Do we have any idea why some of the Zizians ended up in Vermont? The only thing in their network that comes to mind is the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth (MAPLE, a Buddhist-flavoured CFAR offshoot with the usual Medium post accusing leaders of sexual and psychological abuse)
Vermont and New Hampshire have clusters of generic Libertarians.
shade
If you follow world politics, it has been obvious that Noam Chomsky is a useful idiot since the 1990s and probably the 1970s. I wish he had learned from the Khmer Rouge that not everyone who the NYT says is a bad guy is a good guy!
That BlueSky account found professional provocateur (“opinion columnist”) Freddie deBoer making AI 2027 author Scott Alexander retreat to “my median for AGI is more like early 2030s” https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/im-offering-scott-alexander-a-wager deBoer seems to be some kind of hereditarian so let them fight.
(Some people might have been concerned to read that) almost 3,000 “researchers, experts and entrepreneurs” have signed an open letter calling for a ban on developing artifical intelligence (AI) for “lethal autonomous weapons systems” (LAWS), or military robots for short. Instead, I yawned. Heavy artillery fire is much more terrifying than the Terminator.
The people who signed the letter included celebrities of the science and high-tech worlds like Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, cosmologist Stephen Hawking, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind and, of course, Noam Chomsky. They presented their letter in late July to the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, meeting this year in Buenos Aires.
They were quite clear about what worried them: “The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.”
“Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populations, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnc cleansing, etc.”
The letter was issued by the Future of Life Institute which is now Max Tegmark and Toby Walsh’s organization.
People have worked on the general pop culture that inspired TESCREAL, and on the current hype, but less on earlier attempts to present machine minds as a clear and present danger. This has the ‘arms race’ narrative, the ‘research ban’ proposed solution, but focuses on smaller dangers.
patio11’s sometimes bosses at Stripe are such ambitious capitalists that they sometimes scare him. Maybe his racist friends told him that the Japanese are honorary Aryans?
I like this reply on Reddit:
I do my PhD in fair evaluation of ML algorithms, and I literally have enough work to go through until I die. So much mess, non-reproducible results, overfitting benchmarks, and worst of all this has become a norm. Lately, it took our team MONTHS to reproduce (or even just run) a bunch of methods to just embed inputs, not even train or finetune.
I see maybe a solution, or at least help, in closer research-business collaboration. Companies don’t care about papers really, just to get methods that work and make money. Maxing out drug design benchmark is useless if the algorithm fails to produce anything usable in real-world lab. Anecdotally, I’ve seen much better and more fair results from PhDs and PhD students that work part-time in the industry as ML engineers or applied researchers.
This can go a good way (most of the field becomes a closed circle like parapsychology) or a bad way (people assume the results are true and apply them, like the social priming or Reinhart and Rogoff’s economic paper with the Excel error).
I like the quote by John Swartzwelder in chapter 1.
A 2025 UBC master’s thesis on our friends’ ideas and their literary antecedents https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0449985 The supervisor was born around the time that Elron Hubbard, Jack Parsons, RAH, and their wives and lovers were having a chaotic transition to the postwar world.
Yes, I think the people who should have opinions beyond “the state government found some fraud and is investigating further cases” are people who live in Minnesota and have connections to daycare or immigrant communities. Its notorious that the NYT repackages stories by reporters in smaller orgs (or randos on social media) and puts its own spin on them! They don’t have a specific editorial line on social services in the Midwest, just instincts.
I miss when Patrick McKenzie was just sharing an American’s view on Japanese culture and reminding devs that names are not always Firstname Lastname in the Latin alphabet and ‘just’ paying yourself twice the average local income from your business is not a failure. The following is deep twitter pundit brain for a rich white man in Chicago who has lived most of his adult life in Japan and SoCal referring to social programs for poor brown people in Minnesota:
I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.
Edit. I also like the HN response which explains that private companies have few responses to fraud except refusing service, but the State of Minnesota can arrest fraudsters, command third parties to provide evidence about them, and send them to prison, so the People of Minnesota require strong evidence before it uses those powers.
The power company wants money to power your datacenter. The refinery wants money to deliver five 40-foot containers of germanium to nvidia in Taiwan. OpenAI staff want money to buy houses in California. If you are really rich, banks will lend you money against OpenAI or nvidia equity, but then stock prices falling can trigger a chain reaction where the bank calls the loan, you need to sell equity to give them the cash they want, driving down the stock price, others get scared it will drop further and sell …
I don’t know if there has been any on-the-ground journalism about our dear friends except possibly the Zizian murders and some of the investigations into misogyny and sexual abuse. What reporter without a bankroll from EA has money to spend a few months in the Bay Area making friends with introverted bloggers?
One of the mentors at Inkhaven will be Jesse Singal who has said good things about pedophiles and KiwiFarms and is worried about so many young people identifying as trans. Does he have prior connections to eugenics or race pseudoscience? Pinkerite says he is Bluesky buddies with Razib Khan (one of the names RationalWiki can no longer mention).
They are organizing another Inkhaven in April, maybe because it brings in at least $80,000. I do not recommend committing to spend a month in the presence of our dear friends given their practice of allowing sexual, psychological, and substance abuse in their communities!
Fortunately, most of the rest of the world economy is heading in the opposite direction and building new free-trade zones without the US. I think the US in a few years will start to feel a lot like the UK today, with everything falling apart, everyone becoming poorer and less mobile, and anger about Hispanics instead of Poles and trans people.
Yes, in the 2016 emails Yudkowsky hints that he knows Epstein has a reputation for pursuing underage girls and would still like his money. We don’t know what he knew about Epstein in 2009, but he sure seemed to know that something was wrong with the man in 2016. And that makes it harder to put Yud’s writings about the age of consent in a good light (hard to believe that he was just thinking of a sixteen-year-old dating a nineteen-year-old, and had never imagined a middle-aged man assaulting fourteen-year-olds).
Also likely to be concentrated in the USA, whose government is helpfully screaming at the rest of the world “disconnect your economies and your IT systems from ust!” Most of us are busy doing that as fast as possible although it takes a while to get everyone on board.
its a very useful skill when reading the internet to learn to see when “in the US and UK” or “in SoCal and London” should be appended to a sentence. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.
A few people in LessWrong and Effectlve Altruism seem to want Yud to stick in the background while they get on with organizing his teachings into doctrine, dumping the awkward ones down the memory hole, and organizing a movement that can last when he goes to the Great Anime Convention in the Sky. In 2022 someone on the EA forum posted On Deference and Yudkowsky’s AI Risk Estimates (ie. “Yud has been bad at predictions in the past so we should be skeptical of his predictions today”)
A Christopher DiCarlo (cwdicarlo on LessWrong) got AI doomerism into Macleans magazine in Canada. He seems to have got into AI doomerism in the 1990s but hung out being an academic and kept his manifestos to himself until recently. He claims to have clashed with First Nations creationists back in 2005 when he said “we are all African.” His book is called Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It.
There must be many such cases who read the Extropians in the 1990s and 2000s and neither filed them with fiction not turned them into a career.
And its a fable about having to petition a mercurial and brutal authority for resources you need to live! A lesson that anyone who wants to make their living vibe-coding should ponder.
Posting for archival and indexing purposes: u/GorillasAreForEating found an Urbit post titled “Quis cancellat ipsos cancellores?” which complains that Aella takes it on herself to exclude people and movements from the broader LessWrong/Effective Altruist community. The poster says that Aella was the anonymous person who pushed CFAR to finally do something about Brent Dill, because she was roommates with “Persephone.” He or she does not quite say that any of the accusations were untrue, just that “an anonymous, unverified report” says that some details were changed by an editor, and that her Medium post was of “dramatically lower fidelity, but higher memetic virulence” than Brent’s buddies investigating him behind closed doors (Dill posted about domming a 16-year-old who he met when she was 15). The poster accuses Aella of using substances and BDSM games to blur the line of consent.
The post names Joscha Bach as someone Aella tried to exclude. We recently talked abut Bach’s attempt to get Jeffrey Epstein to fund an event where our friends would speak.
Often, people in messed-up situations point at a very similar situation and say “at least we are not like that.” I hope that all of these people find friends who can give them perspective that none of these communities are healthy or just. Whether you are in to bull sessions or polyamory, there are healthy communities to explore in any medium-sized city!