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LessWrong is a machine for causing depression in its cultists
(www.lesswrong.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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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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You know the doom cult is having an effect when it starts popping up in previously unlikely places. Last month the socialist magazine Jacobin had an extremely long cover feature on AI doom, which it bought into completely. The author is an effective altruist who interviewed and took seriously people like Katja Grace, Dan Hendrycks and Eliezer Yudkosky.
I used to be more sanguine about people's ability to see through this bullshit, but eschatological nonsense seems to tickle something fundamentally flawed in the human psyche. This LessWrong post is a perfect example.
@TinyTimmyTokyo @dgerard
The author previously wrote "The Socialist Case for Longtermism” in Jacobin, worked as a Python dev and data analytics person, and worked for McKinsey.
after what I’ve heard my local circles say about jacobin (and unfortunately I don’t remember many details — I should see if anybody’s got an article I can share) I’m no longer shocked when I find out they’re platforming and redwashing shitty capitalist mouthpieces
i have long considered Jacobin the Christian rock of socialism
@gnomicutterance @sneerclub Are you familiar with Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!”?
This makes sense to me. I went through a Jars of Clay / Switchfoot phase, but never Stryper.
I have heard a couple of really good episodes of The Dig podcast, which is a Jacobin thing. Notably "The German Question" a couple of weeks ago.
forget the article, this does the job in so many fewer words
I like some people who have written for Jacobin, sometimes I even enjoy an article here and there, but the magazine as a whole remains utterly unbeaten in the “will walk the length of Manhattan in a “GIANT RUBE” sandwich board for clicks” stakes
this reminds me of a plankton organization or something called "blockchain socialism", where the only thing that they have taken from socialism was aesthetics and probably they also thought that gays are fine people, but nothing beyond that. they would say "Monero can be used for anti-state purposes, therefore it's good for leftism" and shit like that
that's one weird fucking guy, thankfully
I think I’ve met that guy! they’re the weirdest person I’ve ever seen get bounced from a leftist group under suspicion of being a fed (the weird crypto shit was the straw that broke the camel’s back)
the famously leftist pastime, speculation/gambling on nonproductive assets
it’s kind of amazing how many financial scams try to appropriate leftist language and motivations to lure in marks, while the actual scheme is one of the most unrepentantly greedy and wasteful things you can do without going to prison (and some of them cross even that line)
Wasn't that piece linked here before? Lemmy's search is shit unfortunately.
I don't recall
I’m not pulling it up either, but I remember sneering at it. weird
Jacobin is proof that being Terminally Online is its own fucking ideology.
Socialism with uwu small bean characteristics.
that's the uwu smol bean defense contractors
(see: most of Rust)
my conflicting urges to rant about the defense contractors sponsoring RustConf, the Palantir employee who secretly controls most of the Rust package ecosystem via a transitive dependency (with arbitrary code execution on development machines!) and got a speaker kicked out of RustConf for threatening that position with a replacement for that dependency, or the fact that all the tech I like instantly gets taken over by shitheads as soon as it gets popular (and Nix is looking like it might be next)
More details on the rust thing? I can't find it by searching keywords you mentioned but I must know.
Here is the pile of receipts, posted by the speaker who was cancelled via backdoor.
@self @dgerard Am curious if you have specific concerns about Nix or if it's more a general concern based on past experience.
so far the results from various steering committees haven’t been fantastic, to the point where I’ve seen marginalized folks ranting about the outcome on mastodon, which isn’t a great sign. with that said, I’ve also seen a ton of marginalized folks quite happily get into Nix recently, and that’s fantastic — as long as they don’t hit a brick wall in the form of exclusionary social systems set up around contributing to the Nix ecosystem.
overall these are essentially just general concerns around a few signals I’ve seen and the point Nix is at where it’s rapidly transitioning from a project with an academic focus to one with a more general focus. I’ve already seen many attempts by commercial interests to irrevocably claim parts of the ecosystem, especially in flakes (there have been many attempts to restandardize flakes onto a complex, commercially-controlled standard library, which could result in a similar situation to what we’ve seen with rust)
Nix itself is still fantastic tech I use everywhere; that’s why I care if folks are excluded from contributing. unfortunately, the commercialization of open source ecosystems and exclusion seem to go hand-in-hand — it’s one of the tactics that corporations use to maintain control over open source projects, while making forks very hard or impossible for anyone without corporate levels of wealth and available labor.
I think funding and repetition are the fundamental building blocs here, rather than the human psyche itself. I have talked with otherwise bright people who have read an article by some journalist (not necessarily a rationalist) who has interviewed AI researchers (probably cultists, was it 500 million USD that was pumped into the network?) who takes AI doom seriously.
So you have two steps of people who in theory are paid to evaluate and formulate the truth, to inform readers who don't know the subject matter. And then add repetition from various directions and people get convinced that there is definitely something there (propaganda and commercials work the same way). Claiming that it's all nonsense and cultists appears not to have much effect.
There's probably some blurring of what "AI doom" means for people. People might be left thinking that "there could be negative effects due to widespread job loss etc" without necessarily buying into the weird maximalist AI doom ideas or "torturing simulated you forever" nonsense.
And the weirdo cultists probably use that blurring to build support for their cause without revealing the weird shit they actually believe.