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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt 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 Altmanās old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he canāt work in it, isnāt this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?
āIām 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, Iām sold!ā
Every time this dorkus is in the news, remember, heās an absolute wanker.
skill issue
Ah yes, the AI did almost kill everyone with custom bacteria.
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 canāt 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
Iāve 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.
and if that didnāt 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 āwe are going to hack virusses and the terrorists will kill everybodyā stories came up that actual viroligists already explained that this is not how it works, and this isnāt a risk people should really fear. But science fiction > experts.
E: also terrorists donāt just want to kill everybody, and guns and fertilizer are cheap and easy to use.
10 seconds in and Iām already thinking about how many ideas for new chemical weapons I could come up with, and I havenāt studied chemistry since high school.
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 theyāre saying AI will be powerful enough to kill us all, theyāre 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 donāt know and donāt care enough to figure it out. The content of the locked post is only this screenshot. Ed Zitron asks, āWhat is your relationship to the rationalists and effective altruists?ā and Coxon replies as quoted above.
Iām not a scientologist but LRH had some great ideas
Oh, Zitrons bluesky, cool
thatās his twitter, but heās also on bsky. coxon might not be