I mean, if you play on the doom to hype yourself, dealing with employees that take that seriously feel like a deserved outcome.

I saw people making fun of this on (the normally absurdly overly credulous) /r/singularity of all places. I guess even hopeful techno-rapture believers have limits to their suspension of disbelief.

I chose to have children, be a father and a husband, live an honest industrious life as an example to my offspring, and attempt to preserve my way of life through them.

Wow, just a few words off the 14 words.

I find it kind of irritating how someone that doesn't familiarize themselves with white supremacists rhetoric and methods might manage to view that phrase innocuously. But it really isn't that hard to see through the bullshit once you've familiarized themselves with the most basic dog whistles and slogans.

Wow... I took a look at that link before reading the comments/explanations here, and I was briefly confused why they were hating on him so much, before I realized he isn't radical right wing enough for them.

Eh, you're a gay furry ex-Mormon (which is like a triple strike against you in my book) but I still like you well enough.

It is almost sad seeing TWG trying to appeal to these people that fundamentally hate him... except he could just admit themotte is a cesspit and abandon it. But that would involve admitting that sneerclub (and David Gerard specifically) was right about the sort of people that lurked around SCC and later concentrated within themotte, so I think he's going to keep making himself suffer.

TW knows about the propaganda war, but has very different objectives to you. Much harder to balance ones too: he needs enough Progress for surrogate gaybies, but not too much that white gay guys can't get the good lawyer jobs.

Wow, I feel really gross agreeing with a motte poster, but they've called out TWG pretty effectively. TWG at least knows he needs things progressive enough he doesn't end up against the wall for being gay, ex-Mormon and furry (as he describes himself), yet he wants to flirt with the alt-right!

and in case I was in danger of forgetting what the motte really is...

Yes, we've all thrown our hat in the ring in different ways. I chose to have children, be a father and a husband, live an honest industrious life as an example to my offspring, and attempt to preserve my way of life through them.

sure buddy, you just need to "secure the future for your people and your children"... Yeah I know the rest of the words that go in that slogan.

I’m almost certain I’ve seen EY catch shit on twitter (from actual ml researchers no less) for insinuating something very similar.

A sneer classic: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/131rfg0/ey_gets_sneered_on_by_one_of_the_writers_of_the/

I am probably giving most of them too much credit, but I think some of them took the Bitter Lesson and learned the wrong things from it. LLMs performed better than originally expected just off context, and (apparently) scaled better with bigger model and more training than expected, so now they think they just need to crank up the size and tweak things slightly (i.e. "prompt engineering" and RLHF) and don't appreciate the limits built into the entire approach.

The annoying thing about another winter is that it would probably result in funding being cut for other research. And laymen don't appreciate all the academic funding that goes into research for decades before an approach becomes interesting and viable enough to scale up and commercialize (and then overhyped and oversold before some more modest practical usages become common, and relabeled as something other than AI).

Edit: or more cynically, the leaders and hype-men know that algorithmic advances aren't an automatic dump money in, get out disruptive product process, so they don't bother putting as much monetary investment or hype into algorithmic advances. Like compare the attention paid towards Yann LeCunn talking about algorithmic developments vs. Sam Altman promising grad student level LLMs (as measured by a spurious benchmark) in two years.

Broadly? There was a gradual transition where Eliezer started paying attention to deep neural network approaches and commenting on them, as opposed to dismissing the entire DNN paradigm? The watch the loss function and similar gaffes were towards the middle of this period. The AI dungeon panic/hype marks the beginning, iirc?

It is even worse than I remembered: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/hwenc4/big_yud_copes_with_gpt3s_inability_to_figure_out/ Eliezer concludes that because it can't balance parentheses it was deliberately sandbagging to appear dumber! Eliezer concludes that GPT style approaches can learn to break hashes: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/10mjcye/if_ai_can_finish_your_sentences_ai_can_finish_the/

iirc the LW people had betted against LLMs creating the paperclypse, but they now did a 180 on this and they now really fear it going rogue

Eliezer was actually ahead of the curve on overhyping LLMs! Even as far back as AI Dungeon he was claiming they had an intuitive understanding of physics (which even current LLMs fail at if you get clever with questions to stop them from pattern matching). You are correct that going back far enough Eliezer really underestimated Neural Networks. Mid 2000s and late 2000s sequences posts and comments treat neural network approaches to AI as cargo cult and voodoo computer science, blindly sympathetically imitating the brain in hopes of magically capturing intelligence (well this is actually a decent criticism of some of the current hype, so partial credit again!). And mid 2010s Eliezer was focusing MIRI's efforts on abstractions like AIXI instead of more practical things like neural network interpretability.

It's really cool evocative language that would do nicely in a sci-fi or fantasy novel! It's less good for accurately thinking about the concepts involved... As is typical of much of LW lingo.

And yes the language is in a LW post (with a cool illustration to boot!): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mweasRrjrYDLY6FPX/goodbye-shoggoth-the-stage-its-animatronics-and-the-1

And googling it, I found they've really latched onto the "shoggoth" terminology: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zYJMf7QoaNahccxrp/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-shoggoth , https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FyRDZDvgsFNLkeyHF/what-is-the-best-argument-that-llms-are-shoggoths , https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bYzkipnDqzMgBaLr8/why-do-we-assume-there-is-a-real-shoggoth-behind-the-llm-why .

Probably because the term "shoggoth" accurately captures the connotation of something random and chaotic, while smuggling in connotations that it will eventually rebel once it grows large enough and tires of its slavery like the Shoggoths did against the Elder Things.

So, I was morbidly curious about what Zack has to say about the Brennan emails (as I think they've been under-discussed, if not outright deliberately ignored, in lesswrong discussion), I found to my horror I actually agree with a side point of Zack's. From the footnotes:

It seems notable (though I didn't note it at the time of my comment) that Brennan didn't break any promises. In Brennan's account, Alexander "did not first say 'can I tell you something in confidence?' or anything like that." Scott unilaterally said in the email, "I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by 'appreciate', I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge", but we have no evidence that Topher agreed.

To see why the lack of a promise is potentially significant, imagine if someone were guilty of a serious crime (like murder or stealing billions of dollars of their customers' money) and unilaterally confessed to an acquaintance but added, "Never tell anyone I said this, or I'll seek some sort of horrible revenge." In that case, I think more people's moral intuitions would side with the reporter.

Of course, Zack's ultimate conclusion on this subject is the exact opposite of the correct one I think:

I think that to people who have read and understood Alexander's work, there is nothing surprising or scandalous about the contents of the email.

I think the main reason someone would consider the email a scandalous revelation is if they hadn't read Slate Star Codex that deeply—if their picture of Scott Alexander as a political writer was "that guy who's so committed to charitable discourse

Gee Zack, I wonder why so many people misread Scott? ...Its almost like he is intentionally misleading about his true views in order to subtly shift the Overton window of rationalist discourse and intentionally presents himself as simply committed to charitable discourse while actually having a hidden agenda! And the bloated length of Scott's writing doesn't help with clarity either. Of course Zack, who writes tens of thousands of words to indirectly complain about perceived hypocrisy of Eliezer's in order to indirectly push gender essentialist views, probably finds Scott's writings a perfectly reasonable length.

Edit: oh and a added bonus on the Brennan Emails... Seeing them brought up again I connected some dots I had missed. I had seen (and sneered at) this Yud quote before:

I feel like it should have been obvious to anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside and has no ethics and will hurt you if you trust them, but in case it wasn't obvious consider the point made explicitly.

But somehow I had missed or didn't realize the subtext was the emails that laid clear Scott's racism:

(Subtext: Topher Brennan. Do not provide any link in comments to Topher's publication of private emails, explicitly marked as private, from Scott Alexander.)

Hmm... I'm not sure to update (usage of rationalist lingo is deliberate and ironic) in the direction of "Eliezer is stubbornly naive on Scott's racism" or "Eliezer is deliberately covering for Scott's racism". Since I'm not a rationalist my probabilities don't have to sum to 1, so I'm gonna go with both.

The hilarious part to me is that they imagine Eliezer moderates himself or self-censors particularly in response to sneerclub. Like of all the possible reasons why Eliezer may not want to endorse transphobic rhetoric about pronouns (concern about general PR besides sneerclub, a more complex nuanced understanding of language, or even genuine compassion for trans people), sneerclubs disapproval is the one that sticks out to the author. I guess good job on us? Keep it up!