200fifty

I'm so sorry to inform you...

(10,959 words... I don't think I hate myself enough to read this one all the way through.)

Everything about Zack is sad.

I have to say, if you look past the, well, you know, stuff, he's actually pretty decent at injecting pathos into the posts about his personal life. His writing does a good job bringing you into his extremely depressing/self-loathing inner world -- you really feel for the guy, or at least I do. That said, it's this exact effect which makes me think he is probably not perceiving things as lucidly as he thinks he is. Depression can feel like clarity, but that's no way to live.

I love this unhinged Yudkowsky quote buried in here:

This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.

Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish[...]

Zack is actually correct that this is a pretty wild thing to say... "Rest assured that I considered all possible counterarguments against my position which I was able to generate with my mega super brain. No, I haven't actually looked at the arguments against my position, but I'm confident in my ability to think of everything that people who disagree with me would say."

It so happens that Yudkowsky is on the 'right side' politically in this particular case, but man, this is real sloppy for someone who claims to be on the side of capital-T truth.

The problem is... well, Zack correctly recognizes Yudkowsky is maybe not as world-changingly smart as he presents himself, and may be engaging in motivated reasoning rather than disinterested truth-seeking, but then his solution (a) doesn't involve questioning his belief in the rest of the robot apocalypse mythos, and (b) does involve running crying directly into the arms of Moldbug and a bunch of TERFs, which like, dude. Maybe consider critically interrogating those people's arguments too??

I feel like it was all over from the moment they made it talk in first person. No one had any illusions that Inferkit or NovelAI were general intelligences, because it was obvious that they were just language models autocompleting a sentence you typed in.

Six fingers on the right hand

each of us has a strong ethical obligation to live so as to alleviate the suffering of those less fortunate than ourselves

Sounds like he did a bad job at living up to those principles then, huh?

Also is it just me or is this not actually a very good description of utilitarian beliefs lol

Wow, he seems so confident and secure in his masculinity! No one's gonna think this guy has issues with his sexuality after he made this tweet, that's for darn sure.

this made me laugh out loud thank you

And who doesn’t want to be younger for longer?

Oh, of course it's about this. Is it ever not about this with Thiel?

I don't think they were defending ai necessarily, just saying they had objections to the specific technique used by these tools. I do think that not open-sourcing the thing is probably defensible given that it exists in an adversarial context, but the technical concerns are worth being aware of

I'm just wondering how exactly he goes about doing this. Like if I wanted to casually slip the N word into a casual conversation (for... some reason) I'm not actually sure how I would go about setting it up?

Like, is he just randomly saying it at people to see how they react (which most normies rightfully would judge as very weird)? Is he using it to describe actual black people (in which case I feel like people dropping him as a friend aren't really doing it over "speech taboos", are they...)? Is he asking people "so how do you feel about the word 'n.....'?" Something else? My curiosity is piqued now.