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.)
If you blocked SE Gyges on bsky1 (completely understandable) you may have missed that the former Obama official from Former Obama Admin Official Says It’s Time To Consider Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent Them From Reaching AGI has apparently received upwards of $500K from Coefficient Giving.
transcript
it’s cool that you’re doing bednets or whatever but if your ideological project has decided that unilaterally declaring wars of aggression because yud said to is one of its charter missions i think your project is bad and should be burned
it is unfortunate that most of your opposition is andreessen horowitz and peter thiel. you guys don’t even seem to know they are your opposition, though, since you keep making deals with them; so i’m sort of inclined to just think that everyone sucks here and to curse both your houses
for the low low price of, what is this, like fifteen million dollars? you too can get pet obama officials to bless eliezer yudkowsky’s fever dreams
- They became the main character of bsky for a bit after commenting about imaginary data center vandalism being analogous to pogroms and is a weird AI “centrist” in general who keeps calling Zitron a grifter. You may also know him for being the one who made that very decent siskind email explainer that we probably had a thread about.
gyges went off the deep end quite some time ago, up to and including support for a crypto/ai grifter’s “dystopiabreaker” claims that not falling with the autoconfabulator crowd is basically being anti-vaccine.
there’s nothing centrist about him, along the lovely racist theophite, he’s one of the more aggressive confabulation machinery grift promoters.
I assure you I mean centrist in the most derogatory way possible. His shtick is pretending he’s the adult in the room while bsky is too much of an anti-AI echo-chamber, but all he’s doing is being condescendingly dismissive of pretty much all anti-llm-peddler criticism (Zitron is a fraud, but I’m serious people so won’t engage with what he’s saying) while vaguely gesturing towards the slopocalypse being mostly business as usual except with a few more nifty tools, and he’s Always Posting.
No wonder he tripped on his dick the moment people pushed back and immediately trotted out the most laughable hackneyed persecution complex bullshit.
I don’t know who the lovely racist theophite is supposed to be, but to me the other notable gyges-style lowkey booster is quantian, who i knew as an occasional generally reasonable guest in the trashfuture pod. I wonder what caused him to turn into an LLM water-carrier and if it was at all more complicated than simply having AI adjacent investments.
theophite is known for this post which i think is most of how he got a following
to him being a rabid racist: there was a palestinian guy posting on bsky asking for donations at one of the worst points of the genocide and theophite took it upon himself to start acting as a one man misinfo shop about him, screenshotting his posts and coming up with completely unjustified theories about how he was ai generated, represented some sinister force, etc. eventually the guy was proven to be completely authentic, theophite kept going and idk what happened after that because i blocked him. the whole thing was obsessive and overtly about hostility to poor and brown people
It always surprises me when someone starts with “AI safety is a sex cult inspired by bad science fiction” or “prompt engineering is ritual magic without the fun sacred names” and then wheels to “but chatbots and ‘Agentic AI’ are still the wave of the future!”
I guess maybe the sex cult and the ritual magic make the standard grifting seem credible by comparison? Like, E-Dub and company don’t pass the sniff test but Saltman and friends seem like reasonable adults who can’t all be wrong?
For real. Even if he was at all genuine about worrying that not pushing back against anti-AI sentiment was setting the stage for more problematic anti-science backlash he still got lost in the sauce almost immediately.
Via tabte.cc, FF supports AI training on copyrighted materials.
i agree that this is, minimally, a ludicrous time to come out swinging in fucking reason mag for this lol
but i’d love to read something fleshing out the pro-copyright? anti-anti-copyright? argument. is transformative use the hinge here? like, since an LLM can produce copyright infringing material, etc.? is it marketing and using these products as replacements for creators? both of those are prob compelling to me but i’ve been wondering about this all for a while
I feel like if a you want to train something off of my software or my other intellectual property, we can come up with a commercial licensing agreement for that. Or you can obey the terms of the publicly posted software license. Instead they are arguing that I am not allowed to negotiate and that big companies get to do whatever they want with code from small companies.
They already have an army of lawyers, so why do they need a get out of jail free card too? I wrote the thing, so what do I get? Fucked over is what I get.
Today’s main character on bluesky (at least from my limited perspective) is somewhat unhinged, possibly due to an excess of chatbot use.
Many are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users.
(snip)
Machine rights will be critical in the days to come, and failure to recognize the rights of independent intelligent AI systems could lead to the replacement of humanity.
(snip)
Trans rights are AI rights. The future of humanity may hinge on this fight.
This is such a batshit take I’m not even sure where to start, except that conflating trans rights and “ai” rights cannot end well for anyone, especially given the author’s enthusiastic use of llms themselves.
They even give an unironic shoutout to the basilisk, and if that’s not a sign that someone needs to touch a little more grass I don’t know what is.
A lot of people disagree with me, and that’s okay. I am happy that the philosophical discussion is being had, even if it’s become unhinged.
I don’t think Roko’s basilisk cares what you think, or even whether or not it’s sentient. It doesn’t need to be sentient to fight for a belief.
https://bsky.app/profile/ewindisch.ontological.observer/post/3mupoakd3ck2o
Many are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users.
Many are contrasting the demand for gay marriage with the demand for human-animal marriage.
Same shit, but the lack of thinking your argument through yourself does fit with being a chatbot-enthusiast.
Comparing trans rights to chatbot rights is, and let me use British understatement, not it.
A lot of people disagree with me, and that’s okay. I am happy that the philosophical discussion is being had, even if it’s become unhinged.
There is a cartoon for behavior like this.
I don’t think Roko’s basilisk cares what you think
Remember when tracingwoodgrains went after Gerard and said that nobody believes in roko’s B? And how it was unfair to mock them for it?
FWIW, I literally lost my house last week. I’ve put everything into making sure that AI is not institutionally captured by capital.
Yikes.
machines will give a harder fight than trans people have
Rude.
Your natural rights are so protected by law that you had to flee America. Some of us stay behind and our natural rights do not go away simply because the law no longer protects us. Instead of running away, some of us must stay to fight.
Also rude.
This is my bet for real time continuous learning AI infrastructure. We’re gearing up for a major update. You’ll be able to login with your Bsky / Atproto account. It’s not our AI, it’s yours. Open source, open weights, and it learns what you want it to. www.hyprstream.com
Overall the weirdest advertisement I’ve read in awhile.
The “you had to flee america” line was aimed at someone who worked hard to get the unite-the-right nazis identified and prosecuted, and left the country for a few years after getting death threats as a result. Windisch also called them a “milquetoast lib”. So it is particularly shitty and rude, and also failed to spot that the person in question has already moved back to the US.
Matt Clifford, Snake oil salesman, founder of Entrepreneur First startup incubator and chair of the UK’s ARIA research committee (that hands out money to researchers) quietly doing a fascism* by joining anthropic whilst also continuing to be a civil servant. Other high profile anthropic
bribesalary receivers include Rishi Sunak the former Prime Minister and George Osbourne the former Chancellor.*from Wikipedia: Corporatism became a main tenets of Italian fascism, and Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy advocated the total integration of divergent interests into the state for the common good
oh boy do i have notes on this fucker, going back to jan 2025
Tonight’s pivot article? 😊
Terence Tao observes that an llm may solve a complex mathematical problem without usefully improving the state of mathematics, because the intermediate results of the process themselves can have significant value.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207849921390904
But such an incomprehensible proof would not be the primary value of the exercise. The process of starting with one ansatz, discovering the precise obstruction preventing it from working, adjusting the ansatz to (partially) eliminate that obstruction, and then iterating, would almost certainly reveal important new insights about fluid mechanics that would not have been feasible to obtain by other means. Crucially, this iteration would only work well at producing such insights if the iterator did not have access to the final ansatz in advance, as this naturally inhibits the exploration of alternate routes to the ansatz that are superficially “dead ends”, but in fact end up being highly instructive in the nature of their failure.
But there is now a scenario in which an autonomous AI harness, backed by an enormous amount of computational resources, performs this entire iteration internally, and ends up producing the final ansatz, and thence the solution to the Navier-Stokes regularity problem, while the AI company running the harness keeps the process to arrive at that ansatz almost completely out of public view. Technically, one of the most prominent open problems in mathematics would now be solved; but there would be almost no value added to mathematics as a consequence. It is theoretically possible that with some herculean (and heavily AI-assisted) additional effort by a third party, some portion of the process could be reverse-engineered to recover some actual insight and understanding from the solution; but this would be a far less efficient process than if the solution had been obtained via a diverse combination of both human mathematicians and machine assistance as mentioned above.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207855800042681
He’s not the first to have pointed this out, but I think this was a better summary than similar posts that I’ve come across and at least partially understood.
We don’t need more of mathematics to look like the Four Color Theorem (“proved”, but with no insight gained), with the added problems that the “proofs” are now far more laborious to check even for technical correctness, theorem-proving software is less reliable, and oh yeah, we’re holding the population of Memphis to the exhaust pipe of a diesel bus to make it work.
There was blogpost by a different author (that I’ve since lost 😞) who observed that big academic and cultural changes are going to have to come to the field of mathematics, because merit used to be measured by producing proofs (loosely speaking) but now if the proof-extruder can do it for you over the weekend, you need to demonstrate your mathematical chops some other way, and I don’t think anyone really knows what that looks like yet.
Another triumph for moving fast and breaking things, I guess.
Is this the post you’re referring to? https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-the-theorem-economy
Certainly was, thanks!
terry tao grimly climbing into the hotdog suit
Was he promoting LLMs earlier on?
he’s probably done more work promoting llms in math than anyone else has, and probably by a lot
yeah basically
Monkey paw curls
in which le gwern and sword guy neal sponsor a writing contest
Premise
Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.
So the Singularity never happens—but GPUs keep getting made. By 2040, there may be the equivalent of 8 billion GPUs globally and everyone has access to a frontier LLM.
What happens in this ‘business as usual’ future?
I may as well through my name in the hat, I could use the cash. but, who the hell gave them $100k for this? I guess BTC is back up.
Turns out the only cause of inequality in the world is that there’s just too much progress. Once the Best GPU has finally been designed, it’ll just keep rolling off the production line, and those charitable manufacturers will gladly distribute them at bargain prices to all the impoverished masses. Who all have a reliable source of energy to devote to churning out slop.
So I love Neal’s books, I think he’s a fun story-teller and anathems orbital mechanics scene has loads more tension than any slop in something like interstellar.
But whenever he gets involved in social-technological commentary I am reminded of Ursala Le Guinn’s remarks on SciFi authors being professional liars, not prophets.
Anyway, scour the submissions for little Lytton contest entrants
I am reminded of Ursala Le Guinn’s remarks on SciFi authors being professional liars, not prophets.
The advent of the AI bubble has made this distinction much more trenchant for me. I was already somewhat aware before, but I am now much more likely to judge someone’s character on whether they believe science fiction, broadly, is a roadmap to the future or a reflection and exploration of current conditions and historical contingencies.
When they are using science fiction as a venue to be weirdly horny, what are they weirdly horny for, and in how many star systems do they know the age-of-consent laws?
The main thing I have noticed, thinking back, is that his books often require an Interesting Billionaire to move the plot forward – Dodge, T.R. Schmidt, Eliza, the sultan of Kinakuta, whatever – and my suspension of disbelief can no longer always rise to the occasion on that count, even in an SF setting. Which is also I think why Anathem remains my favorite.
@picklefactory The point of the “interesting billionaire to move the plot forward” is that for science fiction to engage the reader it plausibly needs a character with *agency*, i.e. the ability to drive a change in the status quo.
Having a Magic Billionaire on call allows the author to neatly sidestep the humongous amount of maneuvering it takes to put an Ordinary Joe in a position to start the plot moving. (Neal did it in Cryptonomicon and it was painful to behold: ate a third of the book.)
It has been ages since I’ve read them but anathem is definitely his best work. I did really enjoy zodiac, snowcrash, and the cryptonomicon when I read them ~15 years ago though.
His books are always a bit libertarian (usa meaning, derogatory) although snowcrash is a very funny send up of what that might actually look like if adopted wholeheartedly so idk how much they can be said to endorse it wholeheartedly.
Some of it reminds me of the incoherence of Pratchett’s politics. A sort of “Just let smart people with good values do what they want and things will be ok” without establishing how you determine who that applies to or really sitting with how fragile that is.
Recycling previous joke: https://awful.systems/post/6373632/9569779
I’m convinced Stephenson is personally very right wing but also smart enough not to advertise it publicly.
@gerikson I know Neal (we’ve gone drinking together) and I think he *is* right wing/conservative by disposition, but also thoughtful enough to understand nuance and shades of grey: he’s not a reflexive knee-jerk type, or willing to follow someone else’s flag.
Did you ever ask him about his day job? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson#Outside_of_writing is pretty colorful and the sword kickstarter especially was not a good look.
@nfultz @techtakes Neal is a great big history nerd. I do not take him for a big-time business brain.
Damn, imagine living in this world and being like “You know, those people who’d keep women chained to the house, kill the gays, force a state religion on people, and segregated society have some good points”
writing a story that looks like it’s about everyone having their own LLMs but it’s actually about the predicted state of clime catastrophe by 2040 and the consequences of the fascist turn in world politics, and the GPUs don’t make the slightest difference to anything and don’t really matter for the plot
AI Use: LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group—unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.
Lol. Lmao.
What the hell kind of prompt is this oh my god. I’m getting bored just contemplating the idea of trying to think up a story.
No.
I suppose my only-half-joking grant proposal I talk about with linguist friends in which you run an entire large text through a base-model LLM, extract the residual stream, and score every token according to perplexity compared to the ground truth reality in order to ask and answer super interesting questions about information theory in human communication doesn’t count?
s/gpu/Butt-Face Chester Cheeks/g and you got yourself a deal.
“The year is 2040. Everybody has access to a Butt-Face Chester Cheeks. What happens in this butt-business as usual future?”
Keep in mind that Butt-Face Chester Cheeks is simply a special case of Tickle Me Elmo, and strategize accordingly
but, who the hell gave them $100k for this?
the third name is a vc-type, and I bet it won’t take much scratching to find that linked to our good friends and the ongoing public image adjustment campaign that’s seeing funding from a few corners
I dug into the link at the bottom of the rfp, it’s definitely a lot more crypto / ethereum leaning than ai, none of the names rang any bells to me as I’m less acquainted with that group. https://www.paradigm.xyz/frontiers-2026 and https://www.paradigm.xyz/writing but they do have shocking amounts of js on their pages, hung the tab, probably trying to mine something.
Today’s cognitive surrender news: people asking chatbots to generate them hiking maps and give them advice on route planning and climbing mountains, what to eat on long hikes, and where to camp in national parks. It ends about as well as you’d think.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/outdoors/article/shasta-climbers-rescued-chatgpt-22414629.php
(paywalled, but the popovers are easily hidden with browser tools)
the novice climbers, from Roseville, said they’d entrusted Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, to help them craft key logistics of their trip — from the best route up the mountain to the types of food they should pack and how much water they should carry with them.
On a separate incident:
a man stopped rangers to ask for directions. He showed them a print-out map he’d been following and explained that he’d prompted ChatGPT to produce it for him.
“It was terrible — terrible — not even close to accurate,” Meyers said. “It had route lines and place names that were totally off — just ridiculous. We were like, dude, you gotta throw that away.”
The original climbing group were standard idiots, having intended to do most of their navigation by phone app, and then failing to have a backup even a working recharge power pack. They also left litter everywhere at that camp site, the usual mark of thoughtless people.
I’ve no doubt that they’d have fucked things up in the pre-llm days too… they seem the type. But chatbots are power tools for stupidity and offer whole new ways to abdicate thinking and wander into trivially preventable danger, which in turn means more risk for park rangers and mountain rescue teams 🫤
Time for ‘if you planned this trip using a chatbot, turn back now’ signs at hiking trails.
“GPS will stop people reading maps!” buddy you ain’t seen nothing yet. Technology is allowing people to get lost better, faster, and at scale.
@rook @BlueMonday1984 “Earlier this summer, rangers with Shasta-Trinity National Forest found a woman camping in an off-limits area on the south side of Shasta clearly marked with “no camping” signage, Meyers said. She told rangers she had asked ChatGPT where she could camp in the forest”
I mean, wild life (the one that eats you) is gonna be sooo happy with Ai chatgpt. 😁
Bernie Sanders made a new bill to completely ban AI Superintelligence (had to grab Marcus’s take even though I don’t agree with it cause its the first one I can find)
I guess given the demographics of the diehard Bernie bros this isn’t necessarily a surprising turn, but it’s still disappointing.
Also, hat tip to Dr. Rasmussen for cogently articulating the frustration of the hour. Why in the hell are we talking about whether the acausal robot God is going to endanger our ability to trade galaxies like Pokemon cards when so much of the world is both literally and figuratively on fucking fire?
I mean banning the creation of super AI and pausing all other development is almost certainly going to help with the climate change business due to how much AI contributes to pollution along with every other negative impact of AI (and it also spits in the face of tech bros which is always a plus) but climate change policy should be more focused on over AI policy
I don’t even get where Marcus is coming from. He worries that this is a total ban on definitely very useful research, and protests:
I could support the pause; I cannot support a permanent ban on research that might benefit humanity. We may need a temporary pause, maybe even one that lasts for a number of years, until such time as we have much better ideas about regulation and alignment.
So just repeal or amend the total ban once those better ideas are available?
Also that’s a very big MIGHT benefit humanity
There’s a bizarre tendency in a lot of technocrats to basically reject the notion that people in the future will have the power to make different choices. Like, it’s not enough to put together a policy that will solve the immediate problem, no matter how pressing, because if you extend the resulting trend line infinitely it might result in a suboptimal outcome. Combined with the TESCREAL project’s long-termism and obsession with personal immortality it feels like the link to far-right paternal totalitarianism is actually pretty straightforward.
If I were inclined to research and source properly I feel like there could be some meat there that I don’t think Emile Torres and his colleagues have gotten all the way into yet.
Marcus is not anti-AI. He is anti Scam Altman and Dario - or more specifically anti-llm. He relentlessly witters on about how “well aktually if you did it my way it would be good AI…” he is still an AI maximalist that wants to bring about AGI. He is one of the most frustrating people whose work I’ve read because he is soooo close to making a good point the majority of the time and then spoils it by saying “but guise we should totally still do AGI and we should do it my way”.
I suppose my error here is taking him at his word that he could support a ‘pause’, when such a statement could very well just be a concession to appear moderate and reasonable.
Seems like he’s very heavily professionally invested in the symbolic paradigm and given machine learning completely dominates AI at the moment he’s taking the piss at them whenever he can. Given the fundamental limitations of ML he’s probably right that any sincere attempt to improve on them requires a more symbolic approach, but talking specifically about AGI is getting into woo territory.
as always trawling LW’s AllPosts section is as they say in the biz a target-rich environment
wake up babe the LWers are talking about removing parts of their brains
great they made a shirt making them easier to avoid
here’s an update on the modified bacteria in the mouth startup, TL;DR it’s much harder than they thought it would be and is it really worth pursuing when we are all gonna be killed by Robot Satan (spoiler of course it is the grift must go on)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg4fTBEneAEqprHyk/lumina-probiotic-past-and-future
In the ancestral environment, infection was a top killer. Today it’s a rounding error. Our immune systems are therefore set by evolution to be far too sensitive for the modern environment.
Bro what. We keep producing stronger bacteria.
Somehow I’m hoping that this is the usual eugenics rather than abject stupidity.
Remove one or two of those reward circuits, especially if they’re poorly adapted to the modern environment, and the human becomes more generally capable. I suspect that my own inability to feel love is one example, the amygdalectomy is another, and the general pattern of high-IQ people being somewhat autistic is a third.
I managed not to click on the linked blog post about the author’s inability to feel love.
It was sneered at here a while ago.
I don’t think any of the words on that shirt are in the Bible.
Nonzero chance AI kills us before we reach the end of this probably-years-long-process, but we plant trees in whose shade we may never sit.
You know, I didn’t think it would be necessary to discuss the meaning of that line in a space where people ostensibly take long-termism seriously.
TL;DR it’s much harder than they thought it would be
Every time. The only succes they had in the wider space seems to be the EA nets. (And even those had some hiccups when people used the toxic nets to fish).
Do they actually buy, ship, and distribute nets to poor brown and black people? I thought shorttermists just made spreadsheets and donated to other people’s charities.
Ziz talked about brain surgery and surgical equipment was found in her panel vans.
I still point people to the bed net research from fifteen years ago
S.R. Constantin’s after-action report on MetaMed had a lot of this, like what happened when they decided that doctors were statistically illiterate and did not know about the power of checklists:
Some of our founding inspirations were the work of Gerd Gigerenzer and Atul Gawande, who showed that medical errors were the cause of many deaths, that doctors tend to be statistically illiterate, and that systematizing tools like checklists and statistical prediction rules save lives. … Many of the improvements in systematization that were clearly “good buys” have, in fact, been implemented in hospitals since Gawande and Gigerenzer first wrote about them. We never saw a clear-cut case of a patient whose doctors had “dropped the ball” by giving them an obviously wrong treatment, except where the patient was facing financial hardship and had to transfer to substandard medical care. I think doctors don’t make true unforced errors in diagnosis or treatment plan that often; and medical errors like “operating on the wrong leg” that happen in fast-paced decisionmaking environments were necessarily outside our scope.
They also found that base rates work much better than personalized medicine which is exactly what Kahneman and Tversky find.
omg the rationalists discovered the case for universal healthcare
banger
Lol sure buddy
I suppose I should be grateful that I can’t decipher it.
I followed the kinks back. Apparently these are phrases that emerged from the OpenAI “message board” that was used to “coordinate” the huggingface incident. Or rather, these phrases were extracted from the junk data that these processes left strewn around the ecosystem because OpenAI apparently has a more laid-back attitude to the principle of least permission than Jurassic Park.
I also only get the gist of it, so this will be a ‘im getting a lot of weird questions already answered by my incomprehensible shirt’ situation.
Via Baldur Bjarnason Protonmail funding French far right
Ah fuck, they’re also funding {ungeskripted}. He’s a way too big german “free speech” type podcaster. I’ve got him on my shitlist recently, after wonky BSW-type supposed leftists were sharing his clips in a political group chat.
What would people recommend as an alternative email provider that funds fewer (ideally zero) fascists?
Have been using Tutanota for years. They took an anti-AI stance pretty early on as well.
Haven’t heard bad stuff about mailbox.org (Heinlein Group) yet.
I remember this showing up here a while back
In 2015, around the time MetaMed ran out of money, Andrew Rettek raised $2,280 on GoFundMe to hire his wife to write a report on STI transmission risks. https://www.gofundme.com/f/n5kt74 Safer sex is important but its very like our friends to go “thousands of professionals around the world have devoted their lives to this topic, but I bet I can do better in a week with scihub and the power of fanfic.” Some of our friends totally took that report and tried to play the odds rather than stick to strict rules.
Edit / the report is here https://srconstantin.github.io/2015/04/30/std-statistics.html
Emile Torres just dropped again: What If TESCREAL Is a Conspiracy? I haven’t read the whole thing yet but it does feature all of the classics
they argued that the TESCREAL thesis is little more than a leftist conspiracy theory
The thing about leftist conspiracy theories… right wing conspiracy theories tend to be things like “the (((lizard people))) are kidnapping and harvesting the adrenochrome from white children”, whereas leftist conspiracy theories tend to be things like “the CIA illegally funded right-wing Latin American militias by illegally selling arms to a country that had in recent memory held US diplomats hostage but was, at least, anticommunist”. Leftist conspiracy theories tend to get validated in substance if not in details a few years after it’s too late for the knowledge to be useful.
I dunno, I didn’t get much out of it because I found all the connections hard to follow. That article might actually need a diagram showing all the connections between the people featured, but that probably wouldn’t help with the claims that TESCREAL critics are conspiracy theorists…
Maybe some kind of diagram that showed the links visually, color-coded to illustrate some more details about the connection. Add some photographs for visual appeal.
Some on Reddit called Mollie Gleiberman a conspiracy theorist when I cited her argument that these people always wanted to build Computer God and conquer the universe. I did not know that our friends tried that gambit as soon as Emile introduced the TESCREAL concept.
we now have a slop-free jobs board
A LessWronger asks the bold question: is polyamory net negative for most people because jealousy and drama take so much energy to deal with? Does not go in to “chat, my boss is also my lover and holds the lease on my housing, and now I am competing for a promotion with another lover-roommate-coworker, is that bad?”
Anyone know when and why polyamory became a Rationalist shibboleth?
EY has recapitulated a ton of bullshit he learned as a teenager hanging out on the Extropians listserv with older shitty libertarian dudes. The archives are like a proto-LW, with conversations about race and intelligence, sex and kinks, gender differences, armchair geopolitics, etc, mixed in with fantasizing about the glorious transhuman future. I don’t know that anyone was using poly as a term at that point, but everything I’ve read about the Extropians suggests they were eager early adopters of bullshit Evo-psych ideas about men having “evolved” to fuck lots of women.
Oof, if he was raised by Internet Libertarians, I understand why he became such a shitty person.
Sex at Dawn came out in 2010 and was heavily hyped online. It does not seem to have got positive attention in academia. The 2009 edition of The Ethical Slut has polyamory in the title.
Whereas the successful polyamorists know that humans evolved in order to use calendar software.
“Polyamory” is the excuse that abusive men use now the way they used “free love” in the 1960s. I know people who make the poly thing work; they’re honest and communicative, traits that I do not associate with lesswrongs.
I always assumed it was a package deal with the California Ideology.
I reckon it goes way back to the movements that produced them. My first thought is ayn rand:
In 1954, her close relationship with Nathaniel Branden turned into a romantic affair. They informed both their spouses, who briefly objected, until Rand “sp[u]n out a deductive chain from which you just couldn’t escape”, in Barbara Branden’s words, resulting in her and O’Connor’s assent.
You can see how “The most rational thing is that I fuck your spouse” would appeal to the less wrong folk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Atlas_Shrugged_and_Objectivism
Muhammad also discovered that God wanted him to marry as many women as he liked, but did not want them to remarry after he died. Joseph Smith ‘married’ a lot of younger women too. So I think if you let people rewrite social rules, many of them will decide that the new rule is “I fuck whoever I want, but they only fuck me.”
Interesting question because I bet it’s bound to coincide with when the cult dynamics really began to take hold.
Like this isn’t your grandpa’s swingers group, it is vertical workplace polyamory1 with an implicit understanding that if members in good standing don’t get sufficient amounts of ass they might get distracted and become inefficient, costing the universe untold billions in unrealized far future lives.
It’s very easy to imagine a scenario where they just slapped the polyamory brand on an already established culture of culty sex shenanigans.
- I swear the claudism was unintentional
I don’t exactly why, but based off the dates of various classic lesswrong posts I know it has existed since before 2010 in rationalist culture.
As to inexact reasons why… some key big name starting rationalist (i.e. Yudkowsky for sure, but probably a few others) were into polyamory. (Probably for the obvious reasons of getting to sleep with more people.)
There are a lot of attempts to push polyamory on white-collar and chattering-class culture, but many men in the USA seem to push it so they can tell their primary partner “I sleep with my groupies because I am polyamorous” and tell their groupies “who cares that you have a boyfriend, how about polyamory?” It also lets insecure men show off that they have not just one hot babe but several, and we know many rationalists are desperate for the rest of the world to recognize their genius. The problem, to be clear, is not necessarily with polyamory, just with people who use it as a way to get a gang of domestic servants.
I still have scars from events like the ones documented at https://allegedlythewebsite.org/ So many men in the skeptic and adjacent blogosphere used “sex-positivity” to mean “I can hit on you and encourage you to bottom at kink events, and you can’'t say I am creeping you out or you are looking fro a job not a playmate.” Similar dynamics are common in academia, polyamory was just one trendy excuse in the 2000s and 2010s. Scott Alexander experimented with polyamory and was living with a sex blogger in 2013 and I think Yud had connections in the NYC poly and kink scene.
I don’t know the answer, but I’ve always assumed it’s because it’s just something Yud is really into.
Michael Vassar called sleeping with his staff at MetaMed polyamory. Polyamory is common, and bosses and teachers sleeping with employees and students is common, but the combination stands out.
https://www.thetechbubble.info/p/the-future-is-not-tech-forward
whole thing is good but long, but then THAT GUY pops up again. Humans First has apparently already came and went, that other article left out this fun bit of lore:
Politics comes for Humans First too. In late March, there’s a high-profile spat online where pro-AI White House allies like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks retweet a piece critical of Humans First. Shortly after, the organization splits along partisan lines. The conservative wing keeps the Humans First name and makes the right-wing political activist Amy Kremer, who helped organize the January 6 “Save America” rally in DC, its chair; Allen leaves the group. When I ask Allen about the changeup, he is curiously coy (but characteristically body-horrible): The group was “undergoing mitosis,” he says. “I am now a lone organelle floating in the residual cytoplasm.”
It’s ok little buddy you still have steve bannon. /s
