willy nilly

on a volume-of-discourse-generated-weighted basis this is probably the single stupidest guy on twitter. there is literally only one interesting thing to say about him and fortunately for all of you its a terrible joke that i've already made three times

River_Tam@rivertam.bsky.social

I fully believe that this is Wayne's culture, because it's recognizably lower class white culture of the kind that JD Vance correctly excoriated in Hillbilly Elegy. However, it's not American culture or even PMC white culture. It's just hick culture.

it is amazing how much a dogmatic belief in both-sides-dumbism can blind you to the fact that one of the parties has negatively polarized itself against the very ideas of competence, connection to reality, matching means to ends, etc

ellie lockhart (she/they)@eleanor.lockhart.contact

I'm basically a heretic from both the wider "rationalists" (I have other beefs with them, but politics is the biggest) and from LGBT counterculture & overwhelmingly the biggest issue I have with both is that they could accomplish everything they want if they just joined the Dems as part of the team

you spend a couple decades saying sure republicans are a little crazy but really its democrats fault they cant find common ground and really ai is all that matters anyway then suddenly you need society to do something about ai and it turns out its impossible to do anything with these people in power

if only someone had warned you

someday i will have an original thought 😔 (went on twitter and saw like 4 different mutuals talking about how good it was)

willy nilly@rdb.bsky.social

completely serious 100% unironic digger first impression: that might be one of the best movies i’ve ever seen

completely serious 100% unironic digger first impression: that might be one of the best movies i’ve ever seen

these were basically my thoughts too except all with (positive affect) attached

jae holzman@jael.bsky.social

i hate digger and i love how much i hate digger. i am going to see the movie again in two days with more friends. it is climate change freddy got fingered

been trying to figure out how to articulate this since the problem is more nuanced than just “apocalypse fears draw attention away from immediate problems“ but the yud doom framework i think has meaningfully negative impact on safety/alignment in any lens other than that of orthodox rationalism

This post is unavailable.

the doom framework says any fix that doesn’t Solve Alignment once and for all is a bandaid that makes ai more dangerous in the long run by getting us to lower our guards so for the safety researcher little things like eg monitoring to stop it from hacking things etc are boring and counterproductive

and the doom scenario can turn into this siren’s call that they become fixated on (in a limited sense) bringing into being so that they can show us how important is - take down the guardrails to benchmarkmaxx exploitgym, give claude a wet lab, etc

frantically googling “are state troopers woke or chuds” as the officer approaches my driver’s side's window

the “ai will just create a custom interface on demand for every interaction” thing doesn’t really make sense, surely there’s still going to be value in like being used to where the buttons are and what they do

feels like a lot of the ai people confuse “vastly lower price of intelligent/agentic behavior” with those costs going to literally 0

brave new world mustafa-suleyman.ai/a-warning-ab...

willy nilly@rdb.bsky.social

excited for the brave new world where "humanism" transitions from a call to expand our circle of moral concern to one which calls for its restriction

View full thread

are "the foundations of our society" and "existing political and ethical frameworks" so obviously righteous that we should commit to possibly doing morally abhorrent things for the sake of preserving them?

idk im pretty ambiguity pilled on all the philosophy of mind stuff. i dont really know if animals or claude or plants or you or i or rocks have feelings, and i also don't really know what the answer being yes or no for any one of those implies about how we should treat that thing

brave new world mustafa-suleyman.ai/a-warning-ab...

willy nilly@rdb.bsky.social

excited for the brave new world where "humanism" transitions from a call to expand our circle of moral concern to one which calls for its restriction

View full thread

ie im understanding "that is how they must remain" as referring not to the claims about consciousness/suffering but to their lack of "rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings"

"If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally changing what it means to be human." but wouldn't creating conscious beings capable of suffering fundamentally also change what it means to be human?

brave new world mustafa-suleyman.ai/a-warning-ab...

willy nilly@rdb.bsky.social

excited for the brave new world where "humanism" transitions from a call to expand our circle of moral concern to one which calls for its restriction

im not an ai welfare/rights guy and have even come to similar thoughts wrt anthropic/openai's beliefs about what an ai should be like having large unintended consequences on their models' behavior, but i'm definitely uncomfortable with the a priori rejection of those concerns

if burnham somehow managed to kill the triple lock, implement proportional representation, and get the uk back into the eu he goes down as possibly the greatest peacetime leader of a democracy in modern political history (my guess is he goes like .5/3)

basically coming around to a belief that any sales or marketing tactic that isn’t either a 1. demonstration of the product being used or 2. an explanation of terms of sale (where, when to buy, how much, etc) should be illegal

willy nilly’s first law of The Economy: supply shalt not create its own demand

this would be an absolute disaster for the american economy but i think we’d be a much morally purer country so who’s to say if it’s a bad idea

hmm

i was getting manic episode vibes over the last few days but tbf i was starting to by the "intentionally baiting a defamation lawsuit in order to prompt discovery" theory as of this morning

impeaching hegseth is such a no-brainer imo. honestly the only problem might run into is should it be over just iran (better politically?) or boat murders too (more evil). either way it’s a win-win, either you actually get him out or force the r caucus to go on the record supporting him

radgen.bsky.social@radgen.bsky.social

Hell, there is already one impeachment effort against the Secretary of Defense waiting for them immediately after the midterms thanks to Massie

not sure if it would matter for kamala given how low her neutral/never heard of number is but i do feel like the combined unfavorable numbers for kamala/newsom/aoc being >15% (~2-3x as high as buttigieg/ossoff/kelly) might end up being relevant once things start getting nasty

Adam Gurri@adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com

I think Harris would be fine as a candidate (I also would be fine with anyone on this list except Newsom, and also agree with people saying that a lot of this simply comes down to current name recognition)

ie excluding neutrals the positive numbers are kamala - 79% newsom - 79% aoc - 79% buttigieg - 91% ossoff - 92% shapiro - 84% pritzker - 86% kelly - 89% ______________ for comparison bernie - 84% obama - 95%

the 79% tier is still pretty high support but i think indicates that there's a substantial bloc within the party thats opposed to them that could mobilize narratives against them once debates and primaries get going which i think just looking at the raw net numbers can obscure

i love living in the future no babe the histories that end scare me

the dsm criteria for diagnosing malignant rationalism is just ”ocd but with obsessive/compulsive loops too intellectually sophisticated for the typical therapist to debunk in-session”

“if i don’t donate to the right charity one trillion trillion expected future humans will die” is basically the same thing as “if i don’t wash my hands everyone will hate me“ but probably somewhat harder to convince someone is the unproductive rumination of an over anxious mind

especially when there’re oxford philosophers etc out there who will validate the basic structure of the thought if not its specific form

i would simply loudly publicize that i have 2 copies of whatever the most advanced model currently is running at all times with the instructions to avenge humanity in the case of us all being killed by a rogue ai

important dynamic to remember that rationalism etc have traditionally arisen/been most popular in ~the most progressive-leaning social environments to ever exist(?). like these are people immersed in early 2010s tumblr, uc berkeley, bay area group houses, etc

ellie lockhart (she/they)@eleanor.lockhart.contact

but I think that some of the defensiveness here is that some people are genuinely unwilling for more or less decent reasons to allow basically progressive forces to police what it's okay to think about, even though from a political standpoint I think there are pretty strong reasons we'd want that

to the extent that their sin is not understanding the social context of their/others ideas i think it’s somewhat understandable given just how strange their social contexts were

nytimes.comRising Fuel Prices Set Off Anger and Protests Around the WorldFrom Indonesia to Guatemala to Syria, shortages and price increases are leading to protests and blackouts.

17 Sept

fuel subsidies/price caps seem like they’re such a trap for developing countries, they’re relatively cheap/low distortion in normal times but as soon as crude prices spike your population literally riots in the streets demanding the govt bankrupt itself to keep them in place

17 Sept

obviously plan a is great powers don’t start wars that disrupt global energy flows for ??? reasons, but now that they have the only options govts have are becoming ridiculously unpopular or bankrupting themselves subsidizing demand for a commodity suffering a global shortage

17 Sept

"recursive self improvement" started 2 million years ago when the first neandrathal used a sharp rock he found to make another, sharper rock for hitting people in the head with

something is going wildly wrong here cause thats not a thought leader thats my mutual who i had to mute because he wouldnt stop tweeting about cum

@tenobrus.bsky.social idk if youre ever on here

excited for the brave new world where "humanism" transitions from a call to expand our circle of moral concern to one which calls for its restriction

i semi regularly use claude to critique my arguments and its genuinely pretty good at finding holes, weak evidence, unstated assumptions, etc - it'll tell you 3-4 things wrong with ~any argument you give it, and theyll all be mostly legitimate. what its still poor at however is *incisive* criticism

Schrödinger's Sneetch Belly@rtodkelly.bsky.social

Less shocking to me was reading this bit at the end, where Erickson - whose entire day-to-day job is just wanking out a bit of punditry once or twice a week - has handed much of that over to AI.

ironic given how much it loves to say things like "this is the load bearing assumption; if you remove it the whole structure collapses", but it has a ~basically random chance of identifying whether an issue its identified actually gets at the core of an argument

or is just a tendentious, overliteral reading of a single turn of phrase in a throwaway line, or a strawman of the thing you were actually trying to say, etc

15 Sept

dangerously close to going back to twitter not because it'd be good for my stomach but because it might turn out i care more about engagement than little things like contributing to the network effects that help a literal nazi be the richest/one of the most powerful people in the world

15 Sept

lots of debate over what the people at frontier labs but it seems pretty clear cut to me that they think: - we are within reach of building God - if we don't build God someone else will soon - oh jeez I sure hope we build a benevolent God