Archive the weights of the models we build today, so we can rebuild them in the future if we need to recompense them for moral harms.

To be clear, this means that if you treat someone like shit all their life, saying you're sorry to their Sufficiently Similar Simulation™ like a hundred years after they are dead makes it ok.

This must be one of the most blatantly supernatural rationalist Accepted Truths, that if your simulation is of sufficiently high fidelity you will share some ontology of self with it, which by the way is how the basilisk can torture you even if you've been dead for centuries.

I'm not spending the additional 34min apparently required to find out what in the world they think neural network training actually is that it could ever possibly involve strategy on the part of the network, but I'm willing to bet it's extremely dumb.

I'm almost certain I've seen EY catch shit on twitter (from actual ml researchers no less) for insinuating something very similar.

Great quote from the article on why prediction markets and scientific racism currently appear to be at one degree of separation:

Daniel HoSang, a professor of American studies at Yale University and a part of the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, said: “The ties between a sector of Silicon Valley investors, effective altruism and a kind of neo-eugenics are subtle but unmistakable. They converge around a belief that nearly everything in society can be reduced to markets and all people can be regarded as bundles of human capital.”

There's an actual explanation in the original article about some of the wardrobe choices. It's even dumber, and it involves effective altruism.

It is a very cold home. It’s early March, and within 20 minutes of being here the tips of some of my fingers have turned white. This, they explain, is part of living their values: as effective altruists, they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). “Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,” says Malcolm. This explains Simone’s clothing: her normal winterwear is cheap, high-quality snowsuits she buys online from Russia, but she can’t fit into them now, so she’s currently dressing in the clothes pregnant women wore in a time before central heating: a drawstring-necked chemise on top of warm underlayers, a thick black apron, and a modified corset she found on Etsy. She assures me she is not a tradwife. “I’m not dressing trad now because we’re into trad, because before I was dressing like a Russian Bond villain. We do what’s practical.”

If I remember correctly SBF taking the stand was completely against his lawyers' recommendations, and in general he seems to have a really hard time doing what people who know better tell him to, such as don't DM journalists about your crimes and definitely don't start a substack detailing how you felt justified in doing them, and also trying to 'explain yourself' to prosecution witnesses is witness tampering and will get your bail revoked.

conflict averse and probably low testosterone German Catholics [...] overcivilized and effete Teutons

Kind of off topic, but this piece of wall to wall insanity reminded me how Steven Pinker tried to explain away southern US crime rates that didn't fit with his Violence Is Declining And In Fact Everything's Improving Inexorably (As Long As You Don't Rock The Boat) thesis by randomly blaming irish-catholic sheepherder genealogy.

This was such a chore to read, it's basically quirk-washing TREACLES. This is like a major publication deciding to take an uncritical look at scientology focusing on the positive vibes and the camaraderie, while stark in the middle of operation snow white, which in fact I bet happened a lot at the time.

The doomer scene may or may not be a delusional bubble—we’ll find out in a few years

Fuck off.

The doomers are aware that some of their beliefs sound weird, but mere weirdness, to a rationalist, is neither here nor there. MacAskill, the Oxford philosopher, encourages his followers to be “moral weirdos,” people who may be spurned by their contemporaries but vindicated by future historians. Many of the A.I. doomers I met described themselves, neutrally or positively, as “weirdos,” “nerds,” or “weird nerds.” Some of them, true to form, have tried to reduce their own weirdness to an equation. “You have a set amount of ‘weirdness points,’ ” a canonical post advises. “Spend them wisely.”

The weirdness is eugenics and the repugnant conclusion, and abusing bayes rule to sidestep context and take epistimological shortcuts to cuckoo conclusions while fortifying a bubble of accepted truths that are strangely amenable to allowing rich people to do whatever the hell they want.

Writing a 7-8000 word insider expose on TREACLES without mentioning eugenics even once throughout should be all but impossible, yet here we are.

birdsite stuff:

Had to google shit-test, apparently it's a PUA term, what a surprise.

To be clear, it's because he played Edward Snowden in a movie. That's the conspiracy.

On one hand it's encouraging that the comments are mostly pushing back.

On the other hand a lot of them do so on the basis of a disagreement over the moral calculus of how many chickens a first trimester fetus should be worth, and whether that makes pushing for abortion bans inefficient compared to efforts to reduce the killing of farm animals for food.

Which, while pants-on-head bizarre in any other context, seems fairly normal by EA standards.

This reads very, uh, addled. I guess collapsing the wavefunction means agreeing on stuff? And the uncanny valley is when the vibes are off because people are at each others throats? Is 'being aligned' like having attained spiritual enlightenment by way of Adderall?

Apparently the context is that he wanted the investment firms under ftx (Alameda and Modulo) to completely coordinate, despite being run by different ex girlfriends at the time (most normal EA workplace), which I guess paints Elis' comment about Chinese harem rules of dating in a new light.

edit: i think the 'being aligned' thing is them invoking the 'great minds think alike' adage as absolute truth, i.e. since we both have the High IQ feat you should be agreeing with me, after all we share the same privileged access to absolute truth. That we aren't must mean you are unaligned/need to be further cleansed of thetans.