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LessWrong House Style (2023)
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this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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this goes a long way towards explaining why computer pseudoscience — like a fundamental ignorance of algorithmic efficiency and the implications of the halting problem — is so common and even celebrated among lesswrongers and other TESCREALs who should theoretically know better
I am reminded of this excellent essay that I saved a while back: ""your brain does not process information and it is not a computer"
I'm out of the loop: what is lesswrong and why is it cringe?
It's complicated.
It's basically a forum created to venerate the works and ideas of that guy who in the first wave of LLM hype had an editorial published in TIME where he called for a worldwide moratorium on AI research and GPU sales to be enforced with unilateral airstrikes, and whose core audience got there by being groomed by one the most obnoxious Harry Potter fanfictions ever written, by said guy.
Their function these days tends to be to provide an ideological backbone of bad scifi justifications to deregulation and the billionaire takeover of the state, which among other things has made them hugely influential in the AI space.
They are also communicating vessels with Effective Altruism.
If this piques your interest check the links on the sidecard.
I have a basic understanding of what EA is but what do you mean by communicating vessels?
EA started as an offshoot of LessWrong, and LW-style rationalism is still the main gateway into EA as it's pushed relentlessly in those circles, and EA contributes vast amounts of money back into LW goals. Air strikes against datacenters guy is basically bankrolled by Effective Altruism and is also the reason EA considers magic AIs (so called Artificial Super Intelligences) by far the most important risk to humanity's existence; they consider climate change mostly survivable and thus of far less importance, for instance.
Needless to say, LLM peddlers loved that (when they aren't already LW/EAs or adjacent themselves, like the previous OpenAI administrative board before Altman and Microsoft took over). edit: also the founders of Anthropic.
Basically you can't discuss one without referencing the other.
Rationalwiki (not affiliated with LW Rationalists, the opposite actually, op is a mod there) has a page on it. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Less_wrong
Ok rationalwiki actually seems like a really useful resource for reading up on which sexy new movements are bullshit and which aren't
It is, but I would say that as it is aligned to what I think about these folks. It is also a funny site in a way that a lot of these weirdos go "rational wiki sucks, is not rational and lies!" Before reading the pages they are mad about, and afterwards go "yeah no that is fair" after reading it. Happend quite a few times with the "skeptic" yt people in the yt'er to alt right funnel/pipeline from a decade ago. (A few of these people have really lost the plot now, armored skeptic is now some believer in aliens for example. I dont think anyone has cared enough about him to update his page however).
I would love a separate thread on this, more generally a “late 2000s/early 2010s skeptic ytbuers, where are they now”?. The only example (sorta*) I have is thunderf00t, whose yt career track is: anti-christianity, anti-anita sarkeesian, and now anti musk.
*he is not alt right, at least by any mainstream definition of alt-right, afaict.
@swlabr
"anti-christianity, anti-anita sarkeesian, and now anti musk."
2 out of 3 ain't bad.
RationalWiki really hits that sweetspot where everybody hates it and you know that means it's doing something right:
From Prolewiki:
From Conservapedia:
From WikiSpooks (with RationalWiki's invitation for anyone to collaborate highlighted with an emotionally vulnerable red box for emphasis):
And a little bonus:
"Can I have Google discount my rationalwiki entry, has errors posted out of spite 10 years ago"
https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/106033064/can-i-have-google-discount-my-rationalwiki-entry-has-errors-posted-out-of-spite-10-years-ago?hl=en
Perfect.
Damn librals!
E: Saying Darwinism when you mean evolution is quite something btw. Ow god he also is ancient, from 1939.
That sounds like a religion insisting it isn’t one
They do seem to worship Bayes
Edit: I want to qualify that I'm a big fan of Bayes Theorem — in my field, there's some awesome stuff being done with Bayesian models that would be impossible to do with frequentist statistics. Any scorn in my comment is directed at the religious fervour that LW directs at Bayesian statistics, not at the stats themselves.
I say this to emphasise that LWers aren't cringe for being super enthusiastic about maths. It's the everything else that makes them cringe
The particular way they invoke Bayes' theorem is fascinating. They don't seem to ever actually use it in any sort of rigorous way, it's merely used as a way to codify their own biases. It's an alibi for putting a precise percentage point on your vibes. It's kind of beautiful in a really stupid sort of way.
They seem to believe that stereotypes often have a grain of truth to them, and it's thus ok to believe stereotypes.
I would say it goes further and that they have a (pseudo?)magical trust in their own intuitions, as if they are crystal clear revalations from the platonic realms.
"which stereotypes?"
"oh, you know the ones"
They take a theory that is supposed to be about updating one's beliefs in the face of new evidence, and they use it as an excuse to never change what they think.
I think it is a little bit more complicated, Im one of the few mentioning this however, so it isnt a common idea I think. I think it isnt directly a cult/religion, but stealing the language of Silicon Valley, it is a cult incubator. Reading these things, having these beliefs about AGI and rationality makes you more susceptible to join or start cult like groups. The less wrong article "every cause wants to be a cult" doesnt help for example, neither does it when they speak highly of the methods os scientology. The various spinoffs and how many of these groups act cultlike and use cultlike shit makes me think this.
So it is worse in a way.
There's also the communal living, the workplace polyamory along with the prominence of the consensual non-consensual kink, the tithing of the bulk of your earnings and the extreme goals-justify-the-means moralising, the emphasis on psychedelics and prescription amphetamines, and so on and so forth.
Meaning, while calling them a cult incubator is actually really insightful and well put, I have a feeling that the closer you get to TESCREAL epicenters like the SFB the more explicitly culty things start to get.
Yeah but tescreal is a name we give them, themselves organise in different groups (which fit into the term yes). They have different parts pf the tescreal, but it all ends up in culty behaviour, just a different cult.
Btw see also love bombing with Quantum Scott. There was also the weird LW people who ended up protesting other LW people in the crazy way (didnt it include robes or something, I dont recall much). Or calling Scottstar the rightful caliph when Yud was posting less.
So my point is more they morph into different cults, and wonder how much they use this lack of singular cult as a way to claim they are not a cult. Or whatever rot13ed word they used for cult.
E: not that all this really matters in the grand scheme of things. just a personal hangup.
It's impossible to read a post here without going down some weird internet rabbit hole isn't it? This is totally off topic but I was reading the comments on this old phyg post, and one of the comments said (seemingly seriously):
And I'm just thinking, riight highly hypothetical.
It is a peculiar sort of faith movement, where the central devotional practice is wandering around pulling made-up probability estimates out of one's ass
and then posting walls of text about them not merely burying the lede but quite fully conspiring to eliminate the evidence and all witnesses in the same go, as a starting condition
Ah thanks!
They're Basically fanboys of whatever the latest cult is coming out of silicon valley.