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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Here is the document that mentions EA as risk factor, some quotes below

    Fourth, the defendant may feel compelled to do this fraud again, or a version of it, based on his use of idiosyncratic, and ultimately for him pernicious, beliefs around altruism, utilitarianism, and expected value to place himself outside of the bounds of the law that apply to others, and to justify unlawful, selfish, and harmful conduct. Time and time again the defendant has expressed that his preferred path is the one that maximizes his version of societal value, even if imposes substantial short term harm or carries substantial risks to others… In this case, the defendant’s professed philosophy has served to rationalize a dangerous brand of megalomania—one where the defendant is convinced that he is above the law and the rules of the road that apply to everyone else, who he necessarily deems inferior in brainpower, skill, and analytical reasoning.








  • SEO will pillage the commons.

    My personal conspiracy theory (not sure if I actually believe this yet):

    The idea that people would use generative AI to make SEO easier (and thus make search engine results worse) was not an unfortunate side effect of generative AI, it was the entire purpose. It’s no coincidence that OpenAI teamed up with Google’s biggest rival in search engines; we’re now seeing an arms race between tech giants using spambot generators to overwhelm the enemy’s filters.

    The decision to make chatGPT public was not about concern for openness (if it was they would have made the earlier versions of GPT public too), it’s more that they had a business partner lined up and Google search had become enshittified enough that they thought they could pull off a successful “disruption”.










  • Here’s the old sneerclub thread about the leaked emails linking Scott Alexander to the far right

    Scott Alexander’s review of Seeing Like A State is here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/

    The review is mostly positive, but then it also has passages like this:

    Well, for one thing, [James C.] Scott basically admits to stacking the dice against High Modernism and legibility. He admits that the organic livable cities of old had life expectancies in the forties because nobody got any light or fresh air and they were all packed together with no sewers and so everyone just died of cholera. He admits that at some point agricultural productivity multiplied by like a thousand times and the Green Revolution saved millions of lives and all that, and probably that has something to do with scientific farming methods and rectangular grids. He admits that it’s pretty convenient having a unit of measurement that local lords can’t change whenever they feel like it. Even modern timber farms seem pretty successful. After all those admissions, it’s kind of hard to see what’s left of his case.

    and

    Professors of social science think [check cashing] shops are evil because they charge the poor higher rates, so they should be regulated away so that poor people don’t foolishly shoot themselves in the foot by going to them. But on closer inspection, they offer a better deal for the poor than banks do, for complicated reasons that aren’t visible just by comparing the raw numbers. Poor people’s understanding of this seems a lot like the metis that helps them understand local agriculture. And progressives’ desire to shift control to the big banks seems a lot like the High Modernists’ desire to shift everything to a few big farms. Maybe this is a point in favor of something like libertarianism?