(10,959 words... I don't think I hate myself enough to read this one all the way through.)
200fifty
joined 2 years ago
Claude 3 notices when a sentence about pizza toppings doesn't fit with its surrounding text. Whole internet including Tim Sweeney and Margaret Mitchell concludes that it's probably self-aware now.
it's outrageous the NYT called Scoot a racist like Charles Murray! also, Scoot agrees with race science, precisely as Murray does. Also, the leaked 2014 email is only outrageous if you hadn't read SSC
it's outrageous the NYT called Scoot a racist like Charles Murray! also, Scoot agrees with race science, precisely as Murray does. Also, the leaked 2014 email is only outrageous if you hadn't read SSC
Everything about Zack is sad.
I have to say, if you look past the, well, you know, stuff, he's actually pretty decent at injecting pathos into the posts about his personal life. His writing does a good job bringing you into his extremely depressing/self-loathing inner world -- you really feel for the guy, or at least I do. That said, it's this exact effect which makes me think he is probably not perceiving things as lucidly as he thinks he is. Depression can feel like clarity, but that's no way to live.
it's outrageous the NYT called Scoot a racist like Charles Murray! also, Scoot agrees with race science, precisely as Murray does. Also, the leaked 2014 email is only outrageous if you hadn't read SSC
I love this unhinged Yudkowsky quote buried in here:
This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish[...]
Zack is actually correct that this is a pretty wild thing to say... "Rest assured that I considered all possible counterarguments against my position which I was able to generate with my mega super brain. No, I haven't actually looked at the arguments against my position, but I'm confident in my ability to think of everything that people who disagree with me would say."
It so happens that Yudkowsky is on the 'right side' politically in this particular case, but man, this is real sloppy for someone who claims to be on the side of capital-T truth.
The problem is... well, Zack correctly recognizes Yudkowsky is maybe not as world-changingly smart as he presents himself, and may be engaging in motivated reasoning rather than disinterested truth-seeking, but then his solution (a) doesn't involve questioning his belief in the rest of the robot apocalypse mythos, and (b) does involve running crying directly into the arms of Moldbug and a bunch of TERFs, which like, dude. Maybe consider critically interrogating those people's arguments too??
as it turns out, a mountain of health woo and transfusing your teenage son’s blood into yourself is no match for long covid
here in Top Pedophiles Of Twitter, my "friend" thinks about race so very little that he shit-tests every new person he meets with a racial slur
I'm just wondering how exactly he goes about doing this. Like if I wanted to casually slip the N word into a casual conversation (for... some reason) I'm not actually sure how I would go about setting it up?
Like, is he just randomly saying it at people to see how they react (which most normies rightfully would judge as very weird)? Is he using it to describe actual black people (in which case I feel like people dropping him as a friend aren't really doing it over "speech taboos", are they...)? Is he asking people "so how do you feel about the word 'n.....'?" Something else? My curiosity is piqued now.
Effective Altruism is when you want to spend money on genetic engineering for race-and-IQ theories. Emphasises Richard Lynn fandom in the comments. Front-paged.
The whole idea of "IQ correlates with income, so we can eliminate poverty by genetically increasing people's IQ" seems particularly stupid to me. Like, what do you think is the actual reason that IQ correlates with income? Is it because the magical money fairies give you more money the smarter you are? Also, IQ is a normed measure anyway, so the average is always 100 and there's always the same number of people with each score... agh, it's dumb for so many reasons
edit: wait, sorry, it's actually stupider than I thought:
Elites play a disproportionate role in the economic productivity of nations because they occupy important roles in government and business. If one is interested in increasing economic output and creating better institutions, it would be wise to drastically improve the size and abilities of the elite.... In an effort to empirically investigate this question, Carl and Kirkegaard (2022)investigated the benefit of the top 5% independent of the average national IQ level and found additional benefits beyond the benefit from the average IQ. This is fortunate, considering the most likely scenario is that elites adopt the technology more rapidly than the population at large. Government subsidies and low costs would ameliorate the issue of inequality.
Literally just trickle down IQnomics
of all the ways we’ve tried so far, Substack is working the best.
The sheer arrogance of this quote is really something to behold. It's "working the best" by what metric, exactly, sir? And who's the "we" that have tried various ways so far, because it's certainly not 'people on the internet,' many of whom have developed ways of dealing with Nazis which are significantly more effective than the substack method of 'literally give them money to use our platform'
I'm confused how this is even supposed to demonstrating "metacognition" or whatever? It's not discussing its own thought process or demonstrating awareness of its own internal state, it just said "this sentence might have been added to see if I was paying attention." Am I missing something here? Is it just that it said "I... paying attention"?
This is a thing humans already do sometimes in real life and discuss -- when I was in middle school, I'd sometimes put the word "banana" randomly into the middle of my essays to see if the teacher noticed -- so pardon me if I assume the LLM is doing this by the same means it does literally everything else, i.e. mimicking a human phrasing about a situation that occurred, rather than suddenly developing radical new capabilities that it has never demonstrated before even in situations where those would be useful.