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At various points, on Twitter, Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.” ...

When he’s not tweeting about e/acc, Verdon runs Extropic, which he started in 2022. Some of his startup capital came from a side NFT business, which he started while still working at Google’s moonshot lab X. The project began as an April Fools joke, but when it started making real money, he kept going: “It's like it was meta-ironic and then became post-ironic.” ...

On Twitter, Jezos described the company as an “AI Manhattan Project” and once quipped, “If you knew what I was building, you’d try to ban it.”

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[-] Shitgenstein1@awful.systems 16 points 11 months ago

In its reaction against both EA and AI safety advocates, e/acc also explicitly pays tribute to another longtime Silicon Valley idea. “This is very traditional libertarian right-wing hostility to regulation," said Benjamin Noys, a professor of critical theory at the University of Chichester and scholar of accelerationism. Jezos calls it the “libertarian e/acc path.”

At least the Italian futurists were up front about their agenda.

“We’re trying to solve culture by engineering,” Verdon said. “When you're an entrepreneur, you engineer ways to incentivize certain behaviors via gradients and reward, and you can program a civilizational system."

Reading Nudge to engineer the 'Volksschädling' to board the trains voluntarily. Dusting off the old state eugenics compensation programs.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 16 points 11 months ago

The fuck do they mean "solve culture"? Is culture a problem to be solved? Actually don't answer that.

[-] self@awful.systems 10 points 11 months ago

even more horrifying — they see culture as a system of equations they can use AI to generate solutions for, and the correct set of solutions will give them absolute control over culture. they apply this to all aspects of society. these assholes didn’t understand hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy or any of the other sci fi they cribbed these ideas from, and it shows

[-] 200fifty@awful.systems 10 points 11 months ago

It's like pickup artistry on a societal scale.

It really does illustrate the way they see culture not as, like, a beautiful evolving dynamic system that makes life worth living, but instead as a stupid game to be won or a nuisance getting in the way of their world domination efforts

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 11 months ago

remember that Yudkowsky's CEV idea was literally to analytically solve ethics

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 11 months ago

In an essay that somehow manages to offhandendly mention both evolutionary psychology and hentai anime in the same paragraph.

[-] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It's like when he wore a fedora and started talking about 4chan greentexts in his first major interview. He just cannot help himself.

P.S. The New York Times recently listed "internet philosopher" Eliezer Yudkowsky as one of the of the major figures in the modern AI movement, this is the picture they chose to use.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 11 months ago

this is the picture they chose to use.

You may not like it, but this is what peak rationality looks like.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 11 months ago

the cookie cutter glasses are load bearing

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 11 months ago

That hat could only work with New Year's Eve glasses from a year with "00".

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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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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.

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