This totally true anecdote features a friend who "can't recall the names of his parents [but] remember[s] the one thing he'd be safer forgetting."

Discussion on AI starts at about 17mins. The Bas(ilisk) drop happens at 20:30. Sorry if ads mess up my time stamps. I think this is the second time it’s come up on the show.

Source Tweet

@ESYudkowsky: Remember when you were a kid and thought you might have psychic powers, so you dealt yourself face-down playing cards and tried to guess whether they were red or black, and recorded your accuracy rate over several batches of tries?

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And then remember how you had absolutely no idea to do stats at that age, so you stayed confused for a while longer?

Apologies for the usage of the japanese; but it is a very apt description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūnibyō,

really: https://archive.ph/p0jPI

Roko’s twitter is an absolutely reliable guide to how recently a woman with dyed hair and facial piercings kicked him in the nuts again

It will not surprise you at all to find that they protest just a tad too much.

See also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZjXtjRQaD2b4PAser/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning

I used to enjoy Ariely's books and others like him before I started reading better stuff. All that behavioural economics genre seems to be a good example of content that holds up as long as you don't read any more on the subject.

Ugh.

But even if some of Yudkowsky’s allies don’t entirely buy his regular predictions of AI doom, they argue his motives are altruistic and that for all his hyperbole, he’s worth hearing out.

Thought it worth sharing among so much very, very questionable material I've found in reading through the reference material of this book, I came across ths Blake Masters + Peter Thiel connection.

It's my obsession sneer because of how celebrated this god damn book is among the fight for the user UX community.

I’ve mostly been reading the material but need to back up and do an author background check for each one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200101054932/https://blakemasters.com/post/20582845717/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-2-notes-essay

There were five posts on r/sneerclub about our very good friends at Leverage Research and many interesting URLs linking off them.

• 04 Sep 2019: the rich sneering mines to be found by lifting the rock Leverage Research lives under, and the comments are amazing too (archive)
• EA forum (archive)
• a twitter thread of good bits (archive)
• 03 Oct 2019: shocked to see that white nationalist neoreactionary Jonah Bennett was in at Leverage Research. Must be coincidence. (archive) "So far Leverage’s greatest contribution to the EA / rationality movement was a genital herpes outbreak."
• Splinter News: Leaked Emails Show How White Nationalists Have Infiltrated Conservative Media (archive)
• this EA is sure that Bennett was just infiltrating the white nationalists! (archive) though he adds "I previously knew that Leverage has employed several neoreactionaries". In rationalism, an office with a pile of open fucking Nazis in it is just normal. Not everyone's a signed-up party member!
• 13 Oct 2021: First-Hand Account of the Leverage Cult (archive)
• Medium post (archive) by Zoe Curzi. "Many folks have reached out to me privately w/ their own stories about Leverage or Geoff. Some comments on facebook, twitter, Medium, and LessWrong have shared or implied further stories (& concerns about anonymity). So, here’s a place you can submit stories anonymously. It’ll be handled & vetted by Aella, who I trust." oh dear
• 26 Sep 2021: Leverage Research: shocked, shocked to discover that another LessWrong-associated rationalist group is actually a NXIVM-style sex cult (archive)
• LessWrong: Common knowledge about Leverage Research 1.0 (archive)
• Leverage had its own crypto shitcoin, Reserve Rights
• Geoff Anders of Leverage has been linked to another crypto thing that has been in the news lately, Arkham Intelligence (archive)
• 01 Jun 2023: "Serious" research from a "serious" research institute that reads like an SCP (archive) - just in case you thought Leverage wasn't comparable to Scientology.
• On Intention Research - Kerry Vaughan, Leverage Research, PDF (archive) - it's about using the forbidden knowledge you gain at Leverage to psychically hypnotise people into wanting to fuck you, though it doesn't come out and say so in those words

and here's the collected LessWrong on Leverage

Thanks for this, UN.

Occasionally you can find a good sneer on the orange site

this was last year when Aella was trying to do a survey of trans people for one of her darling little twitter poll writeups. I felt it was necessary to warn people off this shockingly awful person. Perhaps you will find it useful.

Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/davidgerard/status/1556391089124286467
Archive: https://archive.is/FZK1B

we actually declared an Aella moratorium on the old sneerclub because she just kept coming up with banger after banger

Sorry for Twitter link...

Last summer, he announced the Stanford AI Alignment group (SAIA) in a blog post with a diagram of a tree representing his plan. He’d recruit a broad group of students (the soil) and then “funnel” the most promising candidates (the roots) up through the pipeline (the trunk).

See, it's like marketing the idea, in a multilevel way

the new line from the rationalists to calling out their eugenic race science is to claim that doing so is "antisemitic dog whistles"

the claim is that calling out the rationalists' extensively documented race science and advocacy of eugenics is "blood libel"

got this in email from one who had previously posted racist abuse at twitter objectors to rationalist eugenics

[dude thought he could spew racist bile in public then email me in a civil tone to complain]

apparently Scoot has made this claim previously, not sure of a cite for this. EDIT: well, sort of in "Untitled"- that criticism of misogynistic nerds is antisemitic dog whistles

the rationalists have already been sending Emile Torres death threats - for the good of humanity you understand - so I am assuming this will be a new part of the justification for that

Emily M. Bender on the difference between academic research and bad fanfiction

hopefully this is alright with @dgerard@awful.systems, and I apologize for the clumsy format since we can’t pull posts directly until we’re federated (and even then lemmy doesn’t interact the best with masto posts), but absolutely everyone who hasn’t seen Scott’s emails yet (or like me somehow forgot how fucking bad they were) needs to, including yud playing interference so the rats don’t realize what Scott is

In the far-off days of August 2022, Yudkowsky said of his brainchild,

If you think you can point to an unnecessary sentence within it, go ahead and try. Having a long story isn't the same fundamental kind of issue as having an extra sentence.

To which MarxBroshevik replied,

The first two sentences have a weird contradiction:

Every inch of wall space is covered by a bookcase. Each bookcase has six shelves, going almost to the ceiling.

So is it "every inch", or are the bookshelves going "almost" to the ceiling? Can't be both.

I've not read further than the first paragraph so there's probably other mistakes in the book too. There's kind of other 'mistakes' even in the first paragraph, not logical mistakes as such, just as an editor I would have... questions.

And I elaborated:

I'm not one to complain about the passive voice every time I see it. Like all matters of style, it's a choice that depends upon the tone the author desires, the point the author wishes to emphasize, even the way a character would speak. ("Oh, his throat was cut," Holmes concurred, "but not by his own hand.") Here, it contributes to a staid feeling. It emphasizes the walls and the shelves, not the books. This is all wrong for a story that is supposed to be about the pleasures of learning, a story whose main character can't walk past a bookstore without going in. Moreover, the instigating conceit of the fanfic is that their love of learning was nurtured, rather than neglected. Imagine that character, their family, their family home, and step into their library. What do you see?

Books — every wall, books to the ceiling.

Bam, done.

This is the living-room of the house occupied by the eminent Professor Michael Verres-Evans,

Calling a character "the eminent Professor" feels uncomfortably Dan Brown.

and his wife, Mrs. Petunia Evans-Verres, and their adopted son, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres.

I hate the kid already.

And he said he wanted children, and that his first son would be named Dudley. And I thought to myself, what kind of parent names their child Dudley Dursley?

Congratulations, you've noticed the name in a children's book that was invented to sound stodgy and unpleasant. (In The Chocolate Factory of Rationality, a character asks "What kind of a name is 'Wonka' anyway?") And somehow you're trying to prove your cleverness and superiority over canon by mocking the name that was invented for children to mock. Of course, the Dursleys were also the start of Rowling using "physically unsightly by her standards" to indicate "morally evil", so joining in with that mockery feels ... It's aged badly, to be generous.

Also, is it just the people I know, or does having a name picked out for a child that far in advance seem a bit unusual? Is "Dudley" a name with history in his family — the father he honored but never really knew? His grandfather who died in the War? If you want to tell a grown-up story, where people aren't just named the way they are because those are names for children to laugh at, then you have to play by grown-up rules of characterization.

The whole stretch with Harry pointing out they can ask for a demonstration of magic is too long. Asking for proof is the obvious move, but it's presented as something only Harry is clever enough to think of, and as the end of a logic chain.

"Mum, your parents didn't have magic, did they?" [...] "Then no one in your family knew about magic when Lily got her letter. [...] If it's true, we can just get a Hogwarts professor here and see the magic for ourselves, and Dad will admit that it's true. And if not, then Mum will admit that it's false. That's what the experimental method is for, so that we don't have to resolve things just by arguing."

Jesus, this kid goes around with L's theme from Death Note playing in his head whenever he pours a bowl of breakfast crunchies.

Always Harry had been encouraged to study whatever caught his attention, bought all the books that caught his fancy, sponsored in whatever maths or science competitions he entered. He was given anything reasonable that he wanted, except, maybe, the slightest shred of respect.

Oh, sod off, you entitled little twit; the chip on your shoulder is bigger than you are. Your parents buy you college textbooks on physics instead of coloring books about rocketships, and you think you don't get respect? Because your adoptive father is incredulous about the existence of, let me check my notes here, literal magic? You know, the thing which would upend the body of known science, as you will yourself expound at great length.

"Mum," Harry said. "If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Wesley Crusher would shove this kid into a locker.