It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.
So this exists: https://readscottalexander.com/stats/links
Link Stats
Across every post, these are the external websites Scott Alexander links to most often. “Links” counts every hyperlink; “Posts” counts how many distinct articles link there.
So far these are probably the clearest non-leaked emails indication of what the good doctor actually believes.
That’s a non-provably non-punchable face if I’ve ever seen one.
Also he seems to be the opposite of charismatic.
Yeah, I guess I’m splitting hairs, cult leader is a very open ended job description after all.
Scott is hilariously uninformed
Elsewhere he is comparing their orwelian chipset distribution control scheme to health inspectors making sure supermarkets don’t sell spoiled milk. He just says whatever as long as he thinks it’ll help convince more people than it drives away, and his fanbase goes along with it because they think that’s how he gets to be the normie whisperer.
This makes me feel there really is no telling what actual agenda the rationaltruists’ would enact if they ever get to dictate policy.
Siskind just posted a follow up to his coverage of ai2040, apparently he’s having a bit of a hard time selling his crowd on the really obvious totalitarian implications of instituting a global surveillance system to track and remotely disable chipsets to make sure rogue elements can’t secretly conjure the robot god prematurely.
It’s important too, chip registration is a big part of the ??? item in the to-do list, right before “China and US passionately french kiss, agree to pause AI research”
Enjoyed the writeup, thanks for gazing into the abyss!
This is a classic rationalist fallacy that we see repeated throughout the piece of assuming that ultimately if you express the argument properly everyone will agree on the right thing
This is complementary to their heterodoxy fetish, leading to fringe or outright bonkers but excruciatingly formalistic positions routinely sleight-of-handing themselves into prominence in the movement.
It’s fine for AIs to get better at using valid arguments and evidence to convince people of things for the right reasons. That kind of persuasion is asymmetric: it works much better when the argument pushes towards the truth.
That’s not how the postmodern condition works
That’s just rationalists believing that once you amass enough IQ/Mana points you unlock the mind control spell. Basically if you aren’t buying what the great-men-of-history-du-jour are selling the AIs will cast domination on you for the greater good.
Eliezer Yudkowsky - who totally isn’t a cult leader
He is definitely a cult enabler and a huge cult beneficiary, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen evidence he could lead shit to fuck.
Diversity and inclusion is suddenly great if it involves fascists doing entryism.
the great potential of psychological change
Which is a euphemism for success in brainwashing.
Also, having dismissed the entirety of psychology and psychiatry as unscientific, they naturally landed ass first on Jung and Dion Fortune as major points of reference.
If your property is outside the solar system, you will need to either go into cryosleep or upload yourself to a computer to survive the journey.
Reminder that rationalists have developed a completely mysticalised conception of brain uploading that’s very functionally similar with old timey souls, mostly so they don’t need to deal with the SOMA problem of every instance of uploaded consciousness being a completely separate self-actualised entity.
Like how exactly is a digital impression of my personality being shipped to alpha centauri to inspect my holdings affect my personal experience? How is it supposed to be interchangeable with using some other made up technology that takes me there in person?
See, it works like this, no one knows what consciousness is, but it’s probably a mathematical object, and if your current conscious self is the same as the conscious self that will be inhabiting your body next friday, and also if a supreme being wants to torture you after you are dead…
Another OpenAI attempt at monetization has died an ignoble death.
OpenAI is already shutting down ChatGPT Atlas, its browser that could do tasks for you on your behalf, less than a year after launching it. Atlas was announced in October.
Nothing in my interactions with humanities types indicates they would be in a better position to handle either the educational slopnami or a slopped out job market.
As far as educational systems go, “human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning” were always left to natural selection instead of being actively pursued. Taking a philosophy course on the history of logic and ethics isn’t the same as having any.
The part about tasteless AI enthusiasts needing to be housetrained to not post slop on the forums because that’s borderline antisocial was also cool.
I like how Yud’s rogue data center air raid task force is gradually becoming another weird rationalist accepted truth.
There’s a corresponding siskind post also called something something plan A, I skimmed until the part where the US and China take de facto control of chip infrasrtucture and distribution (saying “nationalise” is haram for free market types), basically imagine having to write a letter to the government to formally justify upgrading your computer, and that’s all the AI fanfiction I can tolerate without ruining my breakfast.
Also clanker crankers appropriating the term ‘Golden Path’ from Dune is just distasteful.
Being each other’s therapists
That’s probably a euphemism for levs subjecting each other to hours long so-called debugging sessions, i.e. rationalist flavored scientology auditing.
More mundane cult stuff was also taking place, like keeping everyone constantly exhausted from continuous busywork, while also guilt-tripping them out of having free time and non-cult related interests in general. This seems to be a refrain in other witness testimonies that’s absent in Laurenson’s telling, unless she threw a passing mention somewhere that I didn’t catch.
What it boils down is that it was an actual honest to god cult that was getting tons of EA money to develop a self help system that would turn people into Elon Musks (their go-to example for an apex human). They also came up with a stablecoin and a cryptofash magazine that are both still around, and did a lot of behind the scenes work for EA at large, like getting the ball rolling with organising EA conferences around the world.
I think the reason all these exposés are so tiresome to read is because they tend to focus on the boring cult stuff instead of the bonkers rationalist lore (like how Leverage people were trying to cast HPMOR spells on each other), or the long shadow it casts on our current cultural moment due to its deep influence in the EA/rat subculture, like how Amodei though not a member seemed to be a regular there, Grimes is a contributor to Palladium, ex-levs have launched elite coaching companies that presumably implement lev-tech and so on.
Additionally, in true rationalist fashion nobody was punished and nothing was learned, so the people responsible are still around, still getting Thiel money to do much of the same stuff with probably the same issues, just keeping a lower profile this time.
edit: this is much shorter https://www.todayintabs.com/p/over-leveraged thanks @nfultz@awful.systems
Cool short read, I’d recommend it too.
One notable additional piece of information pointed out here is that after the NYMag thing fell apart she got a $35K grant from what turns out to be a sort of rationalist slush fund to finish the piece. The original contract was for $9500 so it’s possible she came out quite ahead on the deal.
Supposedly a bunch of it went to things that would normally be handled on the publisher’s end, like professional fact checking, but having now read the piece I don’t really know what that would look like. She has Dear Leader Geoff Anders on the record like 16 times (k5 rusty counted) and is consistently pretty uncritical of his claims, AND she’s best friends with most of the “ex”-levs named in the article, like did it take thirty thousand dollars to find out that guru David’s origin story is unsubstantiable bollocks and to triple-double check Zoe’s claim of psychotic breaks? (verdict: when rationalists in a high-control environment get PTSD from seeing and hearing things that aren’t there it’s not a psychotic break but some secret other thing).
Also there’s a bunch of most-important-philosopher-in-history Geoff’s original writings and they are predictably bad and ridiculous:
(article has link to the entire word doc)
Zoe Cursi’s account seems like a far more sober examination of the dynamic
I’ve been reading Zoe’s account and she gives a radically different picture of especially Geoff, just by mentioning stuff he was saying and doing while Leverage was active, instead of focusing on his later heartfelt regrets.
Geoff estimated that there were roughly 10 “super weapons” or “super theories.” He said we already had 1–2, one being we had solved philosophy (but not completely, he admitted — all he had left to do was prove that time exists and maybe a few other details, was what I remember him saying). The second super weapon/theory was that we had the One True Theory of Psychology (this phrase was used regularly by many Leverage members).
Uhhhhhhhhhhh
Within a few months of joining, a supervisor I trusted who had recruited me confided in me privately, “I think there’s good reason to believe Geoff is the best philosopher who’s ever lived, better than Kant. I think his existence on earth right now is an historical event.”
Hell yeah.
Are these agents in the room with us now?
How can all this possibly be enforceable.