SneerClub

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

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?

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.”

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."

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

Let's build a tower of nonsense on top of numbers we vibe with and pulled out of our ass

For your utter delight and mine.

• This is readily available: https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets
• This appears to be the first document: https://web.archive.org/web/20220602164803/https://swarthy.substack.com/p/effective-accelerationism-eacc?s=r

The original genesis appears to have been these guys rambling on Twitter shortly before one of them posted the first essay.

cheers to @earthquake@lemm.ee and @blakestacey for finding these

this is a worse understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics than creationists.

they don't name Nick Land as their origin, but do generally credit him as the creator of accelerationism, and also their ideas on the inevitability of techno-capitalism are straight out of "The Dark Enlightenment" by Land.

so firstly, I blame El Sandifer for speaking this fucking neutron star of stupidity into existence, and secondly myself for understanding most of this orchestra of neoreactionary dog whistles.

thirdly, these fuckers all talk like Sephiroth.

I feel like I should write it up to explain the AI grifter e/acc thing, but also it's hard to explain this nonsense without a #include of Neoreaction A Basilisk and I'm not sure the centrist finance types of my readership have that much patience, nor that I do.

EDIT: urgh. Vitalik Buterin is philosophising again. d/acc. https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html "Special thanks to" several rationalists

Found this because an article on Helen Toner popped up in my feed and I wanted to find out more, and boy did I find out more.

Molly White is best known for shining a light on the silliness and fraud that are cryptocurrency, blockchain and Web3. This essay may be a sign that she's shifting her focus to our sneerworthy friends in the extended rationalism universe. If so, that's an excellent development. Molly's great.

saw this pointed out here and felt it deserved it's own post

let me mention that this is exactly the sort of argument I've seen pedophilia enthusiasts break out many times:

hmm, we thoughtful inquirers should look at this incredibly tenous evidence I've curated. it raises questions about whether we should be superrrrr chill about sex with children. questions with answers that, I'm sold on!

we're pretty sure he really did just get kicked for not being enough of an AI doomsday cultist

Not 7.5% or 8%. 8.5%. Numbers are important.

Posting this as a follow up to my last post: Sam Altman's sister, Annie Altman, claims Sam has severely abused her.

Don't know the real reason he's been fired, but good riddance.

Flashback time:

One of the most important and beneficial trainings I ever underwent as a young writer was trying to script a comic. I had to cut down all of my dialogue to fit into speech bubbles. I was staring closely at each sentence and striking out any word I could.

"But then I paid for Twitter!"

AI doctors will revolutionize medicine! You'll go to a service hosted in Thailand that can't take credit cards, and pay in crypto, to get a correct diagnosis. Then another VISA-blocked AI will train you in following a script that will get a human doctor to give you the right diagnosis, without tipping that doctor off that you're following a script; so you can get the prescription the first AI told you to get.

Can't get mifepristone or puberty blockers? Just have a chatbot teach you how to cast Persuasion!

https://read.easypeasymethod.org/

"a rewrite of Allen Carr’s EasyWay to Quit Smoking for pornography"

115 page PDF, god help us

ends with recommendation for mercury chelation and reading a Red Pill manifesto

this is precisely who I'd expect to use Urbit

(spotted by gzt)

In today's episode, Yud tries to predict the future of computer science.

The Future of Sovereign AI

We still don’t know just how important and disruptive artificial intelligence will be, but one thing seems clear: the power of AI should not remained cordoned off by centralized companies. Our panelists—Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed, Native Planet’s ~mopfel-winrux, Tlon’s Lukas Buhler, along with @mogmachine from Bittensor and David Capone from Harmless AI—are the perfect team to explore the possibilities unlocked by more sovereign, decentralized, and open AI.

[A bitcoiner, an ancap, a 3-D gun printer, an alt-righter, the founder of Hatreon and a convicted kiddle fucker walk into a bar. The barman picks up a baseball bat and says "get the fuck out of my bar, Cody."]

Cancelling the Culture Industry

In a world of moral totalitarianism, sometimes freedom looks like a short story about sex tourism in the Philippines. In this panel, author Sam Frank hosts MRB editor in chief Noah Kumin, romance writer Delicious Tacos, sex detective Magdalene Taylor and frog champion Lomez of Passage Press. Join them for a freewheeling discussion of saying whatever they want while evading the digital hall monitors.#

[not being able to live within five hundred feet of a school is a small price to pay for true freedom]

Securing Urbit

How do we make Urbit secure? And what does a secure Urbit look like? The great promise of Urbit has always been that it can provide a sovereign computing platform for the individual—a means by which to do everything you would want to do on a computer without giving up your data. For that dream to be fulfilled, Urbit should be as secure as your crypto hardware wallet—perhaps moreso. Moderated by Rikard Hjort, Urbit experts Logan Allen, and Joe Bryan discuss with Urbit fan and cybersecurity expert Ryan Lackey.

[as secure as a crypto hardware wallet, you say]

Rebooting the Arts

The culture war is over—Culture lost. Now it’s a race to build a new one. Media whisperer Ryan Lambert leads a conversation with Play Nice founder/impresario Hadrian Belove. trend forecaster Sean Monahan, and controversial art-doc collective Kirac. They discuss how to win the culture race, and create a new arts ecosystem out of the rubble.

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

How to Fund a New World

Cosimo de Medici persuaded Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine sculptor, to enter his service by writing him a letter which concluded, 'Come, I will choke you with gold.' Join UF Director of Markets Andrew Kim as he discusses how to get more gold onto Urbit with Jake Brukhman of Coinfund, Jae Yang of Tacen, @BacktheBunny from RabbitX and Evan Fisher of Portal VC.

[the answer's still Thiel, isn't it?]