fnix

Many ordinary people lost their jobs and homes during the Great Recession, while no one at the top was ever held individually accountable. Knowing the dynamics of the tech world, a hard crash would likely end up playing out the same way.

Absolutely. We already sanction Russian oligarchs for the same reasons, why should we treat the American ones any different honestly.

Wow, the term 'epistemically humble' is ingenious really. I don't have to listen to any critics at all, not because I'm a narcissist, oh no, but because I'm so 'epistemically humble' no one could possibly have anything left to teach me!

How much money would be saved by just funneling the students of these endless ‘AI x’ programs back to the humanities where they can learn to write (actually good) science fiction to their heart’s content? Hey, finally a way AI actually lead to some savings!

That’s an AI governance PhD right there!

Bill Gates is having a normal one.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/26/bill-gates-on-ai-humans-wont-be-needed-for-most-things.html

Yeah, I suppose academia and the tech industry are quite different things, for all their problems.

Still, there’s a way to critique systemic issues without mixing it up with self-aggrandizement and the implication that all your coworkers except a few friends are idiots. He really reminds me of Nassim Taleb in that regard, who (among other things) has made some valid criticisms of IQ but whose style is just a bit too much for my sensibilities. ‘Benevolent griftiness’ seems just the right descriptor here. =)

Wanting to escape the fact that we are beings of the flesh seems to be behind so much of the rationalist-reactionary impulse – a desire to one-up our mortal shells by eugenics, weird diets, ‘brain uploading’ and something like vampirism with the Bryan Johnson guy. It’s wonderful you found a way to embrace and express yourself instead! Yes, in a healthier relationship with our bodies – which is what we are – such changes would be considered part of general healthcare. It sometimes appears particularly extreme in the US from here from Europe at least, maybe a heritage of puritanical norms.

Reminds me of the stories of how Soviet peasants during the rapid industrialization drive under Stalin, who’d never before seen any machinery in their lives, would get emotional with and try to coax faulty machines like they were their farm animals. But these were Soviet peasants! What are structural forces stopping Yud & co outgrowing their childish mystifications? Deeply misplaced religious needs?

Isn’t it all a bit like Ludic’s writings on software engineering which have been shared approvingly here a number of times? The profession is shit, office politics dominates actual work, most other people are NPCs who instead of moving mountains just go through the motions etc – but I bear the Spirit and dare to stand on higher ground! Or am I dumb and getting stuck in superficial similarities here, discounting the substantive differences?

Incidentally, the only time I’ve seen Tracing Woodgrains pop up in my timeline is retweets from one of the Decoding the Gurus podcast hosts, who had also previously palled around with EA-adjacent ‘intelligence researchers’ like Stuart Ritchie. Something to keep in mind for people who perhaps hold up that podcast with its long-form episodes as a benchmark for debunking IDW crankery.

A generous interpretation may be that writing music in the context of the modern music industry may indeed be something that’s creatively unsatisfying for composers, but the solutions to that have nothing to do with magical tech-fixes and everything to do with politics, which is of course anathema to these types. What dumb times we live in.