this review has a number of issues
For example, it doesn't even get through the subhead before calling Yud an "AI researcher".
All three of these movements [Bay Area rationalists, "AI safety" and Effective Altruists] attempt to derive their way of viewing the world from first principles, applying logic and evidence to determine the best ways of being.
Sure, Jan.
And he's really showing the unidirectionality of his empathy as well as his persecution complex. E.g., here's Woit telling Aaronson to get therapy:
I tried to tell you earlier this year that you should be seeking professional help about this, and things have now gotten much worse.
And in another comment:
Seriously: seek professional help for your paranoid delusions/psychological defense mechanisms for justifying murdering Palestinian children on a large scale as part of a genocide/ethnic cleansing campaign.
And another commenter says,
I hope Scott gets help, he is clearly insane.
OK, call it casually ableist, but it's not wishing death upon the man, or harm to his loved ones. But here's Aaronson commenting further down the thread:
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m not addressing any of my comments here to Peter, or to any of the cowards of his comment section. They’re unworthy of civilized conversation, as they don’t fulfill the basic prerequisites for it, like caring whether their interlocutors and their loved ones live or die.
Jeshua H. ben Joseph, dude. Get help.
You know who Scott Aaronson reminded me of, back when he first had his incel-ish blogospasm? Tatsuya Ishida. Scott Aa's blogging echoed, to an extent, the "Sisterhood" phase transition of Sinfest. Both of them stemmed from a man being his own worst enemy. In both cases, my reaction was, "Good grief, bro, take a breath. There is not a mass movement to declare that your penis makes you bad. Whatever you're reading, you're seeking it out to hurt yourself because some part of you feels you deserve to be punished."
For those who don't rubberneck at online car crashes, Sinfest was a popular webcomic in the early 2000's known for raunchy, bawdy, deliberately "edgy" humor delivered with rather technically adept art. It was anti-establishment during the Bush years, with a bit of a "spiritual but not religious" streak. Tatsuya seemed to mellow when Obama rose to prominence; the strip bought hard into the "yes we can" message. And then... whoo wee, things got off the chain. He swerved into "feminism", of a self-flagellating kind. Then from anti-porn, anti-sex-work-ism, he went TERF, then MAGA, and eventually esoteric pagan neo-Nazi. The art quality decayed apace, first discarding the personality of the brushwork, the settings, the character design... eventually losing its grasp of basic frame-to-frame continuity. A significant fraction of it by now is probably AI slop. Tats' politics have degenerated into a few hateful ideas in orbit around each other. One Reddit user said, IIRC, "Tats believes that genocide is bad because the Jews are doing it."
Mirror images, man. Mirror images.
I think Eliezer Yudkowsky & many posts on LessWrong are failing at keeping things concise and to the point.
The replies: "Kolmogorov complexity", "Pareto frontier", "reference class".
From page 17:
Rather than encouraging critical thinking, in core EA the injunction to take unusual ideas seriously means taking one very specific set of unusual ideas seriously, and then providing increasingly convoluted philosophical justifications for why those particular ideas matter most.
ding ding ding
It occurs to me that, intentionally or not, he's probably steering TESCREAL types to Wikipedia itself as well. I wouldn't be surprised if accounts were coming out of the woodwork to post multi-kiloword screeds about Wikipedia being soooo unfairrrr....
There’s no attempt to dispute the overlap between NRX and Ratdom, just an un-argued assumption that nobody should care enough to put it in their Wikipedia article.
(ahem) The correct term is a prior.
:-P
"Computational complexity does not work that way!" is one of those TESCREAL-zone topics that I wish I had better reading recommendations for.
Quoted for posterity/convenience:
in a world of greater legibility, romantic partners would have the conversation about "I'd trade up if I found somebody 10%/25%/125% better than you" in advance, and make sure they have common knowledge of the numbers
(Marriage makes sense as a promise not to do that period; but if so, you want to make sure that both partners are on the same page about that. Not everyone assumes that marriage means that.)
Her: I am never, ever letting you go unless I find someone 75% better. Me: Works for me.
oh hello there Performative Allistic Twitter
I just can't respect a man who is posturing and arrogant yet still fails to go for the phrasing "to whom you are speaking".
Suppose you say that you’re 99.99% confident that 2 + 2 = 4.
Then you're a dillbrain.
Then you have just asserted that you could make 10,000 independent statements, in which you repose equal confidence, and be wrong, on average, around once. Maybe for 2 + 2 = 4 this extraordinary degree of confidence would be possible
Yes, how extraordinary that I can say every day that the guy in front of me at the bodega won't win the Powerball. Or that [SystemRandom().random() >= 0.9999 for i in range(10000)] makes a list that is False in all but one spot.
P(x|y) is defined as P(x,y)/P(y). P(A|A) is defined as P(A,A)/P(A) = P(A)/P(A) = 1. The ratio of these two probabilities may be 1, but I deny that there's any actual probability that's equal to 1. P(|) is a mere notational convenience, nothing more.
No, you kneebiter.
Fortunately, the sheer unreadability of the "glowfic" format shields us from the horrors within.