I wouldn’t know anything about the thread, as it’s impossible for me to read without a twitter account. Yet another reason why the site is trash.

But by all means, go on generating content for a bigoted fascist who will use everything you write to increase engagement with his platform and give it undeserved credibility and $$$.

(And no, I won’t block you.)

Sorry for the off-topic rant, but WTF is Emile Torres doing on twitter? Anytime I see someone creating content for that Nazi hellsite, I start looking at them differently.

I’d really like to know the back story on this interview too. I realize weirdness isn’t exactly distinctive when it comes to rationalists, but Zack is in a league of his own.

I’ve been using DigitalOcean for years as a personal VPS box, and I’ve had no complaints. Not sure how well they’d scale (in terms of cost) for a site like this.

Anthropic’s Claude confidently and incorrectly diagnoses brain cancer based on an MRI.

Strange man posts strange thing.

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This linked interview of Brian Merchant by Adam Conover is great. I highly recommend watching the whole thing.

For example, here is Adam, decribing the actual reasons why striking writers were concerned about AI, followed by Brian explaining how Sam Altman et al hype up the existential risk they themselves claim to be creating, just so they can sell themselves as the solution. Lots of really edifying stuff in this interview.

She really is insufferable. If you’ve ever listened to her Pivot podcast (do not advise), you’ll be confronted by the superficiality and banality of her hot takes. Of couse this assumes you’re able to penetrate the word salad she regularly uses to convey any point she’s trying to make. She is not a good verbal communicator.

Her co-host, “Professor” [*] Scott Galloway, isn’t much better. While more verbally articulate, his dick joke-laden takes are often even more insufferable than Swisher’s. I’m pretty sure Kara sourced from him her opinion that you should “use AI or be run over by progress”; it’s one of his most frequent hot takes. He’s also one of the biggest tech hype maniacs, so of course he’s bought a ticket on the AI hype express. Before the latest AI boom, he was a crypto booster, although he’s totally memory-holed that phase of his life now that the crypto hype train has run off a cliff.

[*] I put professor in quotes, because he’s one of those people who insist on using a title that is equal parts misleading and pretentious. He doesn’t have a doctorate in anything, and while he’s technically employed by NYU’s business school, he’s a non-tenured “clinical professor”, which is pretty much the same as an adjunct. Nothing against adjunct professors, but most adjuncts I’ve known don’t go around insisting that you call them “professor” in every social interaction. It’s kind of like when Ph.D.s insist you call them “doctor”.

I wonder what percentage of fraudulent AI-generated papers would be discovered simply by searching for sentences that begin with “Certainly, …”

I’m probably not saying anything you didn’t already know, but Vox’s “Future Perfect” section, of which this article is a part, was explicitly founded as a booster for effective altruism. They’ve also memory-holed the fact that it was funded in large part by FTX. Anything by one of its regular writers (particularly Dylan Matthews or Kelsey Piper) should be mentally filed into the rationalist propaganda folder. I mean, this article throws in an off-hand remark by Scott Alexander as if it’s just taken for granted that he’s some kind of visionary genius.

Non-paywall link.

You know the doom cult is having an effect when it starts popping up in previously unlikely places. Last month the socialist magazine Jacobin had an extremely long cover feature on AI doom, which it bought into completely. The author is an effective altruist who interviewed and took seriously people like Katja Grace, Dan Hendrycks and Eliezer Yudkosky.

I used to be more sanguine about people’s ability to see through this bullshit, but eschatological nonsense seems to tickle something fundamentally flawed in the human psyche. This LessWrong post is a perfect example.

Eats the same bland meal every day of his life. Takes an ungodly number of pills every morning. Uses his son as his own personal blood boy. Has given himself a physical appearance that can only be described as “uncanny valley”.

I’ll never understand the extremes some of these tech bros will go to deny the inevitability of death.

Happy Valentine’s Day everybody!

It’s kind of fascinating how rotten the “New Atheist” movement turned out to be. Whether it’s Richard Dawkins revealing his inner racist-misogynist, Michael Shermer being rapey AF, or James Lindsay turning into a Christofascist, the movement seems to have spawned and/or revealed a lot of really problematic people. I guess it’s no surprise that the rationalist scene had such a membership overlap.

I haven’t read Scott’s comment sections in a long time, so I don’t know if they’re all this bad, but that one is a total dumpster fire. It’s a hive of Trump stans, anti-woke circle-jerkers, scientific racists, and self-proclaimed Motte posters. It certainly reveals the present demographic and political profile of his audience.

Scott has always tried to hide his reactionary beliefs, but I’ve noticed he’s letting the mask slip a bit more lately.

It’s absolutely bizarre that Scott labels Rufo a journalist. Rufo is a right-wing activist who has only ever worked for right-wing think tanks. He first came to my attention as a part of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based “think tank” best known for promoting creationism.

Then again, Scott has previously said that he’s impressed by the arguments of creationist Michael Behe, another Discovery Institute lackey.

Glowfic feels like a writing format designed in a lab to be the perfect channel for Eliezer’s literary diarrhea.

My P(harrassment scandal) for EA is 0.98.