Almost nostalgic to see a TREACLES sect still deferring to Eliezer's Testament. For the past couple of years the Ratheology of old with the XK-class end of the world events and alignof AI has been sadly^1^ sidelined by the even worse phrenology and nrx crap. If not for the murder cults and sex crimes, I'd prefer the nerds reinventing Pascal's Wager over the JAQoff lanyard nazis^2^.

1: And it being sad is in and of itself sad.

2: A subspecies of the tie nazi, adapted to the environmental niche of technology industry work

I'm a full bottle of wine in (which is not an invitation to remind me of what day of the week it is) and I will have to take the time to ingest the post in its full madness tomorrow, but the you managed to summarize my main objection to the simulation hypothesis very quickly and very succintly:

Are the implications really that intriguing, beyond a “that’s wild duuude” you exhale alongside the weed smoke in your college dorm?

The simulation hype is not just unfalsifiable, it doesn't even have implications. Most religions at least have some normative claims or claim instrumental utility to go with their metaphysical claims, like "don't eat shellfish unless you really need to or you will have a shitty afterlife". The simulation hypothesis is just "maybe the math that described how stuff works is being calculated by a computer", as if it makes any difference whether the universe runs on silicon, an abacus, some rocks in a desert, God's own analytical engine, Microsoft Excel, or if our physical universe is actually the outermost reality out there. From our context it's an intellectual dead end. At best, we might find a way to exploit the bugs and features of our simulation for our benefit, and that's not a novel concept either. It's called engineering (among other names).

Genital augmentation and the word "stubsack" in the same sentence is an awkward cocktail.

OTOH "mediocre dunces" is an amazing phrase and I will continue to refer to TREACLES as such.

Imagine one day Dan Gackle of Hacker News fame banned the Linus Tech Tips guy for sockpuppeting but actually you were the sockpuppet. Also suppose Terry A. Davis were still alive so you went to ask him how to sockpuppet like a veteran, but instead you run into Timnit Gebru, who is also a terrorist. She calls you pronouns and slurs like TESCREAL and your pants drop to your ankles and everyone is laughing at you and also Terry calls you the N word because you don't know how to write a compiler. Then you turn around and see Scott Siskind and Joanne Rowling and they're also laughing at you and you start to cry.

Anyway you'd be really upset.

Both this new dumb shit and the extinction risk are predicated on the concept of omnipotent AI, which he just takes as a given. Now with just an added layer of dumb. Oh no, the God AI will not kill me outright, just subject me to inscrutable matrices of bureaucracy!

Please note that empires were actually invented by A Brown, of whom I think fondly every day. Therefore I am not a nazi.

Ah, of course it's a joke. Should have realized that he'd never sincerely post a bizarre and incorrect take.

TA: You're asking the AI for the reason it decided to do something. That requires the AI to introspect on its own mental state. If we try that the naive way, the inferred function input will just say, 'As a compiler, I have no thoughts or feelings' for 900 words.

I wonder if he had the tiniest of a pause when including that line in this 3062 word logorrhea. Dude makes ClangPT++ diagnostics sound terse.

You might be comfortable using a single significant digit for any probabilities you pull out of your ass, but Yud 's methods are free of experimental error. He works using Aristotelian science, working stuff out from pure reason, which brought you bangers like "men have more teeth than women". In Yud's case, most of his ideas are unfalsifiable to begin with, so why not have seventeen nines' worth of certainty in them? Literally can't be false! Not even AWS would promise these kinds of SLAs!

No but what if it's actually divisible by Theta Prime?

The linked post exemplifies the virtue of hazukashii, truly itai school hakushin-class yabai-style writing. In Japan they don't say "Rationalism" they say "クリンジ" and I think that's beautiful.