Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this, and happy 4th July in advance.)
I dunno who "Bentham's Bulldog" is, but they live up to their nick and I like the cut of their jib:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ew3chEabxf8YySR5/functional-decision-theory-not-even-wrong-also-wrong
The community is reduced to downvoting, sputtering, and "the real influential philosophers ~~live in Canada~~ are working in industry, not academia":
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ew3chEabxf8YySR5/functional-decision-theory-not-even-wrong-also-wrong?commentId=4CcLDXFkGWGEsgGuu
Oh no: The Epstein Hysteria
tl;dr: ephebophilia actually, just another criminal case nothing to see here, won't someone think of the non-offending pedophiles and the privacy of the people in the emails, especially those who even though they come off as obvious creeps who consorted with a known sex trafficker have not yet been found legally liable.
Somehow doesn't mention the sitting president of the USA even once.
Consider me well and truly milkshake-ducked now
phew, the comments on the slobstack...
https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-epstein-hysteria/comment/219672502
edit I guess this is also an example of "Rationalist Brain" - reflexively contrarian, overly literal interpretations of wordings, the defense of one venerable old white man over multiple anonymous female victims, etc. You can have principled views on how Epstein was treated when he was alive and how his case has been handled after he died, but you can also choose the keep those views to yourself, or publish them on your substack for all to point and mock.
consider me well and truly milkshake-ducked in this case
This self-own from the comments is amazing:
This is a racist dog-whistle which attacks ESL housekeepers; this sort of meme's frustratingly common on the West Coast.
It's also fascinating because I thought the OP was pretty clear that there's a difference between decision theory and "desirable dispositions" which I interpret as covering the kind of counterfactual preferences indicated here. Actually there's an even more fundamental issue with this as a decision theory problem which is that it misidentifies who is actually making a decision. Changing the applicant's decision theory (while leaving their preference for thievery intact) doesn't matter to the person actually deciding here.
Don't get me wrong, it's also a wildly racist example to put forward, it's just also a bad example and where there is an argument it's addressed in the OP.
They also made the “Yudkowsky is frequently, confidently, egregiously wrong” post
Well you see, the acausalrobotgod actually hates dealing with assholes tying themselves in knots trying to predict its predictions, so actually you really are better off with CDT if you don't want to get 3^^^3 dust specks in your eyes for all eternity.
More seriously, once you start positing beings that can perfectly predict you and reward/punish various decision theories you can basically rationalize any decision theory.
FDT is a largely half-assed^1^ attempt at working backwards from "the timeless multidimensional robot god can't blackmail me from the future if I've already made up my mind about stuff, very strongly like" into something more formalistic so Yud can pretend to address roko's basilisk without acknowledging it.
I think there's also some "here's how two robot gods who can perfectly emulate each other might work things out" sprinkled in, but worse than it sounds.
If you post hard enough, it stops being a debilitating fear of mind-readers and becomes forward-thinking philosophy instead.
Just gotta solve the halting problem, no biggie for a superintelligence
‘ole yuzzie has already solved the halting problem: he can never fucking stop writing
Fun how hard they have to work to show both that it is not a thing that is taken seriously and it is a risk. And how much easier it is when you go 'yeah, that is silly, high intelligence isn't magic'. Of course the latter stance also means there is no AI god who will resurrect the dead.
He also argues somewhere for strong longtermism, so I'd say there's something significantly wrong with his jib somewhere, even if he's right about decision theory and contrarianism.
He's the shrimp welfare guy who thinks he can prove god.
Milkshake ducked
I mean as far as I can tell he's one of the least objectionable prominent rationalists, if only because his main thing is pushing an extreme position wrt animal consciousness instead of being a eugenics and incelism dabbler.
edit: Nevermind... The Epstein Hysteria
Double ducked, what a rollercoaster. (I thought you made a good point before that).
The Epstein take is made worse by the fact that despite Epstein and Maxwell and some people who resigned, nobody has been charged with anything yet from what I know. It is a 'witchhunt' (using the words of people who find this overblown) that doesnt even burn witches.
That is pretty bad... all the standard rationalist thick-headed idiocy and quibbling details and choice of gross example. But even so if that is their worst, they still aren't in the worst quartile of rationalist.
Yeah. For being a little strange I find the shrimp welfare stuff pretty unobjectionable. Like, he vastly overstates the magnitude of good done by those stunners because he does appear to be a shut-up-and-multiply bro, but I'm comfortable with the general notion that we should be nicer to shrimp and other animals we eat, even the ones that don't make good PETA glamour shots.
Ed: oh sweet merciful Jesus the Epstein take. Nope. I'm actually investigating whether we should torture shrimp even harder just to make sure since their most ardent defender is like this.
The shrimp stuff is objectionable insofar as the brain bug that makes you think that if you add up enough shrimp you get the moral entity equivalent of a person because consciousness stacks is the same as the one that makes stuff like longtermism palatable, and also for making the animal welfare movement at large seem unserious.
All this "Omnicient evil demon reads your source code" stuff really feels like Turing would have a thing or two to say about it. (Since one needs to have some even worse bends in logic to believe FDT, as Bulldog states it, is good, it's kinda moot here.)
The whole algorithm predicting your algorithm thing feels like it is basically asking for/claiming the existence of a solution to the halting problem? But yeah, moot point, because the FDT stuff doesn't get as far as ever talking about how to compute an answer and always treats the magic hyper computation as a given.
rationality is when i spend hours arguing on the internet about whether Omega could defeat Super Saiyan Goku