HN:

Also - using soylent, oculus and crypto to paint Andreesen as a bad investor (0 for 3 as he says) is a weird take. Come on - do better if your going to try and take my time.

Reading comprehension is hard. The article actually says "Zero for three when it comes to picking useful inventions to reorder life as we know it, that is to say, though at no apparent cost to his power or net worth." It's saying he's a good investor in the sense of making money, but a bad investor in the sense of picking investments that change the world. Rather telling that the commenter can't seem to distinguish between the two.

Good article, excited for part 2.

#3 is "Write with AI: The leading paid newsletter on how to turn ChatGPT and other AI platforms into your own personal Digital Writing Assistant."

and #12 is "RichardGage911: timely & crucial explosive 9/11 WTC evidence & educational info"

Congratulations to Aella for reaching the top of the bottom. Also random side thought, why do guys still simp in her replies? Why didn't they just sign up for her birthday gangbang?

me when the machine specifically designed to pass the turing test passes the turing test

If you can design a model that spits out self-aware-sounding things after not having been trained on a large corpus of human text, then I'll bite. Until then, it's crazy that anybody who knows anything about how current models are trained accepts the idea that it's anything other than a stochastic parrot.

Glad that the article included a good amount of dissenting opinion, highlighting this one from Margaret Mitchell: "I think we can agree that systems that can manipulate shouldn't be designed to present themselves as having feelings, goals, dreams, aspirations."

Cool tech. We should probably set it on fire.

Under "Significant developments since publication" for their lab leak hypothesis, they don't mention this debate at all. A track record that fails to track the record, nice.

Right underneath that they mention that at least they're right about their 99.9% confident hypothesis that the MMR vaccine doesn't cause autism. I hope it's not uncharitable to say that they don't get any points for that.

delivering lectures at both UATX and Peterson’s forthcoming Peterson Academy

I thought I was terminally online but clearly I've missed something, his what now

Dude STOP. I'm so serious right now STOP dude. You're forcing me to very slightly update my prior P(I'm the simulation) which is a total violation of the NAP

My optimistic read is that maybe OP will use their newfound revelations to separate themselves from LW, rejoin the real world, and become a better person over time.

My pessimistic read is that this is how communities like TPOT (and maybe even e/acc?) grow - people who are disillusioned with the (ostensible) goals of the broader rat community but can't shake the problematic core beliefs.

The cosmos doesn’t care what values you have. Which totally frees you from the weight of “moral imperatives” and social pressures to do the right thing.

Choose values that sound exciting because life’s short, time’s short, and none of it matters in the end anyway... For me, it’s curiosity and understanding of the universe. It directs my life not because I think it sounds pretty or prosocial, but because it’s tasty.

Also lmfao at the first sentence of one of the comments:

I don't mean to be harsh, but if everyone in this community followed your advice, then the world would likely end.

the yellow light turns red when im in the middle of the intersection and my car immediately autopilots to the nearest police station

From the comments:

Effects of genes are complex. Knowing a gene is involved in intelligence doesn't tell us what it does and what other effects it has. I wouldn't accept any edits to my genome without the consequences being very well understood (or in a last-ditch effort to save my life). ... Source: research career as a computational cognitive neuroscientist.

OP:

You don't need to understand the causal mechanism of genes. Evolution has no clue what effects a gene is going to have, yet it can still optimize reproductive fitness. The entire field of machine learning works on black box optimization.

Very casually putting evolution in the same category as modifying my own genes one at a time until I become Jimmy Neutron.

Such a weird, myopic way of looking at everything. OP didn't appear to consider the downsides brought up by the commenter at all, and just plowed straight on through to "evolution did without understanding so we can too."

The first occurred when I picked up Nick Bostrom’s book “superintelligence” and realized that AI would utterly transform the world.

"The first occurred when I picked up AI propaganda and realized the propaganda was true"

For the purposes of this argument, near term AGI or promising clinical trials for depression are off the table.

FOX ONLY. FINAL DESTINATION. NO ~~ITEMS~~ ROBOT GODS.

Eh, the impression that I get here is that Eliezer happened to put "effective" and "altruist" together without intending to use them as a new term. This is Yud we're talking about - he's written roughly 500,000 more words about Harry Potter than the average person does in their lifetime.

Even if he had invented the term, I wouldn't say this is a smoking gun of how intertwined EAs are with the LW rats - there's much better evidence out there.