this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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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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I'm out of the loop: what is lesswrong and why is it cringe?
It's complicated.
It's basically a forum created to venerate the works and ideas of that guy who in the first wave of LLM hype had an editorial published in TIME where he called for a worldwide moratorium on AI research and GPU sales to be enforced with unilateral airstrikes, and whose core audience got there by being groomed by one the most obnoxious Harry Potter fanfictions ever written, by said guy.
Their function these days tends to be to provide an ideological backbone of bad scifi justifications to deregulation and the billionaire takeover of the state, which among other things has made them hugely influential in the AI space.
They are also communicating vessels with Effective Altruism.
If this piques your interest check the links on the sidecard.
I have a basic understanding of what EA is but what do you mean by communicating vessels?
EA started as an offshoot of LessWrong, and LW-style rationalism is still the main gateway into EA as it's pushed relentlessly in those circles, and EA contributes vast amounts of money back into LW goals. Air strikes against datacenters guy is basically bankrolled by Effective Altruism and is also the reason EA considers magic AIs (so called Artificial Super Intelligences) by far the most important risk to humanity's existence; they consider climate change mostly survivable and thus of far less importance, for instance.
Needless to say, LLM peddlers loved that (when they aren't already LW/EAs or adjacent themselves, like the previous OpenAI administrative board before Altman and Microsoft took over). edit: also the founders of Anthropic.
Basically you can't discuss one without referencing the other.
Rationalwiki (not affiliated with LW Rationalists, the opposite actually, op is a mod there) has a page on it. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Less_wrong
Ok rationalwiki actually seems like a really useful resource for reading up on which sexy new movements are bullshit and which aren't
It is, but I would say that as it is aligned to what I think about these folks. It is also a funny site in a way that a lot of these weirdos go "rational wiki sucks, is not rational and lies!" Before reading the pages they are mad about, and afterwards go "yeah no that is fair" after reading it. Happend quite a few times with the "skeptic" yt people in the yt'er to alt right funnel/pipeline from a decade ago. (A few of these people have really lost the plot now, armored skeptic is now some believer in aliens for example. I dont think anyone has cared enough about him to update his page however).
I would love a separate thread on this, more generally a “late 2000s/early 2010s skeptic ytbuers, where are they now”?. The only example (sorta*) I have is thunderf00t, whose yt career track is: anti-christianity, anti-anita sarkeesian, and now anti musk.
*he is not alt right, at least by any mainstream definition of alt-right, afaict.
Personally I'm not going to waste much time on it, every time I see somebody post/make a vid about one of the older people it gets really sad and weird. Shadiversity (while not a skeptic) turned into a big weird (or well, went mask off), stuff like that.
E: I'm also not sure if YT is even still big, income wise, for people or if people go more to twitch for livestreaming shit and then double dipping by uploading edited streams to yt.
@swlabr
"anti-christianity, anti-anita sarkeesian, and now anti musk."
2 out of 3 ain't bad.
RationalWiki really hits that sweetspot where everybody hates it and you know that means it's doing something right:
From Prolewiki:
From Conservapedia:
From WikiSpooks (with RationalWiki's invitation for anyone to collaborate highlighted with an emotionally vulnerable red box for emphasis):
And a little bonus:
"Can I have Google discount my rationalwiki entry, has errors posted out of spite 10 years ago"
https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/106033064/can-i-have-google-discount-my-rationalwiki-entry-has-errors-posted-out-of-spite-10-years-ago?hl=en
Perfect.
Damn librals!
E: Saying Darwinism when you mean evolution is quite something btw. Ow god he also is ancient, from 1939.
Ah thanks!
They're Basically fanboys of whatever the latest cult is coming out of silicon valley.