SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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Lightcone needs your funding for LessWrong! because they had to give the FTX money back (awful.systems)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Funding beg: (The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven's big fundraiser
The story: Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5m back

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

You might think that this review of Yud's glowfic is an occasion for a "read a second book" response:

Yudkowsky is good at writing intelligent characters in a specific way that I haven't seen anyone else do as well.

But actually, the word intelligent is being used here in a specialized sense to mean "insufferable".

Take a stereotypical fantasy novel, a textbook on mathematical logic, and Fifty Shades of Grey.

Ah, the book that isn't actually about kink, but rather an abusive relationship disguised as kink — which would be a great premise for an erotic thriller, except that the author wasn't sufficiently self-aware to know that's what she was writing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

If you want to read Yudkowsky's explanation for why he doesn't spend more effort on academia, it's here.

spoiler alert: the grapes were totally sour

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

You could argue that another moral of Parfit's hitchhiker is that being a purely selfish agent is bad, and humans aren't purely selfish so it's not applicable to the real world anyway, but in Yudkowsky's philosophy—and decision theory academia—you want a general solution to the problem of rational choice where you can take any utility function and win by its lights regardless of which convoluted setup philosophers drop you into.

I'm impressed that someone writing on LW managed to encapsulate my biggest objection to their entire process this coherently. This is an entire model of thinking that tries to elevate decontextualization and debate-team nonsense into the peak of intellectual discourse. It's a manner of thinking that couldn't have been better designed to hide the assumptions underlying repugnant conclusions if indeed it had been specifically designed for that purpose.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Gah. I've been nerd sniped into wanting to explain what LessWrong gets wrong.