The Coco Chanel meme is quite funny, given that the writer seems too young to know much about her other than that she's some sort of fashion lady. (There's a Behind the Bastards series on her upbringing, business attitude, and collaboration with Nazis.)

Not only do I not understand how the Landauer limit works, I don’t even know what it is.

Points for honesty, I guess? But also demerits for not at least reading the Wikipedia article. Rationalists are so quick to write paragraphs explaining that they didn't read paragraphs.

Not sure if it's a NSFW assertion, but to me the p-zombie experiment seems like the result of a discourse that went off the rails very early and very hard into angels on the head of a pin territory, this lw post notwithstanding.

Like, as far as I can tell, imagining a perfectly cloned reality except with the phenomenon in question assumed away, is supposedly (metaphysical) evidence that the phenomenon exists, except in a separate ontology? Isn't this basically like using reverse Occam's razor to prove that the extra entities are actually necessary, at least as long as they somehow stay mostly in their own universe?

Plus, the implicit assumption that consciousness can be defined as some sort of singular and uniform property you either have or don't seems inherently dodgy and also to be at the core of the contradiction; like, is taking p-zombies too seriously a reaction specifically to a general sense of disappointment that a singular consciousness organelle is nowhere to be found?

There’s something infuriating about this. Making basic errors that show you don’t have the faintest grasp on what people are arguing about, and then acting like the people who take the time to get Ph.Ds and don’t end up agreeing with your half-baked arguments are just too stupid to be worth listening to is outrageous.

Hey, that's what we've been saying for years!

@dgerard reading the bit on decision theory and I'm reminded of that one anecdote about the decision theorist who asked their friend if they should propose to their wife.

All right, pack it up boys, guess we don’t need the ol’ sneer club no more.

Poor dude really seems to be confused by the hostility he's been received with. Rationalists aren't anywhere near as interested in being right as feeling right. He won't make much progress that way

One might say

he should update his priors

At the risk of being NSFW.

When I met Yud some years ago, I asked him how he goes about learning new things, his answer was roughly: "Scroll on Facebook until I find someone who has written about it." Maybe he actually read some of the sources he references a long time ago but I think he gave up on learning new things and has sat comfortably abusing his power over the community.

Egads these people are gross.

In my final year of high school debate

Most self aware rationalist.

I’m not an expert about X, but it seems like most of the experts about X think X or are unsure about it. The fact that Eliezer, who often veers sharply off-the-rails, thinks X gives me virtually no evidence about X. Eliezer, while being quite smart, is not rational enough to be worthy of significant deference on any subject, especially those subjects outside his area of expertise. Still though, he has some interesting things to say about AI and consequentialism that are sort of convincing. So it’s not like he’s wrong about everything or is a total crank. But he’s wrong enough, in sufficiently egregious ways, that I don’t really care what he thinks.

So close to being deprogrammed. So close. It's like when a kid finds out about the Easter Bunny but somehow still clings to Santa.

He links to this (warning, so long it has a whole 'why write this' section) article on Yudkowsky being wrong which amuses me.

Making basic errors that show you don’t have the faintest grasp on what people are arguing about, and then acting like the people who take the time to get Ph.Ds and don’t end up agreeing with your half-baked arguments are just too stupid to be worth listening to is outrageous.

This, but for AI lol.

If anyone would like to have a debate about this on YouTube...

LW equivalent of fight me irl bro