SneerClub

For thursday's sentencing the us government indicated they would be happy with a 40-50 prison sentence, and in the list of reasons they cite there's this gem:

4. Bankman-Fried's effective altruism and own statements about risk suggest he would be likely to commit another fraud if he determined it had high enough "expected value". They point to Caroline Ellison's testimony in which she said that Bankman-Fried had expressed to her that he would "be happy to flip a coin, if it came up tails and the world was destroyed, as long as if it came up heads the world would be like more than twice as good". They also point to Bankman-Fried's "own 'calculations'" described in his sentencing memo, in which he says his life now has negative expected value. "Such a calculus will inevitably lead him to trying again," they write.

Turns out making it a point of pride that you have the morality of an anime villain does not endear you to prosecutors, who knew.

Bonus: SBF's lawyers' list of assertions for asking for a shorter sentence includes this hilarious bit reasoning:

They argue that Bankman-Fried would not reoffend, for reasons including that "he would sooner suffer than bring disrepute to any philanthropic movement."

"Walt Bismarck," a neoreactionary/alt-right blogger, decided to live by his beliefs and move from the liberal hellhole of Arizona to the midwest:

In 2018 I moved from a racially diverse swing state in the Sun Belt to a homogenous red state up in corn country. This decision was largely motivated by politics—I was looking to retreat to an imagined hyperborea free of crime and degeneracy where my volk had political autonomy.

The particular delight here is the section "Reason #3 - White people are no longer my most important ingroup".

It turns out they don't like him, they don't like his ideas, and the white womenfolk don't take to him. The frauleins prefer "stoic chudbots with rough hands and smooth brains" over his noble mind and physique.

In practice a society that encourages late marriage is actually much better for more bookish eccentric guys, who tend to be late bloomers in developing their masculinity and ability to seduce women.

(meaning: he came on weird at one of the nice church girls he was ogling to the point where one of her large guy friends suggested he take his leave.)

Our guy comes so close to introspection, but successfully evades it and reaches the root cause - these are the wrong kind of white people:

But these Midwesterners aren’t descended from entrepreneurial adventurers like the rest of us. Their forebears were conflict averse and probably low testosterone German Catholics who fled Bismarck’s kulturkampf to acquire cheap land under the Homestead Act. These people mostly settled areas where aggro Scotch Irish types had driven off the Injun decades ago, so they never had to embrace the risk-tolerant, enterprising, itinerant mindset that had once fueled Manifest Destiny. Instead they produced families that became weirdly attached to their generic little plot of fungible prairie dirt, and as a result we now have huge pockets of the country full of overcivilized and effete Teutons with no conquering spirit who treat outsiders like shit.

There is no shortage of genuine and active neo-Nazis out Iowa way. But they would have met Wordy NRx Boy here and flushed his head.

In the comments section, other racists call him out on his insufficient devotion to the cause of white nationalism.

Even our good friends at The Motte took the piss out of him.

The illustrations are, of course, AI-generated.

original post. Found on Bluesky by ratelimitexceeder.

rootclaim appears to be yet another group of people who, having stumbled upon the idea of the Bayes rule as a good enough alternative to critical thinking, decided to try their luck in becoming a Serious and Important Arbiter of Truth in a Post-Mainstream-Journalism World.

This includes a randiesque challenge that they'll take a $100K bet that you can't prove them wrong on a select group of topics they've done deep dives on, like if the 2020 election was stolen (91% nay) or if covid was man-made and leaked from a lab (89% yay).

Also their methodology yields results like 95% certainty on Usain Bolt never having used PEDs, so it's not entirely surprising that the first person to take their challenge appears to have wiped the floor with them.

Don't worry though, they have taken the results of the debate to heart and according to their postmortem blogpost they learned many important lessons, like how they need to (checks notes) gameplan against the rules of the debate better? What a way to spend 100K... Maybe once you've reached a conclusion using the Sacred Method changing your mind becomes difficult.

I've included the novel-length judges opinions in the links below, where a cursory look indicates they are notably less charitable towards rootclaim's views than their postmortem indicates, pointing at stuff like logical inconsistencies and the inclusion of data that on closer look appear basically irrelevant to the thing they are trying to model probabilities for.

There's also like 18 hours of video of the debate if anyone wants to really get into it, but I'll tap out here.

ssc reddit thread

quantian's short writeup on the birdsite, will post screens in comments

pdf of judge's opinion that isn't quite book length, 27 pages, judge is a microbiologist and immunologist PhD

pdf of other judge's opinion that's 87 pages, judge is an applied mathematician PhD with a background in mathematical virology -- despite the length this is better organized and generally way more readable, if you can spare the time.

rootclaim's post mortem blogpost, includes more links to debate material and judge's opinions.

edit: added additional details to the pdf descriptions.

Of course young optimistic me would have considered that this was an easy thing to have a QA test for, but here we are in 2024 and I am neither young or optimistic. Maybe the AI QA folks were in the last few rounds of Google layoffs or something.

Some gems from the article.

... We numbered 50 or so. We came from places like Harvard and Stanford and UChicago and MIT and U Penn. There was James, who studied computer science. Then there was Cameron, who also studied computer science. David and Peter studied computer science, while Luke and Albert studied computer science. As for Mike and Jason, the former studied computer science, whereas the latter studied computer science. Ethan was not unlike Max, in that both studied computer science. Some people studied business, too.

The students’ demographics were as revealing as their chosen majors. Roughly 80% were white. Over 70% were men. There was not a black man in the room.

(And if you need to leave to use the bathroom, you’ll get to pass by a massive oil painting of George W. Bush making the Hand of Benediction in front of the wreckage of 9/11, beside a Madonna-figure whose halo glows, I shit you not, with the Coca Cola logo.)

Peter springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of what’s to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity we’re going to experience at UATX. We’re going to grapple with big issues. We’re going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. We’re going, he says, to do something called “Street Epistemology.”

What is Street Epistemology? He’ll demonstrate. It’s one of two things he does, the other being jiu-jitsu. “I don’t have a life,” he says. “I talk to strangers and I wrestle strangers.” But before we can do Street Epistemology, Peter needs to think of some questions.

“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.” I thought this over.

Many of the founders had participated in the same conservative think tanks: The Hoover Institution, The Manhattan Institute, The American Enterprise Institute. Many had contributed to The Free Press, the digital paper founded by Bari Weiss in 2021, the same year UATX was announced. Many were friends or fans of Jordan Peterson. One UATX founder was even double-dipping, delivering lectures at both UATX and Peterson’s forthcoming Peterson Academy. One had been fired from Princeton University after sleeping with a student and “discouraging her from seeking mental health care,” per an official university statement. One had been accused of assaulting his girlfriend. (The charges were dropped.) Another had had a talk at MIT canceled after comparing Affirmative Action to “the atrocities of the 20th century.” And so, beneath their optimism, there churned bitterness and indignation at their mistreatment by the Thought Police—sour feelings they sweetened with their commitment to “free and open inquiry.”

The one promised in this post several months ago.

@collectivist spotted the finished product was out:

When he posted the finished video on youtube yesterday, there were some quite critical comments on youtube, the EA forum and even lesswrong. Unfortunately they got little to no upvotes while the video itself got enough karma to still be on the frontpage on both forums.

YouTube; LessWrong; EA Forum

the video is everything you'd expect. The power of classical liberalism and technology segues into uwu libertarianism. I made it about three minutes with a great deal of skipping.

I'm doing it so skillfully. I'm totally basilisking you. isn't that scary

Bwahahahaha get fucked you unbearable scumsucking dork

I mean just look at his fucking sentence construction with the rule of three and the cute internal rhyme/alliteration on “ideology/inevitability/individual”

I’m sorry, and this isn’t massively SneerClub except insofar as the death bit is obviously very Yud-coded, it’s just this quote came up again in the middle of a long and really bleak article, and for whatever reason I just burst out laughing

He’s always so goddamn indignant, like he’s being bullied for his lunch money but he came prepped with the most badass comebacks he could think of in the mirror - I mean seriously, read the quote back to yourself out loud and see if it would ever work outside “an online libertarian journal”, let alone on a stage

Look at his fucking face, how does this guy get up in the morning and not only take himself seriously, but take himself that goddamn seriously

Anyway…

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11178564

Scientists Train AI to Be Evil, Find They Can't Reverse It::How hard would it be to train an AI model to be secretly evil? As it turns out, according to Anthropic researchers, not very.

"glowfic" apparently. written in a roleplay forum format.

This is not a story for kids, even less so than HPMOR. There is romance, there is sex, there are deliberately bad kink practices whose explicit purpose is to get people to actually hurt somebody else so that they'll end up damned to Hell, and also there's math.

start here. or don't, of course.

I did fake Bayesian math with some plausible numbers, and found that if I started out believing there was a 20% per decade chance of a lab leak pandemic, then if COVID was proven to be a lab leak, I should update to 27.5%, and if COVID was proven not to be a lab leak, I should stay around 19-20%

This is so confusing: why bother doing "fake" math? How does he justify these numbers? Let's look at the footnote:

Assume that before COVID, you were considering two theories:

1. Lab Leaks Common: There is a 33% chance of a lab-leak-caused pandemic per decade.
2. Lab Leaks Rare: There is a 10% chance of a lab-leak-caused pandemic per decade.

And suppose before COVID you were 50-50 about which of these were true. If your first decade of observations includes a lab-leak-caused pandemic, you should update your probability over theories to 76-24, which changes your overall probability of pandemic per decade from 21% to 27.5%.

Oh, he doesn't, he just made the numbers up! "I don't have actual evidence to support my claims, so I'll just make up data and call myself a 'good Bayesian' to look smart." Seriously, how could a reasonable person have been expected to be concerned about lab leaks before COVID? It simply wasn't something in the public consciousness. This looks like some serious hindsight bias to me.

I don’t entirely accept this argument - I think whether or not it was a lab leak matters in order to convince stupid people, who don’t know how to use probabilities and don’t believe anything can go wrong until it’s gone wrong before. But in a world without stupid people, no, it wouldn’t matter.

Ah, no need to make the numbers make sense, because stupid people wouldn't understand the argument anyway. Quite literally: "To be fair, you have to have a really high IQ to understand my shitty blog posts. The Bayesian math is is extremely subtle..." And, convince stupid people of what, exactly? He doesn't say, so what was the point of all the fake probabilities? What a prick.

Pass the popcorn, please.

(nitter link)

I'm called a Nazi because I happily am proud of white culture. But every day I think fondly of the brown king Cyrus the Great who invented the first ever empire, and the Japanese icon Murasaki Shikibu who wrote the first novel ever. What if humans just loved each other? History teaches us that we have all been, and always will be - great

read the whole thread, her responses are even worse

Is uh, anyone else watching? This dude (chaos) was/is friends with Brent Dill.

I somehow missed this one until now. Apparently it was once mentioned in the comments on the old sneerclub but I don't think it got a proper post, and I think it deserves one.

From Sam Altman's blog, pre-OpenAI

Epistemic status: Speculation. An unholy union of evo psych, introspection, random stuff I happen to observe & hear about, and thinking. Done on a highly charged topic. Caveat emptor!

oh boy

archive: https://archive.is/uOP4y

Utilitarian brainworms or one of the many very real instances of a homicidal parent going after their disabled child? I can't decide, but it's a depressing read.

May end up on SRD, but you read it here first.

At various points, on Twitter, Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.” ...

When he’s not tweeting about e/acc, Verdon runs Extropic, which he started in 2022. Some of his startup capital came from a side NFT business, which he started while still working at Google’s moonshot lab X. The project began as an April Fools joke, but when it started making real money, he kept going: “It's like it was meta-ironic and then became post-ironic.” ...

On Twitter, Jezos described the company as an “AI Manhattan Project” and once quipped, “If you knew what I was building, you’d try to ban it.”