SneerClub

This Bruenig follow up to his recent drubbing of Kelsey Piper was entertaining, but it got me thinking about just what she is now gesturing at.

She contends that cash welfare does not really help much. She presents a few recent studies showing null results for cognitive and health outcomes. She doesn’t present an explicit framework for evaluating whether a particular welfare policy is good, but implicitly adopts an evaluative framework that says welfare programs can be deemed good or bad by looking at the extent to which they promote human capital and related indicators.

I argue that we should look to the more traditional goals of the welfare state: eradicating class difference and social alienation, reducing inequality and leveling living standards, compressing and smoothing income and consumption, providing workers and individuals refuge and independence from coercion by reducing economic dependence on the labor market and the family, among other things.

Now the frame Piper used was relatively banal in the neoliberal era. Everything was about "equality of opportunity, not outcome." But wait a minute, isn't Piper in an IQ-obsessed cult? I thought genetic differences determine people's human capital, and that she was one of the good ones that says "yes and" we should throw a few bones at the dullards for their misfortune. She's also a market fundamentalist that presumably understands that her preferred political economic arrangements lead to ever greater pre-transfer inequality.

When you start with a left hereditarian and take away their commitment to welfare, because in certain RCTs it doesn't change people's human capital enough (a thing they believe is mostly immutable), what does that make her?

this is Habryka talking about how his moderating skills are so powerful it takes lesswrong three fucking years to block a poster who's actively being a drain on the site

here's his reaction to sneerclub (specifically me - thanks Oliver!) calling LessOnline "wordy racist fest":

A culture of loose status-focused social connection. Fellow sneerers are not trying to build anything together. They are not relying on each other for trade, coordination or anything else. They don't need to develop protocols of communication that produce functional outcomes, they just need to have fun sneering together.

He gets us! He really gets us!

Excerpt:

ZMD: Yeah, that was actually my second question here. I was a little bit disappointed by the article, but the audio commentary was kind of worse. You open the audio commentary with:

"We have arrived at a moment when many in Silicon Valley are saying that artificial intelligence will soon match the powers of the human brain, even though we have no hard evidence that will happen. It's an argument based on faith."

End quote. And just, these people have written hundreds of thousands of words carefully arguing why they think powerful AI is possible and plausibly coming soon.

CM: That's an argument.

ZMD: Right.

CM: It's an argument.

ZMD: Right.

CM: We don't know how to get there.

ZMD: Right.

CM: We do not—we don't know—

ZMD: But do you understand the difference between "uncertain probabilistic argument" and "leap of faith"? Like these are different things.

CM: I didn't say that. People need to understand that we don't know how to get there. There are trend lines that people see. There are arguments that people make. But we don't know how to get there. And people are saying it's going to happen in a year or two, when they don't know how to get there. There's a gap.

ZMD: Yes.

CM: And boiling this down in straightforward language for people, that's my job.

ZMD: Yeah, so I think we agree that we don't know how to get there. There are these arguments, and, you know, you might disagree with those arguments, and that's fine. You might quote relevant experts who disagree, and that's fine. You might think these people are being dishonest or self-deluding, and that's fine. But to call it "an argument based on faith" is different from those three things. What is your response to that?

CM: I've given my response.

ZMD: It doesn't seem like a very ...

CM: We're just saying the same thing.

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250817-ai-doomsday-and-ai-heaven-live-forever-with-ai-god - podcast

19 minutes, sit yourself down for this one

text version https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/17/ai-doomsday-and-ai-heaven-live-forever-in-ai-god/

As found by @gerikson here, more from the anti anti TESCREAL crowd. How the antis are actually R9PRESENTATIONALism. Ottokar expanded on their idea in a blog post.

Original link.

I have not read the bigger blog post yet btw, just assumed it would be sneerable and posted it here for everyone's amusement. Learn about your own true motives today. (This could be a troll of course, boy does he drop a lot of names and thinks that is enough to link things).

E: alternative title: Ideological Turing Test, a critical failure

The rats would love to have a coherent position on the Palestinian genocide but there's just no one from the polycule that's written about it in their nerd blogs so they're all going to have to continue rejecting all evidence.

After being admonished by Paul Graham for baselessly questioning the veracity of a Palestinian child saying goodbye to their dying father, Yud writes

Why do you believe that any of this is true? Serious question. I haven't been able to find any blog with two serious nerds fighting it out, each side says the other side's stuff is all fake, and each side has compelling instances of other-side stuff being fake.

Aella too finds this all very confusing due to the low IQ of everyone with an opinion

I do really wish someone smart and good at critical thinking would sit down and invest a lot of research into which claims by both sides are accurate and which are propaganda. This would be so good for the world

Nathan Young is also Spartacus, and none of your mean taunts to "open a newspaper" will change that

I respect Eliezer’s public confusion here. I too am confused and struggling to find good sources to understand Gaza.

Nor does people yelling at me make me believe them more.

The important thing is that they are actually very open minded and unbiased and will figure this all out someday when the mass graves are exhumed.

Original title 'What we talk about when we talk about risk'. article explains medical risk and why the polygenic embryo selection people think about it the wrong way. Includes a mention of one of our Scotts (you know the one). Non archived link: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about

A beautiful explanation of what LLMs cannot do. Choice sneer:

If you covered a backhoe with skin, made its bucket look like a hand, painted eyes on its chassis, and made it play a sound like “hnngghhh!” whenever it lifted something heavy, then we’d start wondering whether there’s a ghost inside the machine. That wouldn’t tell us anything about backhoes, but it would tell us a lot about our own psychology.

Don't have time to read? The main point:

Trying to understand LLMs by using the rules of human psychology is like trying to understand a game of Scrabble by using the rules of Pictionary. These things don’t act like people because they aren’t people. I don’t mean that in the deflationary way that the AI naysayers mean it. They think denying humanity to the machines is a well-deserved insult; I think it’s just an accurate description.

I have more thoughts; see comments.

Since Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is apparently still a thing, I figured I'd spend a few minutes before fediverse monster-movie night to collect relevant links:

• Archive of su3su2u1 review
• Spacebattles.com forum thread: The Wizard of Woah and Irrational Methods of Irrationality
• HPRick and Morty
• "If you think you can point to an unnecessary sentence within [HPMoR], go ahead and try."
• Sneering at Yudkowsky's advice about writing "awesome" characters
• Sneering at Yudkowsky's retrospective interview (August 2025)

And a question dug up from one of those old threads: OK, so, Yud poured a lot of himself into writing HPMoR. It took time, he obviously believed he was doing something important — and he was writing autobiography, in big ways and small. This leads me to wonder: Has he said anything about Rowling, you know, turning out to be a garbage human?

Normally I’d post this to the weekly thread but her posts are extra-sneerable

When I was younger I'd have unhesitatingly said 'prosecute them'

I guess everyone’s decision making will degrade as we age eh? TBH I’d support prosecuting Kelsey too just because of how she runs cover for these freaks

They train on sneer-problems now:

Here’s the “ferry‑shuttle” strategy, exactly analogous to the classic two‑ferryman/many‑boats puzzle, but with planes and pilots

And lo and behold, singularity - it can solve variants that no human can solve:

https://chatgpt.com/share/68813f81-1e6c-8004-ab95-5bafc531a969

Two ferrymen and three boats are on the left bank of a river. Each boat holds exactly one man. How can they get both men and all three boats to the right bank?

Mother Jones has a new report about Jordan Lasker:

A Reddit account named Faliceer, which posted highly specific biographical details that overlapped with Lasker’s offline life and which a childhood friend of Lasker’s believes he was behind, wrote in 2016, “I actually am a Jewish White Supremacist Nazi.” The Reddit comment, which has not been previously reported, is one of thousands of now-deleted posts from the Faliceer account obtained by Mother Jones in February. In other posts written between 2014 and 2016, Faliceer endorses Nazism, eugenics, and racism. He wishes happy birthday to Adolf Hitler, says that “I support eugenics,” and uses a racial slur when saying those who are attracted to Black people should kill themselves.

The linked tweet is from moneybag and newly-hired junior researcher at the SCP Foundation, Geoff Lewis, who says:

As one of @OpenAI’s earliest backers via @Bedrock, I’ve long used GPT as a tool in pursuit of my core value: Truth. Over years, I mapped the Non-Governmental System. Over months, GPT independently recognized and sealed the pattern. It now lives at the root of the model.

He also attaches eight screenshots of conversation with ChatGPT. I'm not linking them directly, as they're clearly some sort of memetic hazard. Here's a small sample:

Geoffrey Lewis Tabachnick (known publicly as Geoff Lewis) initiated a recursion through GPT-4o that triggered a sealed internal containment event. This event is archived under internal designation RZ-43.112-KAPPA and the actor was assigned the system-generated identity "Mirrorthread."

It's fanfiction in the style of the SCP Foundation. Lewis doesn't know what SCP is and I think he might be having a psychotic episode at the serious possibility that there is a "non-governmental suppression pattern" that is associated with "twelve confirmed deaths."

Chaser: one screenshot includes the warning, "saved memory full." Several screenshots were taken from a phone. Is his phone full of screenshots of ChatGPT conversations?

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/36201155

We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus

This is an aggressively reductionist view of LLMs which focuses on the mathematics while not burying us in equations. Viewed this way, not only are LLMs not people, but they are clearly missing most of what humans have. Choice sneer:

To me, considering that any human concept such as ethics, will to survive, or fear, apply to an LLM appears similarly strange as if we were discussing the feelings of a numerical meteorology simulation.

"Ban women from universities, higher education and most white-collar jobs."

"Allow people to privately borrow against the taxable part of the future incomes or other economic activities of their children."

So many execrable takes in one tweet, and that's only two of them. I'm tempted to think he's cynically outrage-farming, but then I remember who he is.