A pre-emptive warning for commenters: if you post both here and in
the linked thread, you may be banned immediately. In general, if you
post on SSC, you may be banned immediately. This is Sneer Club.
“If he’s not on Rogan in 6 months I’ll eat my sock”
“Why the f— is he wearing a fedora? Is he intentionally trying to
make his arguments seem invalid? Is this guy actually a pro-AI mole to
make anti-AI positions seem stupid? Because while I have not yet
listened to his arguments, I must say he’s already pissed in the well as
far as first impressions go.”
imagine being on r/ssc and not knowing Yud. (E: also censoring the
word fuck, a thing I always associate with conservatives)
E: omg,
is he wearing a fedora due to
Grimes?, that means. Dgerard is to blame for the fedora!
>Is this guy actually a pro-AI mole to make anti-AI positions seem stupid?
lol I think this conspiracy theory has been suggested here too. He's so absurd that nobody feels totally sure that Yudkowsky isn't some kind of double agent or saboteur.
Yeah I was thinking about just that. Yudkowsky being at all useful for AI risk presumes that AI risk works exactly like it does in science fiction and its prevention looks like Yudkowsky's self importance fantasies.
Suppose the AI risk doesn't work perfectly like this, suppose say it starts with the AI ineptly fucking around with the internet trying to map its "internal state" (and crashing various vital services in the process). Like some software that they never heard of, that I won't mention by name, that's used for security right now (and which is completely harmless because it's not that great).
Then the data centers need red "emergency stop" buttons, and software engineers need some sort of stop work authority, you know, normal industrial accident prevention kind of shit.
Does any of that repackaging of scifi as the concerns help with that? Not even a little bit.
Comes year 2050 or 2060 or whatever, there's been decades of increasingly shrill shit from these guys, lesswrong is better known as a cult that poisoned themselves to death perhaps, maybe even terrorism. In the off chance that some threat will materialize, it'll be impossible to deal with, because of all these people. And they aren't even doing it because they're concerned but mistaken! It's pure selfish grifting, plus pure selfish fantasizing about how they are so important.
jfc that Yudkowsky tweet is the dumbest thing of all the dumbest things he ever said. The reason fedora-wearing neckbeards are cringe is because they try to seem cool without putting effort and “earning” it. It's seen as a cheap trick, a lack of genuineness, it communicates laziness and lack of self-awareness, which are off-putting qualities.
You absolutely can pull a fedora off, but you need to actually have a unique style.
When you were partying
Yud studied The Hat
When you were having premarital sex
Yud mastered The Math Pets
While you wasted your days at the gym in pursuit of vanity
Yud cultivated The Sequences
And now that the world is on fire and the AGI are at the gate you have the audacity to come to Yud for help?
It also communicates "I have no friends who are willing and able to tell me which hat might look good on me" and "I have no idea how to coordinate a hat with the rest of my outfit". Not everything goes with a T-shirt.
[an actual good SSC comment explaining this exact phenomenon](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/y0nw9t/what_was_it_about_fedoras_and_flame_shirts/irv8yii/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3)
He is pulling it off! Look at all the comments from people about how he should stick to AI theory etc etc.
He’s *playing* a tech neckbeard.
Hiring an acting coach lmao. The *role* is a tech neckbeard in a fedora.
Because when these idiots see that they assume he knows something about AI.
i [used to have](http://www.reddragdiva.co.uk/acgpix/010420/00a-davidruby.jpg) an actual fedora (not a frickin trilby), best prop ever for amusing the sxxy deth chyx
There are some, uh, more favorable interpretations too though. E.g.
[It's just amazing how utterly dominant eliezer is even compared to this guy who is much smarter (or allows himself to be much smarter) than lex. Scott is pretty scary in the same way but this is just on another level IMO.](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/12e68my/comment/jfbxq0s/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Amazing that some people interpret interpersonal abrasiveness as a sign of intellectual strength.
* [So between regretting the fedora or - what to me feels his more unfortunate mistake as a spokesperson - assuming your audience takes the same premises for granted as you already do](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/12e68my/comment/jfc6j0w/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
* [I feel his writing was phrasing things in ways that make it sound smart and complicated but the essence of what it tried to communicate was often rather plain. It made it less accessible to me at least to consume that.](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/12e68my/comment/jfaxxyp/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
* [It was too much in-group jargon for things that normies already had words for, for my tastes. It was like reading a philosophical movement that took SV startup company cults and turned them into a science-themed ai doom club.](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/12e68my/comment/jfc3tfr/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
* [If you ask him to plainly state his argument without using jargon he made up (he’s incapable of this, that’s the whole ruse), it’s either completely banal science fiction trope or a tangential philosophy proposition someone else created.](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/12e68my/comment/jfbq1dn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
* [Could he actually pass a college calculus test? I’m honestly not sure. He just likes referencing things like an L2 norm regularization because it sounds complicated but has he actually done ML?](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/12e68my/comment/jfafgcz/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
* Does he also realize this isn’t complicated and referencing the regularization method had nothing to do with the point he was making other than attempting to make himself look smarter than his interlocutor?
* [Every time someone asks for an explanation of why AGI=doom, it's just "you do not understand instrumental convergence and the orthogonality thesis". (Because it's a rubbish argument that relies on a massively speculative chain of inferences and a sprinkle of sci-fi magic.)](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/12e68my/comment/jfca9br/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Wow, these comments are scathing for ssc. It’s like the illusion of
him as a super genius just suddenly shattered for some of them.
It’s pretty funny though that they all seem to be in agreement that
he’s correct about the actual issue lol. Guys, just take one more step…
maybe him not being as smart as you thought means he’s not actually
correct about this?
The funny thing about Yudkowsky is that in the hypothetical (which a lot of these folks believe) where the AI could be a threat, having some idiot who has zero understanding of AI go viral, over a fucking *chatbot*, would of course be highly detrimental to the world's ability to deal with an AI threat should such threat actually present itself in the future.
If only there was a childhood parable about some boy who had fun yelling about a threat that in principle might be real but wasn't real at the time.
Suppose they keep on going like this, and then 10, 20 years down the line, there's some AI that isn't a fucking language model at all, which actually has its own goal built into it, and it starts threateningly probing around (I dunno, hacks the drivers, overclocks itself, the algorithm not quite differentiating between clock speeds going up and the world slowing down), and then the management needs to be convinced that there's some self destructive potential here since you got an algorithm that's just too open ended about how it searches for solutions. Presumably even the future would have a poorly secured internet that we rely on for daily life and infrastructure, which would not appreciate being subject to an unscheduled fuzzing test courtesy of some "AI" that doesn't know what the fuck its doing it's just trying to I dunno characterize all possible responses of the system.
In the unlikely event of such happening, it'd be nice if we wouldn't have decades long history of idiots freaking out over chatbots and text compression/interpolation algorithms which do not in any way shape or form operate like the above scifi hypothetical.
I don’t think anyone is sneering at what yud is saying about anything
- they just think he’s a freaky fedora tech bro that’s not good at
communicating their fear of robots and love of eugenics
Also posters on the SSC sub can eat shit lol sorry
Ssc posters are like the nerds that were so obsessed with their own intelligence that absolutely no one liked them.
They were weird and had dumbass opinions that were “logical”
Like I had a dude in my physics class (in college actually) that spent about 5 min arguing with the professor one day that astronomy was useless lol.
not surprising but interesting to see that by doing so much outreach into the alt-right, Scoot Salamander has recruited a whole new wave of relative normies into the fold whose idea of intellectual discourse is even more esthetic than the OG
[r/justneckbeardthings - "Not enough people have seen this old video with Jordan Peterson"](https://www.reddit.com/r/justneckbeardthings/comments/mdmlm0/not_enough_people_have_seen_this_old_video_with/)
Women, being inchoate sparks of the primal Tiamat chaos dragon at the center of infinity, are simply incapable of accepting the ordered majesty of male fedora wearing.
A pre-emptive warning for commenters: if you post both here and in the linked thread, you may be banned immediately. In general, if you post on SSC, you may be banned immediately. This is Sneer Club.
“If he’s not on Rogan in 6 months I’ll eat my sock”
“Why the f— is he wearing a fedora? Is he intentionally trying to make his arguments seem invalid? Is this guy actually a pro-AI mole to make anti-AI positions seem stupid? Because while I have not yet listened to his arguments, I must say he’s already pissed in the well as far as first impressions go.”
imagine being on r/ssc and not knowing Yud. (E: also censoring the word fuck, a thing I always associate with conservatives)
E: omg, is he wearing a fedora due to Grimes?, that means. Dgerard is to blame for the fedora!
The crossover episode nobody ever thought would happen.
Some fun excerpts:
Is this guy actually a pro-AI mole to make anti-AI positions seem stupid?
For someone so into rationality, I’m surprised that this instrumental side of rationality wasn’t calculated. A couple months of PR training or with an acting coach and a wardrobe makeover is hardly a “sacrifice”.
He’s about as bad for the AI safety movement as that antiwork mod was for Antiwork.
He debates like a snotty, condescending high school debate team kid in an argument with his mom
Fucking pessimistic nerd, all complaints zero solutions
Wow, these comments are scathing for ssc. It’s like the illusion of him as a super genius just suddenly shattered for some of them.
It’s pretty funny though that they all seem to be in agreement that he’s correct about the actual issue lol. Guys, just take one more step… maybe him not being as smart as you thought means he’s not actually correct about this?
I don’t think anyone is sneering at what yud is saying about anything - they just think he’s a freaky fedora tech bro that’s not good at communicating their fear of robots and love of eugenics
Also posters on the SSC sub can eat shit lol sorry
Jfc he’s like a mix between Jordan Peterson and a failing upward overconfident pick up artist from the 90s
The emperor wears
no clothesa fedora