God that was bleak - I thought Nick was bad in his guest spots on Alex’s show (seen via Knowledge Fight, of course) but apparently you really do need at least two layers of insulating podcast to avoid suffering critical psychic damage from that level of hatred. I appreciated the acknowledgement that in order to feel at all okay playing clips you needed to sanewash him a little bit. I’m pretty sure that JorDan do the same thing with Alex and don’t acknowledge it nearly often enough.

I also feel like some of Nick’s schtick is about trying to position himself and maintain his position in the right wing grifter bigot-industrial complex. Like, the open disdain for his audience and presenting his actually pretty straightforward feelings on the halftime show as somehow brave and iconoclastic is also about differentiating himself and making his audience feel superior to Alex, Tucker, Candace, etc. In that sense the open disdain for the audience serves another purpose in terms of reinforcing heirarchy. Look at how great it feels for me to be better than you. And even you are better than the chuds, who are better than the racialized other.

It’s especially strange because becoming less prone to bias and developing a clear understanding of what serves your interest is so much of the pitch for Rationalism as a community/ideology/project. Like, here’s unbearably long essays that promise to help cultivate the superpower of seeing the world clearly and acting in it effectively, now if you acknowledge that nobody outside this small set of group homes is actually doing that you’ll be shunned. And that’s not getting into how easily exploitable those assumptions of good faith are by bad-faith actors. It comes back to that quote from Scott that has stuck in my head apparently more than it did his: if you build a community based on the principle that you will absolutely never have a witch hunt you will end up living among approximately seven principles civil libertarians and eleven million goddamn witches, and this is true even if you’re right that witch hunts are bad.

That is what happens when your mode of analysis is closer to erotic Harry Potter fan fiction (which is indeed the medium in which Yudkowsky has delivered some of his prognostications)

I was going to throw a point of order about not all fanfic being erotic, but given how they fetishize “intelligence” and “rationality” I can’t be sure that they don’t get off on that slog.

There’s gotta be a pithy way of talking about this. I propose “Phantom Funds” - money that investors and analysts expect to be there that ends up not existing when the cards are turned over.

Why yes this does largely boil down to fraud but without the legal consequences.

Is it though? Like, theres missing detail about the request to publish their talking points in addition to the original reporting, but it’s a pretty fair description of the original reporting at issue. That’s pretty solid as far as headlines go.

It’s such a powerful dodge. What you’re actually saying is “we’re going to keep doing exactly what we’re doing and see if that fixes it” because the nature of innovation is such that it’s actually pretty complex to “invest” in, and very rarely has the direct application you need. Like, you don’t get penicillin by investing in pharmaceutical innovation you get it by paying some nerd to fuck off to the jungle for a few years and hope that his special interest ends up being useful. Bell Labs was able to basically invent the modern world by funneling the profits of their massive monopolistic empire into a bunch of nerds poking stuff with probes to see what happens elementary physics and materials science research that didn’t have a definite objective.

I’ve heard worse ideas. It’s funny; I would have expected the people who were in tech because it looked like the best bet for a relatively stable in-demand career would have been the ones who were crap at it relative to the folks doing it purely for love of the game. But it turns out that having something else going on is closely linked to touching grass in ways that make you harder to lure into the cult.

Yeah, I probably should have included a warning about incoming psychic damage on that link. Sorry.

Although highlighting the phrase “intelligence displacement” construct dies illuminate that the whole case they make is built on the same foundations as that other Rat fixation: eugenics and race science! Like, I’m not saying the author is definitely a eugenicist breaking out the skull calipers, but their argument is based on the same idea of what “intelligence” is in the first place. It’s a distinct commodity that is produced or contained in certain minds and is the ultimate source of the value that they create. If you’re a “knowledge worker” you don’t provide a specific perspective, experience, expertise, or even knowledge, you just plug your intelligence into the organization like connecting a new processor bank to a server farm. Because it’s disconnected from a person’s individuality and subjectivity we can model it effectively as a commodity and look to optimize its production, either by automating away the squishy human element with ai or by increasing the productivity of current methods by optimizing for the white “right” kind of person.

I can see a situation where his bombing campaign fails to achieve the objective, a special operation like in Venezuela fails, and Hegseth or Rubio or someone (Putin? Netanyahu? Kanye?) convinces him to invade long enough that inertia carries it forward.

Of course, anything we do is going to take us to the same result we’ve seen with all these interventions. The US military and whatever allies join us will be, broadly speaking, terrifyingly effective at achieving their tactical and operational goals, but because the overall strategic plan is somewhere between non-existent and backwards those successes will fail to actually do anything. We will inflict and suffer that much more death and devastation, and all it will accomplish is making the world less stable and less safe for everyone.

Link to the Zitron sneer

It’s a pretty wild read. This isn’t a rational doomer screed about the annihilation of life on earth, though it similarly bounces radically between being overly vague and overly specific to create the appearance of analyjsis and consideration and confuse when it’s claiming a fact with when it’s extrapolating a trend (hint: it’s almost always the latter and the trend may or may not be real). Instead it’s written firmly for the McKinsey set to convince them their bets on the AI future weren’t dumb and actually it’s the naysayers who will lose their jobs and homes. Also David might need to update his site because there’s an offhanded reverse-pivot back into crypto.

I think there’s definitely something to that. It seems like it rhymes with my own interpretation, at least. I did 7 years of support for backend network infrastructure (load balancing, SSL optimization, etc) and one thing that I consistently found was that the way the applications and tech services at most of these companies were structured everything was treated like a complete black box by everyone who wasn’t specifically working on that element. Like, I would find myself trying to trace a problem through the application flow and every other request was essentially being handled by a completely different team and the people I was talking to didn’t even understand the questions I was asking. That level of siloed work is somewhat necessary given the sheer complexity of the systems and infrastructure that modern applications rely on, but also seems to cultivate a certain level of incuriousity. What’s happening inside those black boxes doesn’t even get considered because it doesn’t matter; it’s somebody else’s problem right up until it suddenly isn’t. The current crop of confabulation machines take this tendency to a kind of logical extreme where nobody can adequately look into the black box to understand what it’s doing, and that will similarly be perfectly fine up until it very much isn’t and there won’t be anyone to call to figure out how to fix it.

From the outside? I’m gonna be honest and say I don’t know that you do.

A computer that both does what you don’t tell it to do and doesn’t do what you tell it to do. I didn’t think we could do it but - I tell you what - it’s been done.

While there is absolutely a large segment of the Iranian population that isn’t satisfied with the theocratic dictatorship, the same could also have been said of Iraqis who didn’t like the baathists or Afghans who hate the Taliban. Once you start dropping bombs on these people - to say nothing of the violence that necessarily follows a boots-on-the-ground occupation - you’re going to start driving them into the waiting arms of factions that oppose you. Especially because the current administration has shown a less-than-comforting attitude towards civilian casualties, war crimes, and genocide.

Let’s also not lose sight of the role that US and British intervention played in creating the circumstances for the Ayatollahs to come to power in the first place. The Shah wasn’t exactly any kinder to the Iranian people and was a foreign puppet to boot.

Harris’s take only works if, like him, you assume that the fundamental problem with Iran is Islam, rather than actually bothering to look at the history of the country and how it became what it is today. Because in that case once you get the ayatollah out of the way and introduce the light of Science! to the people they’ll immediately become rational civil libertarians and believe exactly the same things he does. The Irreligious Right is exactly as reductive and stupid as the worst evangelicals, but can better use the language of STEM to hide it.

You know, it would be interesting if the “AI blog” keeps illustrating his descent into madness and hallucinates that he like leaves his partner for “her” etc. because that’s how these stories go even in the hopeful case that he recovers before doing any more serious damage.

The Atlantic has a take on this too. Sam Altman is Losing His Grip on Humanity.

Somehow I had missed the boat on Donald Boat and now I have so many questions. Absolutely wild read.

It does seem more and more like the most relevant parallel is radicalization, particularly the concerns about algorithmic radicalization and stochastic terrorism we got back in the early 2010s. The machine system feeds the user back what they’ve put into it, validating that input and pushing the user into more extreme positions. When it happens through a community (“classical” radicalization) the fact that the community needs to persist serves to mediate or at least slow the destructive elements of the spiral. Your Nazi book club/street gang stops meeting if people go to prison, lose their jobs/homes, etc. Online communities reduce this friction and allow the spiral to accelerate to a great degree, but the group can still start eating itself if it accepts the wrong level of unhingedness and toxicity.

Algorithmic/Stochastic radicalization, where the user moves through a succession of media environments and (usually online) communities can allow things to accelerate even more because the user no longer actually has to maintain long-term social ties to remain engaged in the spiral. Rather than increasingly-destructive ideas echoing around a social space, the user can chase them across communities, with naive content algorithms providing a solid nudge in the right direction (pun wholly intended). However, the spiral is still dependent on the ability of the relevant media figures and communities to persist, even if the individual users no longer need a persistent connection to them. If the market doesn’t have space for a creator then their role in that network drops. Getting violent or destructive content deplatformed also helps slow down the spiral by adding friction back into the process of jumping to the next level of radicalism. Past a certain point you find yourself back in the world of needing to maintain a community because the ideology has gotten so rotten that there’s no profit in entertaining it. Past that you end up back with in-person or otherwise high-friction high-trist groups because the openness of a low-friction online community compromises internal security in ways that can’t be allowed when you’re literally doing crimes.

Chatbot-induced radicalization combines the extreme low friction of online interactions with an extremely high value validation and a complete lack of social restrictions. You don’t have to retain a baseline connection to reality to maintain a relationship with a chatbot. You don’t have to make connections and put in the work to find a chatbot to validate your worst impulses the same way that you do to join a militia. Your central cause doesn’t have to be something to motivate anyone outside yourself. Your local KKK chapter probable has more on its agenda than hating your ex-wife (not that it doesn’t make the list, of course), but your chatbot instance will happily give you an even stronger echo chamber no matter how narrow the focus. And unlike the stigma associated with the kinds of hate groups and cults that would normally fill this role for people, the entire weight if the trillion-dollar tech industry seems to be invested in promoting these chatbots as reliable and trustworthy – even more so than the experts and institutions that are supposed to provide an anchor to counter this kind of descent. That’s the most dangerous part of our Very Good Friends’ projects on the matter. That’s how you get relatively normal people to act like they’re talking to God and He’,s telling them everything they don’t want to admit they want to hear.

Fixed-position office chairs? What goddamn vibe-brained rat-pilled techbro started convincing people to forgo the single best redeeming factor of office chairs?

Since the advent of ChatGPT in November 2022, the number of monthly submissions to the arXiv preprint repository has risen by more than 50% and the number of articles rejected each month has risen fivefold to more than 2,400 (see ‘Rejection rates climb’).

If I’m interpreting this right then the growth in the number of rejections is wildly outpacing the growth in submissions, which means not only are we getting a tsunami of slop but that the bad papers are actively chasing away good ones.