I should probably mention that this person went on to write other comments in the same thread, revealing that they’re still heavily influenced by Bay ?Area rationalism (or what one other commenter brilliantly called “ritual multiplication”).
The story has now hopped to the orange site. I was expecting a shit-show, but there have been a few insightful comments from critics of the rationalists. This one from “rachofsunshine” for instance:
[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz’s friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.]
The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community.
As relevant here:
While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some degree of rounding or unknown-unknowns. A -> B and B -> C means A -> C in a formal sense, but A -almostcertainly-> B and B -almostcertainly-> C does not mean A -almostcertainly-> C. Rationalists, by tending to overly formalist approaches, tend to lose the thread of the messiness of the real world and follow these lossy implications as though they are lossless. That leads to…
Precision errors in utility calculations that are numerically-unstable. Any small chance of harm times infinity equals infinity. This framing shows up a lot in the context of AI risk, but it works in other settings too: infinity times a speck of dust in your eye >>> 1 times murder, so murder is “justified” to prevent a speck of dust in the eye of eternity. When the thing you’re trying to create is infinitely good or the thing you’re trying to prevent is infinitely bad, anything is justified to bring it about/prevent it respectively.
Its leadership - or some of it, anyway - is extremely egotistical and borderline cult-like to begin with. I think even people who like e.g. Eliezer would agree that he is not a humble man by any stretch of the imagination (the guy makes Neil deGrasse Tyson look like a monk). They have, in the past, responded to criticism with statements to the effect of “anyone who would criticize us for any reason is a bad person who is lying to cause us harm”. That kind of framing can’t help but get culty.
The nature of being a “freethinker” is that you’re at the mercy of your own neural circuitry. If there is a feedback loop in your brain, you’ll get stuck in it, because there’s no external “drag” or forcing functions to pull you back to reality. That can lead you to be a genius who sees what others cannot. It can also lead you into schizophrenia really easily. So you’ve got a culty environment that is particularly susceptible to internally-consistent madness, and finally:
It’s a bunch of very weird people who have nowhere else they feel at home. I totally get this. I’d never felt like I was in a room with people so like me, and ripping myself away from that world was not easy. (There’s some folks down the thread wondering why trans people are overrepresented in this particular group: well, take your standard weird nerd, and then make two-thirds of the world hate your guts more than anything else, you might be pretty vulnerable to whoever will give you the time of day, too.)
TLDR: isolation, very strong in-group defenses, logical “doctrine” that is formally valid and leaks in hard-to-notice ways, apocalyptic utility-scale, and being a very appealing environment for the kind of person who goes super nuts -> pretty much perfect conditions for a cult. Or multiple cults, really. Ziz’s group is only one of several.
As someone who also went to university in the late 80s and early 90s, I didn’t share his experiences. This reads like one of those silly shaggy-dog stories where everyone says sarcastically afterwards: “yeah that happened”.
Damn. I thought I was cynical, but nowhere near as cynical as OpenAI is, apparently.
As anyone who’s been paying attention already knows, LLMs are merely mimics that provide the “illusion of understanding”.
I’m noticing that people who criticize him on that subreddit are being downvoted, while he’s being upvoted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, as part of his prodigious self-promotion of this overlong and tendentious screed, he’s steered some of his more sympathetic followers to some of these forums.
Actually it’s the wikipedia subreddit thread I meant to refer to.
As a longtime listener to Tech Won’t Save Us, I was pleasantly surprised by my phone’s notification about this week’s episode. David was charming and interesting in equal measure. I mostly knew Jack Dorsey as the absentee CEO of Twitter who let the site stagnate under his watch, but there were a lot of little details about his moderation-phobia and fash-adjacency that I wasn’t aware of.
By the way, I highly recommend the podcast to the TechTakes crowd. They cover many of the same topics from a similar perspective.
For me it gives off huge Dr. Evil vibes.
If you ever get tired of searching for pics, you could always go the lazy route and fall back on AI-generated images. But then you’d have to accept the reality that in few years your posts would have the analog of a geocities webring stamped on them.
Trace seems a bit… emotional. You ok, Trace?
But will my insurance cover a visit to Dr. Spicy Autocomplete?
So now Steve Sailer has shown up in this essay’s comments, complaining about how Wikipedia has been unfairly stifling scientific racism.
Birds of a feather and all that, I guess.
what is the entire point of singling out Gerard for this?
He’s playing to his audience, which includes a substantial number of people with lifetime subscriptions to the Unz Review, Taki’s crapazine and Mankind Quarterly.
why it has to be quite that long
Welcome to the rationalist-sphere.
Scott Alexander, by far the most popular rationalist writer besides perhaps Yudkowsky himself, had written the most comprehensive rebuttal of neoreactionary claims on the internet.
Hey Trace, since you’re undoubtedly reading this thread, I’d like to make a plea. I know Scott Alexander Siskind is one of your personal heroes, but maybe you should consider digging up some dirt in his direction too. You might learn a thing or two.
Please touch grass.
The next AI winter can’t come too soon. They’re spinning up coal-fired power plants to supply the energy required to build these LLMs.
Until a month ago, TW was the long-time researcher for “Blocked and Reported”, the podcast hosted by Katie ‘TERF’ Herzog and relentless sealion Jesse Singal.
I wouldn’t know anything about the thread, as it’s impossible for me to read without a twitter account. Yet another reason why the site is trash.
But by all means, go on generating content for a bigoted fascist who will use everything you write to increase engagement with his platform and give it undeserved credibility and $$$.
(And no, I won’t block you.)
Sorry for the off-topic rant, but WTF is Emile Torres doing on twitter? Anytime I see someone creating content for that Nazi hellsite, I start looking at them differently.
Lots of discussion on the orange site post about this today.
(I mentioned this in the other sneerclub thread on the topic but reposted it here since this seems to be the more active discussion zone for the topic.)