SneerClub

Apparently DOGE isn’t killing enough people (literally or metaphorically)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlrBjeAtJUk - video

A nice and solid mockery of just how badly e/accs derailed their own plans by getting Trump elected. I'll let the subtitle(?) speak for itself:

Effective accelerationists didn’t just accidentally shoot themselves in the foot. They methodically blew off each of their toes with a .50 caliber sniper rifle.

Came across this fuckin disaster on Ye Olde LinkedIn by 'Caroline Jeanmaire at AI Governance at The Future Society'

"I've just reviewed what might be the most important AI forecast of the year: a meticulously researched scenario mapping potential paths to AGI by 2027. Authored by Daniel Kokotajlo (>lel) (OpenAI whistleblower), Scott Alexander (>LMAOU), Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean, it's a quantitatively rigorous analysis beginning with the emergence of true AI agents in mid-2025.

What makes this forecast exceptionally credible:

1. One author (Daniel) correctly predicted chain-of-thought reasoning, inference scaling, and sweeping chip export controls one year BEFORE ChatGPT existed

2. The report received feedback from ~100 AI experts (myself included) and earned endorsement from Yoshua Bengio

3. It makes concrete, testable predictions rather than vague statements that cannot be evaluated

The scenario details a transformation potentially more significant than the Industrial Revolution, compressed into just a few years. It maps specific pathways and decision points to help us make better choices when the time comes.

As the authors state: "It would be a grave mistake to dismiss this as mere hype."

For anyone working in AI policy, technical safety, corporate governance, or national security: I consider this essential reading for understanding how your current work connects to potentially transformative near-term developments."

Bruh what is the fuckin y axis on this bad boi?? christ on a bike, someone pull up that picture of the 10 trillion pound baby. Let's at least take a look inside for some of their deep quantitative reasoning...

....hmmmm....

O_O

The answer may surprise you!

Thinking about how the arsing fuck to explain the rationalists to normal people - especially as they are now a loud public problem along multiple dimensions.

The problem is that it's all deep in the weeds. Every part of it is "it can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong."

With bitcoin, I have, over the years, simplified it to being a story of crooks and con men. The correct answer to "what is a blockchain and how does it work" is "it's a way to move money around out of the sight of regulators" and maybe "so it's for crooks and con men, and a small number of sincere libertarians" and don't even talk about cryptography or technology.

I dunno what the one sentence explanation is of this shit.

"The purpose of LessWrong rationality is for Yudkowsky to live forever as an emulation running on the mind of the AI God" is completely true, is the purpose of the whole thing, and is also WTF.

Maybe that and "so he started what turned into a cult and a series of cults"? At this point I'm piling up the absurdities again.

The Behind The Bastards approach to all these guys has been "wow these guys are all so wacky haha and also they're evil."

How would you first approach explaining this shit past "it can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong"?

[also posted in sneer classic]

yeah i'm sure Matt Levine, qntm and Wildbow are gonna be champing at the bit to attend wordy racist fest

I haven't watched it. I don't know how well she will cover the subject or how deep the rabbit hole she will venture.

All I know is she's delightful and I sure as hell won't read that bilge myself, so I'm looking forward to an entertaining summary.

Edit: I watched it. I had a good time.

archive: https://archive.is/kM5hX

A solid piece on AI and ethics (and the general lack of them), featuring a nice sideswipe at our very good friends.

While this linear model's overall predictive accuracy barely outperformed random guessing,

I was tempted to write this up for Pivot but fuck giving that blog any sort of publicity.

the rest of the site is a stupendous assortment of a very small field of focus that made this ideal for sneerclub and not just techtakes

By Timnit Gebru and Emile P. Torres

Pro-tier sneers by seasoned veterans, get em while they're hot!

Edit: I am reliably informed that it is no longer hot.

some of the sub’s friends are holding a conference although they’re still not totally comfortable to go public:

but buyers are warned that purchases will “require approval”

aww, the poor babies. even with literal nazis in the whitehouse they still feel uncomfortable to spout their weird shit

hopefully if this thing happens at all, someone documents the everliving hell out of every attendee

tweet

lesswrong: How To Make Superbabies

Sneerclubbers may recall a recent encounter with "Tracing Woodgrains", née Jack Despain Zhou, the rationalist-infatuated former producer and researcher for "Blocked and Reported", a podcast featuring prominent transphobes Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog.

It turns out he's started a new venture: a "think-tank" called the "Center for Educational Progress." What's this think-tank's focus? Introducing eugenics into educational policy. Of couse they don't put it in those exact words, but that's the goal. The co-founder of the venture is Lillian Tara, former executive director of Pronatalist.org, the outfit run by creepy Harry Potter look-a-likes (and moderately frequent topic in this forum) Simone and Malcolm Collins. According to the anti-racist activist group Hope Not Hate:

The Collinses enlisted Lillian Tara, a pronatalist graduate student at Harvard University. During a call with our undercover reporter, Tara referred three times to her work with the Collinses as eugenics. “I don’t care if you call me a eugenicist,” she said.

Naturally, the CEP is concerned about IQ and want to ensure that mentally superior (read white) individuals don't have their hereditarily-deserved resources unfairly allocated to the poors and the stupids. They have a reading list on the substack, which includes people like Arthur Jensen and LessWrong IQ-fetishist Gwern.

So why are Trace and Lillian doing this now? I suppose they're striking while the iron is hot, probably hoping to get some sweet sweet Thiel-bucks as Elon and his goon-squad do their very best to gut public education.

And more proof for the aphorism: "Scratch a rationalist, find a racist".

the comments are a delight also

so i stumbled upon a thing on reddit

the thing is that there's an obscure early scifi book by none other than wernher von braun, that is about mars colonization, where they find already existing civilization, leader of which is called elon. apparently this is why megaracist elon's father named him that:

Interest in this novel increased in 2021 when people connected the Martian leader, called the Elon, to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, suggesting that von Braun may have somehow foreseen Musk's space exploration ventures.[15] However, Errol Musk, Elon's father, asserted in 2022 that he was fully aware of the von Braun connection in naming his son.[16]

also in that book: tunnels used for high-speed travel; nation-states became obsolete because of some magic tech; highly technocratic planetary government as a result. that stimulant habit seems historically accurate then, even if it's cut with ketamine sometimes. some more red string on corkboard https://www.mind-war.com/p/the-elon-how-a-nazi-rocket-scientist this tracks as one of his grandparents moved from canada to south africa because canada in 40s wasn't racist enough for them, and with all the technocracy inc things.

so yeah, motherfucker might be believing - or even groomed into - that he's destined to be a planetary overlord, all based on nazi scifi, and he's playing it out irl with all the fuck you money he has

a place for it

this is very self-serving ass covering from the rationalist sphere

there's a glaring hole in it: what precisely the break was between Ziz and her friends and the rest of the rationals. this isn't detailed.

xcancel: https://xcancel.com/aella_girl/status/1884481375690223684

aella's document dump: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1z21U_q1tESO61iL35ertsIjZYczJrHpQ