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The article doesn't mention SSC directly, but I think it's pretty obvious where this guy is getting his ideas

When they made an alt-right equivalent of Patreon they called it "Hatreon". This stuff is like a game to them.

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An old post from Caroline Ellison's tumblr, since deleted.

[-] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Here is the document that mentions EA as risk factor, some quotes below

Fourth, the defendant may feel compelled to do this fraud again, or a version of it, based on his use of idiosyncratic, and ultimately for him pernicious, beliefs around altruism, utilitarianism, and expected value to place himself outside of the bounds of the law that apply to others, and to justify unlawful, selfish, and harmful conduct. Time and time again the defendant has expressed that his preferred path is the one that maximizes his version of societal value, even if imposes substantial short term harm or carries substantial risks to others... In this case, the defendant’s professed philosophy has served to rationalize a dangerous brand of megalomania—one where the defendant is convinced that he is above the law and the rules of the road that apply to everyone else, who he necessarily deems inferior in brainpower, skill, and analytical reasoning.

[-] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 11 points 11 months ago

No, they're able to grasp the near term risks, they just don't want that to get in the way of making money because they know they're unlikely to be affected.

[-] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 11 points 11 months ago

It's worth noting that miricult.com went live about a year after Yudkowsky posted that.

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I somehow missed this one until now. Apparently it was once mentioned in the comments on the old sneerclub but I don't think it got a proper post, and I think it deserves one.

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From Sam Altman's blog, pre-OpenAI

[-] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 11 points 11 months ago

Looking forward to LW articles with titles like "Ashkenazification via engineered viruses as a solution for African poverty: here's why it might work"

[-] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 18 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

the cell’s ribosomes will transcribe mRNA into a protein. It’s a little bit like an executable file for biology.

Also, because mRNA basically has root level access to your cells, your body doesn’t just shuttle it around and deliver it like the postal service. That would be a major security hazard.

I am not saying plieotropy doesn't exist. I'm saying it's not as big of a deal as most people in the field assume it is.

Genes determine a brain's architectural prior just as a small amount of python code determines an ANN's architectural prior, but the capabilities come only from scaling with compute and data (quantity and quality).

When you're entirely shameless about your Engineer's Disease

[-] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Old news obviously, but I think it's worth documenting the organizations and dollar amounts

even Steven Pinker is coming out against EA now: https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1732114240666743102

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Image taken from this tweet: https://twitter.com/softminus/status/1732597516594462840

post title was this response: https://twitter.com/QuintusActual/status/1732615870613258694

Sadly the article is behind a paywall and I am loath to give Scott my money

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I was wondering if someone here has a better idea of how EA developed in its early days than I do.

Judging by the link I posted, it seems like Yudkowsky used the term "effective altruist" years before Will MacAskill or Peter Singer adopted it. The link doesn't mention this explicitly, but Will MacAskill was also a lesswrong user, so it seems at least plausible that Yudkowsky is the true father of the movement.

I want to sort this out because I've noticed that a recently lot of EAs have been downplaying the AI and longtermist elements within the movement and talking more about Peter Singer as the movement's founder. By contrast the impression I get about EA's founding based on what I know is that EA started with Yudkowsky and then MacAskill, with Peter Singer only getting involved later. Is my impression mistaken?

[-] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 14 points 11 months ago

I still find it amusing that Siskind complained about being "doxxed" when he used his real first and middle name.

[-] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I highly suspect the voice analysis thing was just to confirm what they already knew, otherwise it would have been like looking for a needle in a haystack.

People on twitter have been speculating that someone who knew him simply ratted him out.

[-] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 24 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

“Our goal is really to increase the scope and scale of civilization as measured in terms of its energy production and consumption,” h

old and busted: paperclip maximizer

new hotness: entropy maximizer

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At various points, on Twitter, Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.” ...

When he’s not tweeting about e/acc, Verdon runs Extropic, which he started in 2022. Some of his startup capital came from a side NFT business, which he started while still working at Google’s moonshot lab X. The project began as an April Fools joke, but when it started making real money, he kept going: “It's like it was meta-ironic and then became post-ironic.” ...

On Twitter, Jezos described the company as an “AI Manhattan Project” and once quipped, “If you knew what I was building, you’d try to ban it.”

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

Most of the article is well-trodden ground if you've been following OpenAI at all, but I thought this part was noteworthy:

Some members of the OpenAI board had found Altman an unnervingly slippery operator. For example, earlier this fall he’d confronted one member, Helen Toner, a director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, at Georgetown University, for co-writing a paper that seemingly criticized OpenAI for “stoking the flames of AI hype.” Toner had defended herself (though she later apologized to the board for not anticipating how the paper might be perceived). Altman began approaching other board members, individually, about replacing her. When these members compared notes about the conversations, some felt that Altman had misrepresented them as supporting Toner’s removal. “He’d play them off against each other by lying about what other people thought,” the person familiar with the board’s discussions told me. “Things like that had been happening for years."

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non-paywall archived version here: https://archive.is/ztech

If anyone finds pictures of the wooden unaligned AI effigy they should post them.

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In a world of moral totalitarianism, sometimes freedom looks like a short story about sex tourism in the Philippines.

I literally lol'd. Beyond parody.

the answer is to get Peter Thiel to try to magic up Dimes Square out of nothing, isn’t it?

On a actually serious note: When I look back at the multiple years I spent on sneerclub and otherwise following the rationalists, I increasingly feel that I had been tilting at windmills. I had spent most of that time making fun of them instead of looking into their finances, and in doing so I had missed the big picture and simply hadn't realized how integral Peter Thiel was in propping them up and building a network to support them.

Thiel funds or funded MIRI, EA groups, Curtis Yarvin, FTX and OpenAI.

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GorillasAreForEating

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