Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Soā¦ apparently Peter Thiel has taken to co-opting fundamentalist Christian terminology to go after Effective Altruism? At least it seems that way from this EA post (warning, I took psychic damage just skimming the lunacy). As far as I can tell, heās merely co-opting the terminology, Thielās blather doesnāt have any connection to any variant of Christian eschatology (whether mainstream or fundamentalist or even obscure wacky fundamentalist), but of course, the majority of the EAs donāt recognize that, or the fact that he is probably targeting them for their (kind of weak to be honest) attempts at getting AI regulated at all, and instead they charitably try to steelman him and figure out if he was a legitimate point. ā¦I wish they could put a tenth of this effort into understanding leftist thought.
Some of the comments areā¦ okay actually, at least by EA standards, but there are still plenty of people willing to defend Thiel
One comment notes some confusion:
Yeah, its because he is simply borrowing Christian Fundamentalists Eschatological terminologyā¦ possibly to try to turn the Christofascists against EA?
Someone actually gets it:
Note this commenter still uses non-confrontational language (āIām dubiousā) even when directly calling Thiel out.
The top comment, though, is just like the main post, extending charitability to complete technofascist insanity. (Warning for psychic damage)
tl,dr; Thiel now sees the Christofascists as a more durable grifting base than the EAs, and is looking to change lanes while the temporary coalitions of maximalist Trumpism offer him the opportunity.
I repeat my suspicion that Thiel is not any more sober than Musk, heās just getting sloppier about keeping it out of the public eye.
I think a big difference between Thiel and Musk, is that Thiel views himself as an āintellectualā and derives prestige āintellectualismā. I donāt believe for a minute heās genuinely christian, but his wankery about end-of-times eschatology of armageddon = big-left-government, is a a bit too confused to be purely cynical, I think sniffing his own farts feeds his ego.
Of course a man who would promote open doping olympics isnāt sober.
Thiel is a true believer in Jesus and God. He was raised evangelical. The quirky eschatologist that youāre looking for is RenĆ© Girard, who he personally met at some point. For more details, check out the Behind the Bastards on him.
Edit: I wrote this before clicking on the LW post. This is a decent summary of Girardās claims as well as how they influence Thiel. Iām quoting West here in order to sneer at Thiel:
Thiel knows what to do about this. After all, he funded Bollea v. Gawker. Instead of letting journalists cancel celebrities, why not cancel journalists instead? Then thereās no longer any journalists to do any cancellation! Similarly, Thiel is confirmed to be a source of funding for Eric Weinstein and believed to fund Sabine Hossenfelder. Instead of letting scientists cancel religious beliefs, why not cancel scientists instead? By directing money through folks with existing social legitimacy, Thiel applies mimesis: pretend to be legitimate and you can shift what is legitimate.
In this context, Thiel fears the spectre of AGI because it canāt be influenced by his normal approach to power, which is to hide anything that can be hidden and outspend everybody else talking in the open. After all, if AGI is truly to unify humanity, it must unify our moralities and cultures into a single uniformly-acceptable code of conduct. But the only acceptable unification for Thiel is the holistic catholic apostolic one-and-only forever-and-ever church of Jesus, and if AGI is against that then AGI is against Jesus himself.
Is there any more solid evidence of Hossenfelder taking Thielbux, or is this just a guess based on the orbit she moves in: appearing on Michael Shermerās podcast years after the news broke that he was a sex pest, blurbing the new book edited by sex pest Lawrence Krauss, etc.
Thereās no solid evidence. (You can put away the attorney, Mr. Thiel.) Experts in the field, in a recent series of interviews with Dave Farina, generally agree that somebody must be funding Hossenfelder. Right now sheās associated with the Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU Munich; her biography there is pretty funny:
For those not in physics: this is crank shit. To the extent that MCMP funds her at all, they are explicitly pursuing superdeterminism, which is unfalsifiable, unverifiable, doesnāt accord with the web of science, and generally fails to be a serious line of inquiry. Now, does MCMP have enough cash to pay her to make Youtube videos and go on podcasts? We donāt know. So itās hard to say whether she has funding beyond that.
Oh, wow, that biography is hilariously bad. Contexuality is not the same thing as superdeterminism. And locality is not āa lost causeā. Plenty of people throw around the term quantum nonlocality, but in the smaller population of those who take foundations seriously, many will say that quantum mechanics is local. Most but not all proponents of Copenhagen-ish interpretations say something like, āThe moral of Bellās theorem is that nature needs a non-(local hidden variable) theory. We keep locality and drop the hidden variables. In other words, quantum physics is a local non-(hidden variable) theory.ā The Everettians of various flavors also tend to hold onto locality, or try to, while not always agreeing with each other on how to do that. Itās probably only among the Bohmians that youāll find people insisting that quantum physics means nature is intrinsically nonlocal.
Thanks for the references. The quirky theology was so outside the range of even the weirder Fundamentalist Christian stuff I didnāt recognize it as such. (And didnāt trust the EA summary because they try so hard to charitably make sense of Thiel).
Except the EAs are, on net, opposed to the creation of AGI (albeit they are ineffectual in their opposition). So going after the EAs doesnāt make sense if Thiel is genuinely opposed to inventing AGI faster. So I still think Thiel is just going after the EAās because heās libertarian and EA has shifted in the direction of trying to get more government regulation. (As opposed to a coherent theological goal beyond libertarianism). Iāll check out the BtB podcast and see if it changes my mind as to his exact flavor of insanity.
Being gay must really complicate things for him.
Yep, the usefulness of EA is over, they are next on the chopping block. Iād imagine a similar thing will happen to redscare/moldbug if they ever speak out against him.
E: And why would a rich guy be against a āwe are trying to convince rich guys to spend their money differentlyā organization. Esp a ālibertarianā āI get to do what I want or elseā one.
It always struck me as hilarious that the EA/LW crowd could ever affect policy in any way. Theyāre cosplaying as activists, have no ideas about how to move the public image needle other than weird movie ideas and hope, and are literally marinated in SV technolibertarianism which sees government regulation as Evil.
Thereās a mini-freakout over OpenAI deciding to keep GPT-4o active, despite it being more āsycophanticā than GPT-5 (and thus more likely to convince people to do Bad Things) but thereās also the queasy realization that if sycophantic LLMs is what brings in the bucks, nothing is gonna stop LLM companies from offering them. And thereās no way these people can stop it, because theyāve made the deal that LLM companies are gonna be the ones realizing that AI is gonna kill everyone and thatās never gonna happen.
It is kind of sad. They are missing the ideological pieces that would let them carry out activism effectually so instead theyāve gotten used as a free source of crit-hype in the LLM bubble. ā¦except not that sad because they would ignore real AI dangers in favor of their sci-fi scenarios, so I donāt feel too bad for them.
Brian Merchantās article about that lighthaven gathering really struck me.
The men who EAs think will end the earth were in the building with them, and rather than organize to throw them out a window (or even to just make them mildly uncomfortable), the bayes knowers all gormlessly moped around their twee boutique hotel and cried around some whiteboards.
Absolute hellish brainworms
Yeah that article was one of the things I had mind. Itās the peak of centrist liberalism where EAs and lesswrongers can think these people are literally going to cause mankindās extinction (or worse) and they canāt even bring themselves to be rude to them. OTOH, if they actually acted coherently on their nominal doomer beliefs, they would be carrying out terrorism on a far greater scale than the Zizians, so maybe it is for the best they are ideologically incapable of direct action.
The ideological version of Mr Burnsās diseases getting in each otherās way
Ooh, do you have a link to share?
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-disagreements
Wild, thank you!
Well when they are just passively trying to convince the rich guys, they can use the organization to launder reputation or boost ideologies they are in favor of. When the organization actually tries to get regulations passed, even ineffectually, well, that is a threat to the likes of Thiel.
That was what I meant, I was being a bit sarcastic there.
Using the term āAntichristā as a shorthand for āglobal stable totalitarianismā is A Choice.
I think Leathery Pete might have read too much Left Behind.