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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
Unsurprisingly, the Coxon dipshit who is getting all the press for quitting his cushy AI-industry job is a MIRI fanboy:
If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?
“I’m intuitively opposed to culinary traditions that people have been developing for hundreds of years, but gosh dang it, when they talk about the Machine God torturing a billion simulated copies of me unless I tithe my income to a Harry Potter fanfiction writer, I’m sold!”
Every time this dorkus is in the news, remember, he’s an absolute wanker.
skill issue
Ah yes, the AI did almost kill everyone with custom bacteria.
and if that didn’t get everyone, the food-safety AI plus MAHA will pick up the stragglers with natural bacteria cultivated in abundance
How could I forget the AI Black Death that happened this year?
I recall a long time ago when the first ‘we are going to hack virusses and the terrorists will kill everybody’ stories came up that actual viroligists already explained that this is not how it works, and this isn’t a risk people should really fear. But science fiction > experts.
E: also terrorists don’t just want to kill everybody, and guns and fertilizer are cheap and easy to use.
10 seconds in and I’m already thinking about how many ideas for new chemical weapons I could come up with, and I haven’t studied chemistry since high school.
And was a Bayesian calculating agent that enumerates every possible explanation for the information it takes in and ranks them according to evidence, along with every trajectory through the world that could fulfill its utility function, rather than approximating the high dimensional shape of text
It annoys me how much credit for predicting AI Eliezer gets away with claiming among his cult (and even outside his cult, like in interviews with reporters that could know better if they bothered to do their job) when all the actual details he predicted are nothing like LLM-based agents.
Likewise for claiming success on predicting instrumental convergence. LLM agents often can’t stay focused on the goal they are post trained and directly prompted to pursue, they are the furthest thing from trying to optimally maximize a bunch of secondary values in pursuit of master goal.
It is actually kind of amazing how diametrically opposed his ideas for a long time were to what actually led to new advances in the field
I’ve previously made an effort post summarizing this! https://awful.systems/post/4172436
tldr; Eliezer has criticized (more like mocked, or dare I say it, sneered at) expert systems, GOFAI, and neural networks, and he never really admitted he was wrong when it became apparent in the 2010s that neural networks really were a viable approach.
Least surprising news of the week
Plus Anthropic-the company he quit for being irresponsible-being heavily tied to EA/rationalism. Not exactly the best endorsement
The eugenics endorsing also does a pretty good job with that
It is very funny how the rhetoric from the rationalist doomers has been one of the main forces propping up the AI industry. If they’re saying AI will be powerful enough to kill us all, they’re still saying that AI is powerful! They are so high on their own supply (and the fame and wealth from finally being in the spotlight) that they have not realized just how much they have undermined their own cause.
Then again, perhaps one could say that a doomsday prophet, deep down, actually wants doom to happen.
(Also, the paltry amount of technical work done by MIRI has zero relevance whatsoever to modern day AI.)
Is there a place to see this other than getting an account on that site?
There might be some way of bypassing the ATproto sign-in wall, but I don’t know and don’t care enough to figure it out. The content of the locked post is only this screenshot. Ed Zitron asks, “What is your relationship to the rationalists and effective altruists?” and Coxon replies as quoted above.
I’m not a scientologist but LRH had some great ideas
Oh, Zitrons bluesky, cool
that’s his twitter, but he’s also on bsky. coxon might not be