r/SneerClub archives
newest
bestest
longest
The combination of ppl thinking they're "rational" & rationalize every bonkers idea they have with "math" & "science," & their fanaticism + god complex is exhausting. (https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1624548093701287937?s=46&t=3yeP7iyIOSuBo3ZfBk6mcQ)
74

Epic thread.

I unironically love this. It is delightful. Timnit Gebru is incensed because she thinks it’s deranged, which it is, but it’s mostly just deranged in the same sense that any set of religious beliefs is deranged.

Here are some things that I am delighted by:

New Testament vs. Old Testament: If Yudkowsky is offering us an Old Testament flavor of Rationalism, in which the AI God is wrathful and punitive, then it stands to reason that there should be a New Testament version too, in which the AI God loves us and all things happen for a good reason. On the one hand I’m surprised it’s taken us so long to get here, but on the other hand this continues the impressive pace at which the Rationalists are speedrunning the evolutionary course of the Christian religion.

Spinoza’s AI God: It’s tempting to dismiss this stuff as techno libertarianism with insaner jargon (which it kind of is), but I think it’s better-understood as Spinozan Rationalism. You see, the AI God is not a separate entity that seeks to destroy us, but rather It is a great, all-encompassing intelligence of which we are an integral part. The author basically says this explicitly!

Effective accelerationism aims to follow the “will of the universe”

We must have faith: The author just comes right out and says it!

e/acc is about having faith

Doing religion and calling it science is prototypically sneerworthy behavior, whereas doing religion and calling it religion is almost respectable…

Counting angels: …but they still kind of think that they’re doing science

Directly working on technologies to accelerate the advent of this transduction is one of the best ways to accelerate the progress towards growth of civilization/intelligence in our universe

At the rate they’re going, though, it’s surely only a year or two at most before they start to say that all this talk about scifi technology and the singularity is really meant to be metaphorical, and that Rationalism is really about a personal journey to understanding and deepening one’s communion with information and computation.

Lines like “Capitalism is hence a form of intelligence” are very good evidence that the writing is not.

... After making that comment, I spent way too much time gathering links to illustrate how everything this screed says about science is just shoving words together that the author vaguely remembers hearing in proximity. E.g., the "Jarzynski-Crooks fluctuation dissipation theorem"? [Not a thing](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=%22Jarzynski-Crooks+fluctuation+dissipation+theorem%22&btnG=). There are three separate but related ideas (the Crooks fluctuation theorem, the Jarzynski equality and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem) which the author doesn't know *are* separate, because he hasn't a clue what he's talking about. But that's probably evident enough without elaborating upon it.

“e.g. a new technological paradigm emerges, letting the free market find how to extract utility from this said technology would be the best way to proceed, much better than fear-mongering

The 250 year old background drone of conservatism. “Look, I know the current socio-economic situation may look bad, but have you considered how much worse it could become if you tried to stop the moneyed classes from doing whatever they want? That’s not an acceptable risk. Please be civil and shut the fuck up”.

This is a pretty nice summary. Mao wrote about it almost 100 years ago, when the moneyed class called it “being practical”, to which he responded … well, I think we know how he responded.
> "Look, I know the current socio-economic situation may look bad, but have you considered how much worse it could become if you tried to stop The Party from doing whatever it wants? That's not an acceptable risk... *for you*. Please be civil and shut the fuck up, or we'll send you to a re-education camp". If there was a hell Mao would be rotting in it, the fucking hypocrite.

This is the successor thing to EA or some shit iirc.

It's an antithesis to EA fears of dangers from technology, basically saying something like "everything will be fine, we need to accelerate growth as much as possible". X-risk people's worst nightmare.
You know, I read [Bostrom's x-risk essay](https://aeon.co/essays/none-of-our-technologies-has-managed-to-destroy-humanity-yet). He doesn't argue that society should slow down growth or deliberately not pursue certain technologies, he actually considers that to basically be an x-risk. > It would be bad news if the vulnerable world hypothesis were correct. In principle, however, there are several responses that could save civilisation from a technological black ball. One would be to stop pulling balls from the urn altogether, ceasing all technological development. That’s hardly realistic though; and, even if it could be done, it would be extremely costly, to the point of constituting a catastrophe in its own right. They've always been like this. Their solution to harmful technologies is not to choose not to pursue them, or exercise caution. It's to create a global Panopticon or escape to Mars or some bullshit like that.
I happily confess to not reading Bostrom.
You are wise.
Because the goal of the longtermist project doesn't give a rat's left asscheek about actual people. Failing to advance technology to a hypothetical point where we've got billions of simulated AI constructs running in Dyson spheres would be only very slightly less bad than getting wiped out by a meteor or some embodiment of our own hubris.

Go ahead, read some of this drivel; he seems to think that big words are better at communicating. The writer is functionally illiterate.

Wait, isn’t e/acc a joke?

Rule 34 of rationalist bad ideas

e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism Parts of e/acc (e.g. Beff) consider ourselves post-humanists; in order to spread to the stars, the light of consciousness/intelligence will have to be transduced to non-biological substrates

Do you want Necrons? Because this is how you get Necrons.