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.

Economist John Quiggin posts a critique of William MacAskill’s type of utilitarianism with confusing logic, has to retract it when a quote with chapter and verse in his main text does not exist:

Even though I have a clear memory of locating the third quotation in the Gutenberg edition, I can’t find it now. So, I;ve edited the post to deleted it. Apologies for this. I’m assuming the quote I found was some kind of AI confabulation, and that I slipped up on the check. I will need to double check more carefully in future.

(quote is from the comments I have not corrected or added sic)

He says he is writing a book against pro-natalism.

Everything depends on the details like what country, what field, and what university. Because this involves specific people, its also inherently unpredictable. I would say that in general, a field that will accept a second go at a PhD, but won’t accept a well documented HR complaint against a supervisor, is not one worth working in.

how is Tesla stock a thing?

Edward Niedermeyer write a book to answer that very question (cheating on taxes + organize gangs of invested fanboys who suppress negative news online)

Stock markets in the rest of the developed world seem less bubbly than the US market.

It looks like this site requites https:// or http;// to recognize a link as an external link, otherwise it prepends awful.systems/ and treats it as an internal link

“U” for “you” was when I became confident who “Nina” was. The blogger feels like yet another person who is caught up in intersecting subcultures of bad people but can’t make herself leave. She takes a lot of deep lore like “what is Hereticon?” for granted and is still into crypto.

She links someone called Sonia Joseph who mentions “the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers … leads (sic) to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen.” Joseph says she is Canadian but worked in the Bay Area tech scene. Cursed phrase: agi cnc sex parties

I have never heard of a wing of these people in Canada. There are a few Effective Altruists in Toronto but I don’t know if they are the LessWrong kind or the bednet kind. I thought this was basically a US and Oxford scene (plus Jaan Tallinn).

The Substack and a Rationalist web magazine are both called Asterisk.

There is an old principle in software development not to make the GUI too pretty until the back end works, because managers and customers will think its ready when they can click around buttons with nice shading and animations. I think slopware is like that. People see the demo that appears to work and don’t see what maintaining it and integrating it with other systems is like.

Yud has posted:

Among my friends who came to my attention for psychelics[sic] having had any significant impact on them, positive or negative, I would say the mean result has been overwhelmingly, heartbreakingly negative. Please seriously consider not doing drugs.

He seems very worried about his tendency to procrastination (akrasia in LessWrong jargon) and inability to make himself exercise. So he is concerned about inability to control himself. So his public position is that LSD might have medical uses, but it has harmed people close to him.

AFAIK, the people in this space who have acknowledged using LSD and other psychedelics are gwern, Aella, and QiaochuYuan (during his rationalist phase). Scott Alexander hinted that he might have tried it, Eliezer Yudkowsky is interested in psychedelic therapy but also tells readers to please not use LSD. Can any of you name anyone else in this space who has talked about dropping acid?

I don’t want to get into “A says that B dropped acid” in a StubSack thread.

The 2016 Nootropics Survey results and Nootropics Survey 2020 Results suggest that it was popular with anonymous SlateStar readers.

There is a better timeline where Eliezer Yudkowsky got better religious education, understood that he was having messianic thoughts reinforced by Orison Scott Card’s Mormonism, and ended up working in a cafe, writing pulp fiction, and participating in the local kink scene (I think Scott Alexander knows damn well what he is doing and thinks the Truth about the Lesser Breeds is more important)

I first sighted Nick Bostrom in a series of mad-science-flavoured erotic horror comics on the Internet Archive (The Apsinthion Protocol and Progress in Research by the same writer). I wish more people had the sense to keep those ideas in the world of weird fiction like Charlie Stross does

The comic I linked is pretty tame (particularly the first few pages with the Bostrom reference). The whole series contains a wide variety of squicks so use your judgement before exploring.

Yes, not mutilating infants’ genitals is the default choice! A few nations have that custom like a few have the custom of stretching necks, or footbinding, or piercing ears. Its not even a very old custom in the USA (early 20th century I think whereas in North Africa and West Asia it goes back thousands of years).

Argentina and Russia are the usual examples of countries which had great futures in 1913 and threw them away with a series of bad decisions

Rationalists 🤝 Postrationalists Writing screeds about how following the advice of Internet posts and self-medicating with controlled substances can be good if you are very smart

Also had a beef with Aella when they were both in Austin!

They are not beating the allegations that a Postrationalist is a Rationalist who admits Yud is just a dude and their goals are religious goals.

Update: There is a partially cached Facebook post where MacDonald states what he claims is Eigenrobot’s government name and says that Eigenrobot’s “(self admitted) BPD wife used to want to fuck me” (Google and Bing saved snippets, but do not share the full cache). That could have been what got him kicked out of VibeCamp for doxxing.

The simplenote post from a VibeCamp attendee claimed that “prior to Scott Alexander’s articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall,” Any idea what post he was thinking of? Know Your Amphetamines archive was from January 2021 so about the time VibeCamp got started.

The post is undated but mentions Hereticon in January 2022.

invest

If you are broadly invested in US stocks, you are already invested in the chatbot bubble and the defense industry. If you are worried about that, an easy solution is to move some of that money elsewhere.

You would need a non-self-published source which says u/TPO = Lasker