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in reply to @vogon's post:
it was "funny" to read some of big yud's recent essays, after not paying attention for years, and see how he's completely lost it, headless chicken mode.
still got a lot of affection for what lw/ea purported to be a decade ago back when it was more weird nerds than vcs. it's sad they will be remembered only for the bad
he even wrote a whole piece explaining his inevitable downfall http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beliefs
When you're the one leading the cult it's even easier and more profitable to keep making the mental sausage
Just looking at the title of the article I can see so clearly how the site got it's community of "guys who own tech companies and would otherwise be reading Thomas Friedman"
so the worst part here is that the article is 100% correct, and it is 100% the easiest way to explain the phenomena to, for instance, online moderators.
But it's tainted enough that I cannot do that lmaooooo
Yeah the saddest part is that by a lot of standards these guys are a step up from Friedman
It is worth the read, its an important phenomenon regardless of who wrote it.
in this case, especially because they did.
i agree
and i think he chose to call it the way he did to appease his fellows into thinking a cult might get cooler when the more moderate wackos are gone.
anyway, the mods are asleep, let's post eggbug recipies XD
And here I thought the discussion on general intelligence software and global thermonuclear war was settled 40 years ago
Oh?
I mean, I was speaking from the perspective that I was an intern at IBM in 2016 just watching devs twist themselves over how to label something Watson while it was basically just... statistics and insights programs that were not connected to any 1 specific large system. They were all cloud solutions that operated independently of each other sharing no data, outcomes, or even training methodology (if it even had any ML at all!)
previous guy he was named after sold tabulating machines to the nazis with a full understanding
Why would... anyone name their product he was named after. That's like Fanta trying to disguise its origin.
this really leaves it overtly obvious I do not absorb any history from the corpos I work for. Jesus.
I didn't know until '19, the book covering it hasn't been well talked about but now other sources are cropping up. dw about missing it, IBM was pretty good at burying it
the heat is rapidly approaching 55C and yet I find myself irresistibly drawn deeper. We only have coolant and rations for six days, ten if we stretch them. But I am sure, beyond all doubt, that we are about to break through.
to be pedantic, CTR (ibm before ibm) started doing business in germany in the 20s and spun off the subsidiary Dehomag, which conducted the "are you Really German" ancestry census in 1933 the same year hitler came into power. they were there right from the beginning of the third reich
it would be hilarious to watch all these people melting down over their poor little meow meoarkov chains if they did not have so much power and we were not on the precipice of something rather unfortunate
I love being lashed with 500 feet of chain to the twenty greediest, most deeply incurious people on earth as they all stand at the edge of a pit and talk themselves into a fervor about how the only salvation for all of us lies at the bottom
looking over at the cliff next to ours and i gotta say the whole 'liver pecked out once a day' thing is starting to seem downright leisurely in comparison
the chains don't prevent you from pecking out the billionaires' livers, hope that helps
i feel like that would be implying that they gave us anything even close to the power of fire. like prometheus would look over and be kind of offended. im leaning more towards saw trap
wild how much bullshit can trace its roots to yudkowsky reading the wrong creepypasta and getting too scared
Me last week: what?? This is a Microsoft Research paper? This seems dubious but I guess I should at least consider it
Me 15 minutes later: oh I completely missed they gave OpenAI $11B that explains things
the elite fear AI because they fear that it will deem them, not the masses, of being the useless ones
Well maybe Europe is acting smarter than oh nevermind they're doing stupid things too
I had to look up "Roko's basilisk" and how is this the dumbest thing I've ever heard? How the fuck are people walking around this earth managing to eat and breathe while thinking a hypothetical future AI is capable of time travel and telepathy and uses that to... torture people? If it was capable of that it could achieve it's goal of earlier existence easier by nudging people in the right direction. They've just invented shitty protestant god again.
FYI, Roko, the guy behind this spectacularly bafflingly stupid idea, has sexually harassed at least one person and been banned from places like it.
The entire "Less Wrong" community of "rationalists" has incredible cult vibes and a suicide linked to them as a result! It's really bad!
I've read a bit about them but didn't realize it was started by the Harry Potter fanfic guy. Which just makes it more sad and comical.
it always amazes me how many people -- even people rightly critical of the whole sphere -- don't know about this! it should be mentioned every time the basilisk thing comes up
My favorite thing about it is that the exact same crowd likes to talk about "Pascal's mugging" to point at the problem with maximization of bullshit hypothetical utilities, which is exactly what "Roko's basilisk" is an instantiation of.
Because they are just so smart that having a name for being dumb means they aren't being it.
I'm going to make a very slight and probably meaningless disagreement about one minor point here.
in a blatant turn from their initial manifesto about how they thought open-source artificial intelligence was necessary for the good of humanity
To me, it's incredibly clear that they wanted to do this from the beginning, it was a matter of when not if. You get people (and honestly usually just businesses) to integrate it into their goings on, then you tighten the squeeze on them. The first hit is free.
oh yeah absolutely, you could look at the founding team and see that it was gonna become a scam at some point
I know this isn’t the most important part of this post, but this was how I learned that the Lesswrong person is the same person who wrote the HP fanfic that made me go “huh, I don’t think I like fanfic” and bounce off of it entirely
even for a fanfic hpmor had a few to many rape scenes for me to get pulled in.
which has always made me wonder about the cultists, because when i told this to my ex she kept insisting it was an important work and "you can just ignore those" yes, and the Stanford prison experiment was important too, however,
To drop a crumb of context for those who don't know, openai did the same thing with gpt3. They promised it would be open source, kept very secret about it until was actually good at something, and then released it in the form we are familiar with.
woof … someone tried to pull me into the lesswrong cult a long time ago, and I’m so glad I ran away from that shit. Kind of shocked to see it still going though