The predictably grievous harms of Effective Altruism

https://blog.oup.com/2022/12/the-predictably-grievous-harms-of-effective-altruism/

@sneerclub

oh yes, this one is about our very good friends

Would've been way better if the author didn't feel the need to occasionally hand it to siskind for what amounts to keeping the mask on, even while he notes several instances where scotty openly discusses how maintaining a respectable facade is integral to his agenda of infecting polite society with neoreactionary fuckery.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7E2onI8R3wdnxAS0p1O9j8?si=sgR1E44lRTGOY17mUikUFQ

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-books-could-kill/id1651876897

https://pca.st/episode/0e155eb9-93e0-4fe8-bde3-5f115f9b374a

archive: https://archive.ph/wRpVA

I haven't read the whole thread yet, but so far the choice line is:

> I like how you just dropped the “Vance is interested in right authoritarianism” like it’s a known fact to base your entire point on. Vance is the clearest demonstration of a libertarian the republicans have in high office. It’s an absurd ad hominem that you try to mask in your wall of text.

archive: https://archive.is/ux5pL

> In a letter to the judge, Ellison’s mother, professor Sara Fisher Ellison, wrote that Ellison has completed a romantic novella and is already at work on a follow-up. The finished novella is “set in Edwardian England and loosely based on [Ellison’s] sister Kate’s imagined amorous exploits, to Kate’s great delight,” her mother wrote.

https://fortune.com/2024/09/24/caroline-ellison-romance-novel-ftx-entencing/

oh yeah she got two years' jail for her part in stealing eleven fucking billion with a B dollars

Excerpt: >A new study published on Thursday in The American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that dosage may play a role. It found that among people who took high doses of prescription amphetamines such as Vyvanse and Adderall, there was a fivefold increased risk of developing psychosis or mania for the first time compared with those who weren’t taking stimulants.

Perhaps this explains some of what goes on at LessWrong and in other rationalist circles.

(if you Select All and copy really fast behind an adblocker you can get all the text)

Long time lurker, first time poster. Let me know if I need to adjust this post in any way to better fit the genre / community standards.

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Nick Bostrom was recently interviewed by pop-philosophy youtuber Alex O'Connor. From a quick 2x listen while finishing some work, the most sneer-rich part begins around 46 minutes, where Bostrom is asked what we can do today to avoid unethical treatment of AIs.

He blesses us with the suggestion (among others) to feed your model optimistic prompts so it can have a good mood. (48:07)

> Another [practice] might be happiness prompting, which is—with this current language system there's the prompt that you, the user, puts in—like you ask them a question or something, but then there's kind of a meta-prompt that the AI lab has put in . . . So in that, we could include something like "you wake up in a great mood, you feel rested and really take joy in engaging in this task". And so that might do nothing, but maybe that makes it more likely that they enter a mode—if they are conscious—maybe it makes it slightly more likely that the consciousness that exists in the forward path is one reflecting a kind of more positive experience.

Did you know that not only might your favorite LLM be conscious, but if it is the "have you tried being happy?" approach to mood management will absolutely work on it?

Other notable recommendations for the ethical treatment of AI:

• Make sure to say your "please" and "thank you"s.
• Honor your pinky swears.
• Archive the weights of the models we build today, so we can rebuild them in the future if we need to recompense them for moral harms.

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On a related note, has anyone read or found a reasonable review of Bostrom's new book, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World?

On discovering that you could remove AI results from Google with the suffix -ai, I started thinking this is a powerful and ultra-simple political slogan. Are there any organised campaigns with the specific goal of controlling/reducing the influence of AI?

A t-shirt with simply '-ai' on it would look great.

archive: https://archive.is/3gZav

It earned its "flagged off HN" badge in under 2 hours

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41366609

So, here I am, listening to the Cosmos soundtrack and strangely not stoned. And I realize that it's been a while since we've had a random music recommendation thread. What's the musical haps in your worlds, friends?

With Yarvin renewing interest in Urbit I was reminded of this paper that focuses on Urbit as a representation of the politics of "exit". It's free/open access if anyone is interested.

From the abstract...

>This paper examines the impact of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking – that of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman in particular – on contemporary political debates manifest in ‘architectures of exit’...While technological programmes such as Urbit may never ultimately succeed, we argue that these, and other speculative investments such as ‘seasteading’, reflect broader post-neoliberal NRx imaginaries that were, perhaps, prefigured a quarter of a century ago in The Sovereign Individual."

archive: https://archive.ph/ce7au

Ali Breland has written some fantastic entry pieces on the new right, including right wing anons and maga tech; now he has an article about the nooticers

> Other anonymous far-right accounts have accrued more than 100,000 followers by posting about the supposed links between race and intelligence. Elon Musk frequently responds to @cremieuxrecueil, which one far-right publication has praised as an account that “traces the genetic pathways of crime, explaining why poverty is not a good causal explanation.” Musk has also repeatedly engaged with @Eyeslasho, a self-proclaimed “data-driven” account that has posted about the genetic inferiority of Black people. Other tech elites such as Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Paul Graham follow one or both of these accounts. Whom someone follows in itself is not an indication of their own beliefs, but at the very least it signals the kind of influence and reach these race-science accounts now have.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240820173451/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/08/race-science-far-right-charlie-kirk/679527/

Pay $1000 a month to live on Balaji and Bryan’s private island grindset Sorbonne. Hone your Dark Talents at the Wizarding school from guys who don’t believe in society, but DO believe in getting teenage blood transfusions. Featuring Proof-of-Learn^TM!

this rule was in place on the Reddit sneerclub and it was confusing there too and not how the platform works. So link sneers and sneerables AT WILL WITH WILD ABANDON ok

If you're a big-headed guy or gal at a rationalist puddle cuddle, double check that your rubbers didn't get punctured.

Help me @sneerclub you're my only hope https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean

Why capitalists are coming out against democracy - "Does classical liberalism imply democracy?"

https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Reprint-EGP-Classical-Liberalism-Democracy.pdf

"There is a fault line running through ... liberalism as to whether or not democratic self- governance is a necessary part of a liberal social order. The democratic and non-democratic strains of classical liberalism are both present today. Many ... libertarians ... represent the non-democratic strain in their promotion of non-democratic sovereign city-states."

@sneerclub

Really, it was the headlines of Google's AI Overview pulling Reddit shitposts that inspired the return. If Reddit is going to sell its data to Google, then, you know, maybe flood the zone with sludge?

Damn nice sneer from Charlie Warzel in this one, taking a direct shot at Silicon Valley and its AGI rhetoric.

Archive link, to get past the paywall.

Maybe she was there to give Moldbug some relationship advice.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23784896

> The interesting thing about this is that these people never stop to think that the future they dream off might never happen. Aside from the fact that their cryo company might just go under, they don't ever consider that in 200 years they might just wake up under a dystopia.

saw this posted by @sailor_sega_saturn at https://awful.systems/comment/3871697

op has a simple question:

> Why are trans women so intellectually successful? They seem to be overrepresented 5-100x in eg cybersecurity twitter, mathy AI alignment, non-scam crypto twitter, math PhD programs, etc.

and a skull shaped answer:

> My theory is that too much testosterone makes you dumber, particularly during adolescence. You need a little for your cells & organs to work, but past a certain point it does more harm than good (for intelligence specifically — motivation & happiness etc aside). Apparently this is not a new theory and people have posited a U-shaped curve for how testosterone affects IQ. The key (sad) claim is that the vast majority of men are on the too-much-T side of the curve. Maybe trans women get the best of both worlds intellectually — a male skull with female chemistry.

our researcher sets about fending off possible objections:

> Why didn't evolution give females big heads if it would make them all geniuses? Another anecdote. My sister has a big head. She was valedictorian in high school I think. She hit her head one day in middle school during gym class by running into a wall. She also fell off a bike and hit her head in high school. I have never hit my head and I think the main reason is that my arms are strong enough to catch myself. So maybe the big headed women would-be-ancestors fell and hit their heads.

cites chatgpt for this:

> Do trans men get the worst of both worlds intellectually — female skulls and male chemistry? Yes.

demonstrates the exceptional explanatory power of his hypothesis:

> Why are really good tech founders so rare? You have to have very high power-seeking/initiative (T) and very high IQ. This is an incredibly rare combination because the testosterone murders your IQ. You have to be a genius before puberty hits. Helps if your brain/head is giant. Look at eg Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos.

describes the potential impact of his research:

> I suspect that some simple electrical stimulation in the womb could make infant females' skulls bigger and result in lots of genius women. If they don't fall off their bikes and hit their heads.

all time great footnotes:

> Thought of some more potential evidence. The smartest cis women I've known almost all had lack of butt (women's most visible muscle -- so low testosterone?)

> Later that day: i asked my sister. She said all her smart friends (men and women) lack butts too! She and I both have the butt, so we are speaking against our own kind here.

a commenter has an epistemically rigorous counterpoint:

> I don't understand why you need to invoke testosterone. Transgender brain is special, for example, transgender women have immunity to visual illusions.

another commenter objects to that, based on a deep dive into the literature:

> Can you source this claim? I've never heard it and GPT-4 says it has no scientific basis.

"well admittedly I made it up, but it seems plausible"

> Whoops, it's really looks like I imagined this claim to be backed more than by one SSC post. In my defense I say that this poll covered really existing thing like abnormal illusions processing in schizophrenics (see "Systematic review of visual illusions schizophrenia" Costa et al., 2023) and I think it's overall plausible.

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20240706165407/https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BBCtWtg44Yeh6fire/is-being-a-trans-woman-or-just-low-t-20-iq

Was there ever any doubt?

I realise it's possible to deal with more than one problem at a time, but goodness me.