Of course they use shitty AI slop as the background for their web page.
Like, what the hell is it even supposed to be? A mustachioed man writing in a journal in what appears to be a French village town square? Shadowy individuals chatting around an oddly incongruous fire pit? Guitar dude and listener sitting on invisible benches? I get that AI produces this kind of garbage all the time, but did the lesswrongers even bother to evaluate it for appropriateness?
Sorry, when she started taking Yud's claims to be a "renowned AI researcher" at face value, I noped out.
I'm probably not saying anything you didn't already know, but Vox's "Future Perfect" section, of which this article is a part, was explicitly founded as a booster for effective altruism. They've also memory-holed the fact that it was funded in large part by FTX. Anything by one of its regular writers (particularly Dylan Matthews or Kelsey Piper) should be mentally filed into the rationalist propaganda folder. I mean, this article throws in an off-hand remark by Scott Alexander as if it's just taken for granted that he's some kind of visionary genius.
It's kind of fascinating how rotten the "New Atheist" movement turned out to be. Whether it's Richard Dawkins revealing his inner racist-misogynist, Michael Shermer being rapey AF, or James Lindsay turning into a Christofascist, the movement seems to have spawned and/or revealed a lot of really problematic people. I guess it's no surprise that the rationalist scene had such a membership overlap.
My P(harrassment scandal) for EA is 0.98.
Reading his timeline since the revelation is weird and creepy. It's full of SV investors robotically pledging their money (and fealty) to his future efforts. If anyone still needs evidence that SV is a hive mind of distorted and dangerous group-think, this is it.
One of the easiest ways to get downvoted on the orange site is to say anything even mildly critical of Scott Alexander Siskind. It's really amusing how much respect there is for him there.
I wonder if he's ever applied this advice to himself. Because one could argue that trauma was a significant factor in his obsession with transhumanism and the singularity.
When Yud's younger brother died tragically at age 19, it clearly traumatized him. In this case, X was "the death of my little brother". From this he learned Y: to be angry and fearful of death ("You do not make peace with Death!"). His fascination with the singularity can be seen in this light as a wish to cheat death, while his more recent AI doomerism is the singularity's fatalistic counterpart: an eschatological distortion and acceleration of the reality that death comes for us all.
This part of the first comment got an audible guffaw out of me:
I think that there's been a failure to inhabit the least convenient possible world°, and the general distribution over possible outcomes, and correspondingly attempt to move to the pareto-frontier of outcomes assuming that distribution.
Unintentional self-parody of the highest order.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then Yud is witless.
That thread is wild. Nate proposes techniques to get his kooky beliefs taken more seriously. Others point out that those very same techniques counterproductively pushed people to into the e/acc camp. Nate deletes those other people's comments. How rationalist of him!