- cross-posted to:
- techtakes
- cross-posted to:
- techtakes
(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I think it’s Coefficient Giving (née Open Philanthropy). Yud has made negative comments about them in the past, especially after Moskovitz tried to distance themselves from rationalism.
EDIT: Citation.
I also thought of Open Philanthropy, but couldn’t remember the Eliezer post that best illustrated his resentment towards them. (In addition to the top-level post you’ve linked, I’ve seen various bitter lesswrong comments along the same lines).
He seems ticked off at Coefficient Giving, but are they “a giant rich organization that stole some of my ideas, ignored everything I said about what not to do, and are going around telling people I made them do it”? (Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions).
Yud has said he got bored with LessWrong, and he does not like Coefficient Giving, Anthropic, OpenAI, or the Zizians, so is he satisfied with any group that adores his ideas?
One of the many issues autodidacts face is that they never have to deal with undergrads sitting in a room with them for hours listening to them explain things in exhaustive detail and then still somehow spend their final writing assignment completely missing the goddamn point.
It builds character, I assume.
“a giant rich organization”: they claim to have directed over 7 billion in grants since 2014, so this actually seems like a fair comment?
“stole some of my ideas”: they’ve shown interest in AI stuff, including Eliezer’s ideas, they just have longer (but still pretty fantastical, like AGI by 2050) timelines for stuff like AGI and that influences their funding priorities in a way Eliezer disagrees with
“ignored everything I said about what not to do”: eh, Eliezer has said a lot of things, they probably didn’t follow his advice exactly
“and are going around telling people I made them do it”: I’ve seen a few people here and there in various rationalist-adjacent circles blame Eliezer for helping OpenAI network and get started and thereby kindle the very doom he warned about, so. It seems plausible some of them were connected to coefficient giving?
That sounds like the normal academic process, which Eliezer neither understands nor appreciates.
Yeah, him gradually losing interest in LessWrong in the mid 2010s created room for SSC to grow in popularity. Also, that would have been around the time it became apparent Eliezer had been very wrong about neural networks, so we missed the chance to see Eliezer actually have to overcome biases and admit he was wrong in a non-self-aggrandizing way. (Eliezer has admitted he was wrong before, but only in ways that made his next idea even more important, see his progression from nanotech to coding a seed AI in Lisp to solving AI safety).
Yeah, the group sex.
He’s just an intellectual coward, he didn’t even own up to the basilisk despite his whole decision theorist phase clearly being about trying to cook up a convincing cope for it.
Some of his fans think he is basically living in seclusion with frequent dates with his primary partner the therapist. He seems like he would be much happier living like that with the occasional venture out to see his fans. Most people learn that its enough that their spouse and their friends love them and they don’t need to be famous.
It’s really hard to say because Yud’s being unnecessarily cryptic. Also, I think the “going around telling people I made them do it” might be a reference to the Zizians, which is what he’s describing in the precending sentence. I am not aware that anyone from any rich organization has said anything like that about Yudkowsky, but who knows what they might be telling people behind the scenes.