftist thought.
Some of the comments are... okay actually, at least by EA standards, but there are still plenty of people willing to defend Thiel
One comment notes some confusion:
I’m still confused about the overall shape of what Thiel believes.
He’s concerned about the antichrist opposing Jesus during Armageddon. But afaik standard theology says that Jesus will win for certain. And revelation says the world will be in disarray and moral decay when the Second Coming happens.
If chaos is inevitable and necessary for Jesus’ return, why is expanding the pre-apocalyptic era with growth/prosperity so important to him?
Yeah, its because he is simply borrowing Christian Fundamentalists Eschatological terminology... possibly to try to turn the Christofascists against EA?
I'm dubious Thiel is actually an ally to anyone worried about permanent dictatorship. He has connections to openly anti-democratic neoreactionaries like Curtis Yarvin, he quotes Nazi lawyer and democracy critic Carl Schmitt on how moments of greatness in politics are when you see your enemy as an enemy, and one of the most famous things he ever said is "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible". Rather I think he is using "totalitarian" to refer to any situation where the government is less economically libertarian than he would like, or "woke" ideas are popular amongst elite tastemakers, even if the polity this is all occurring in is clearly a liberal democracy, not a totalitarian state.
Note this commenter still uses non-confrontational language ("I'm dubious") even when directly calling Thiel out.
The top comment, though, is just like the main post, extending charitability to complete technofascist insanity. (Warning for psychic damage)
Nice post! I am a pretty close follower of the Thiel Cinematic Universe (ie his various interviews, essays, etc)
I think Thiel is also personally quite motivated (understandably) by wanting to avoid death. This obviously relates to a kind of accelerationist take on AI that sets him against EA, but again, there's a deeper philosophical difference here. Classic Yudkowsky essays (and a memorable Bostrom short story, video adaptation here) share this strident anti-death, pro-medical-progress attitude (cryonics, etc), as do some philanthropists like Vitalik Buterin. But these days, you don't hear so much about "FDA delenda est" or anti-aging research from effective altruism. Perhaps there are valid reasons for this (low tractability, perhaps). But some of the arguments given by EAs against aging's importance are a little weak, IMO (more on this later) -- in Thiel's view, maybe suspiciously weak. This is a weird thing to say, but I think to Thiel, EA looks like a fundamentally statist / fascist ideology, insofar as it is seeking to place the state in a position of central importance, with human individuality / agency / consciousness pushed aside.
As for my personal take on Thiel's views -- I'm often disappointed at the sloppiness (blunt-ness? or low-decoupling-ness?) of his criticisms, which attack the EA for having a problematic "vibe" and political alignment, but without digging into any specific technical points of disagreement. But I do think some of his higher-level, vibe-based critiques have a point.
This was discussed last week but I looked at the comments and noticed someone in the comments getting slammed for... checks notes... noting that Eliezer wasn't clear on what research paper he was actually responding to (multiple other comments are kind of confused, because they assume he means one paper then other comments correct them that he obviously meant another). The commenter of course edits to back-peddle.
One of the comments really annoyed me:
The “genetics is meaningless at the individual level” argument has always struck me as a bit of an ivory-tower oversimplification.
No, its pushing back at eugenicist with completely fallacious ideas. See for example Genesmith's posts on Lesswrong. They are like concentrated Genetics Dunning-Kruger and the lesswrongers eat them up.
No one is promising perfect prediction.
Yes they are, see Kelsey Piper's comments about superbabies, or Eliezer worldbuilding about dath Ilan's eugenics, or Genesmith's totally wacko ideas.
The numbers that get thrown about don’t mean what the people throwing them around think them to mean
That describes a common rationalist failure mode. They reach for a false sense of quantification by throwing lots of numbers at things, but the numbers are already approximations of much more nuanced, complex, and/or continuous things, so by overemphasizing the numbers, they actually get further from properly understanding. See for example... fixation on IQ; slapping probabilities everywhere; extrapolating trend lines (METR task length); and prediction markets.
that couple
I hate that I know what is being talked about the instant I see it.
Also, they've appeared on 3 separate top posts in the stubstack this week, so yeah another PR blitz. I find it kind of funny/stupid the news media can't even bother to find a local eugenicist couple to talk to. I guess having a "story" served up to you is enticing enough to utterly fail to provide pushback or question if the story is even relevant to your audience in the first place.
They are going with the 50% success rate because the "time horizons" for something remotely reasonable like 99% or even just 95% are still so tiny they can't extrapolate a trend out of it and it tears a massive hole in their whole AGI agents soon scenarios().
I would give it credit for being better than the absolutely worthless approach of "scoring well on a bunch of multiple choice question tests". And it is possibly vaguely relevant for the pipe-dream end goal of outright replacing programmers. But overall, yeah, it is really arbitrary.
Also, given how programming is perceived as one of the more in-demand "potential" killer-apps for LLMs and how it is also one of the applications it is relatively easy to churn out and verify synthetic training data for (write really precise detailed test cases, then you can automatically verify attempted solutions and synthetic data), even if LLMs are genuinely improving at programming it likely doesn't indicate general improvement in capabilities.
Eliezer's response is especially stupid given that he has cited his fictional worldbuilding project like it is evidence (we have examples saved over on the reddit sneerclub).
Saw this posted to the Reddit Sneerclub, this essay has some excellent zingers and a good overall understanding of rationalists. A few highlights...
Rationalism is the notion that the universe is a collection of true facts, but since the human brain is an instrument for detecting lions in the undergrowth, almost everyone is helplessly confused about the world, and if you want to believe as many true things and disbelieve as many false things as possible—and of course you do—you must use various special techniques to discipline your brain into functioning more like a computer. (In practice, these techniques mostly consist of calling your prejudices ‘Bayesian priors,’ but that’s not important right now.)
We're all very familiar with this phenoma, but this author has a pithy way of summarizing it.
The story is not a case study in how rationality will help you understand the world, it’s a case study in how rationality will give you power over other people. It might have been overtly signposted as fiction, with all the necessary content warnings in place. That doesn’t mean it’s not believed. Despite being genuinely horrible, this story does have one important use: it makes sense out of the rationalist fixation on the danger of a superhuman AI. According to HPMOR, raw intelligence gives you direct power over other people; a recursively self-improving artificial general intelligence is just our name for the theoretical point where infinite intelligence transforms into infinite power.
Yep, the author nails the warped view Rationalists have about intelligence.
We’re supposedly dealing with a group of idiosyncratic weirdos, all of them trying to independently reconstruct the entirety of human knowledge from scratch. Their politics run all the way from the furthest fringes of the far right to the furthest fringes of the liberal centre.
That is a concise summary of their warped Overton Window, yeah.
And some people are crediting Eliezer as if he predicted this devastating damage and not something completely different. Or they compare LLMs spewing shit to his scenarios of agentically and intellignetly dangerous and manipulative AGIs.
Should we give up on all altruist causes because the AGI God is nearly here? the answer may surprise you!
tldr; actually you shouldn't give because the AGI God might not be quite omnipotent and thus would still benefit from your help and maybe there will be multiple Gods, some used for Good and some for Evil so your efforts are still needed. Shrimp are getting their eyeballs cut off right now!
So this blog post was framed positively towards LLM's and is too generous in accepting many of the claims around them, but even so, the end conclusions are pretty harsh on practical LLM agents: https://utkarshkanwat.com/writing/betting-against-agents/
Basically, the author has tried extensively, in multiple projects, to make LLM agents work in various useful ways, but in practice:
The dirty secret of every production agent system is that the AI is doing maybe 30% of the work. The other 70% is tool engineering: designing feedback interfaces, managing context efficiently, handling partial failures, and building recovery mechanisms that the AI can actually understand and use.
The author strips down and simplifies and sanitizes everything going into the LLMs and then implements both automated checks and human confirmation on everything they put out. At that point it makes you question what value you are even getting out of the LLM. (The real answer, which the author only indirectly acknowledges, is attracting idiotic VC funding and upper management approval).
Even as critcal as they are, the author doesn't acknowledge a lot of the bigger problems. The API cost is a major expense and design constraint on the LLM agents they have made, but the author doesn't acknowledge the prices are likely to rise dramatically once VC subsidization runs out.
And looks like dgerad is already on the case and the lesswrongers are aware of it.
o7