blakestacey

AOC:

They need him to be a genius because they cannot handle what it means for them to be tricked by a fool.

The MIRI, CFAR, EA triumvirate promised not just that you could be the hero of your own story but that your heroism could be deployed in the service of saving humanity itself from certain destruction. Is it so surprising that this promise attracted people who were not prepared to be bit players in group housing dramas and abstract technical papers?

Good point.

Logic. Rationality. Intelligence. Somewhere in all these attempts to harness them for our shared humanity, they’d been warped and twisted to destroy it.

Oh, the warping and twisting started long before Ziz. (The Sequences are cult shit.)

LaSota and those in her orbit alleged that CFAR and its leadership were laced with anti-trans beliefs and practices. (“That's preposterous,” one member of the rationalist community, who is also trans, told me. “Rationalists have the most trans people of any group I've seen that isn't explicitly about being trans. You'd just show up at a math event or house party, and it would be 20 percent trans.”)

The leadership can't be transphobic because 20% of the membership is trans. In related news, the United States government cannot be sexist because [breaks down into bleak and bitter laughter]

Don't think in detail about the future superintelligence that can hug you and turn you into TANG!

I was tempted to give them their free ticket to the egress for saying "paint their discourse with the purples".

It's conceivable that there was some amazing math lurking in one or more of the non-string-theory ideas, and nobody was lucky enough to find it.

Occasional sneerclub character Nate Silver is bluechecking again.

All Person Of Interest fanfiction must by Internet law be extremely gay to spite Caviezel.

• The Fifth Element as a Root/Shaw story
• Pacific Rim as a Finch/Reese story

The New York Times Pitchbot enters our territory:

We wanted to understand the future of AI. So we talked to three Hawk Tuah cryptocurrency investors at a White Castle in Toms River.

Working in the field of genetics is a bizarre experience. No one seems to be interested in the most interesting applications of their research. [...] The scientific establishment, however, seems to not have gotten the memo. [...] I remember sitting through three days of talks at a hotel in Boston, watching prominent tenured professors in the field of genetics take turns misrepresenting their own data [...] It is difficult to convey the actual level of insanity if you haven’t seen it yourself.

Like Yudkowsky writing about quantum mechanics, this is cult shit. "The scientists refuse to see the conclusion in front of their faces! We and we alone are sufficiently Rational to embrace the truth! Listen to us, not to scientists!"

Gene editing scales much, much better than embryo selection.

"... Mister Bond."

The graphs look like they were made in Matplotlib, but on another level, they're giving big crayon energy.

But could even a generation of Johns von Neumann outsmart the love child of Skynet and Samaritan from Person Of Interest?