NSFW: this article, mentioned but not linked by the Substack author, is good reading if you want to know about the inciting drama. Choice quote:

Personally I always default to dismissing the chuddy “you radicalized me” explanation as a manipulation tactic coming from people who were already wanting to go there and just looking for an excuse. Also adjacent to abuser logic, like “look what you made me do.” I don’t buy that nazi furry radicalizing, of all things, happens to neutral people.

An ounce of NSFW might help here. There's a very reasonable definition of addiction using ΔFosB modulation. Scott probably doesn't like this because it implies that the concept of addiction is hopelessly overlapping with desires for food, shelter, exercise, social belonging, etc. and totally avoids the difficult subjective task of determining whether a person's addiction is interfering with their daily life; Scott gets paid good money to be judgmental about his patients' lives!

You are an exponential economist, but I am a finite physicist. Do the math.

I'm being explicitly NSFW in the hopes that your eyes will be opened.

The Singularity was spawned in the 1920s, with no clear initiating event. Its first two leaps forward are called "postmodernism" and "the Atomic age." It became too much for any human to grok in the late 1940s, and by the 1960s it was in charge of terraforming and scientific progress.

I find all of your questions irrelevant, and I say this as a machine-learning practitioner. We already have exponential growth in robotics, leading to superhuman capabilities in manufacturing and logistics.

He thinks he's discount Peter Watts.

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.

If you ever happen to chat in-person with this sort of highly-concerned moderate, feel free to grill them about how they would deal with violent fascists. Either they cave, or they'll eventually conclude that their immense powers of rhetoric allow them to verbally defuse Nazis somehow. In this latter case, point out that they can't even convince you that punching Nazis is wrong, and conclude that they must not be very good at rhetoric.

Sorry, but I can't even sneer properly at this sort of cowardice. It's pathetic to the point where ridicule is the only response I can emotionally justify.

The Internet is not for capitalists. It has been co-opted.

Hey, don't lump us "gifted" folks in with LW~ I survived Talented & Gifted; I stayed in school, studied, and learned about the world. Yud's contention is that I should have dropped out and read sci-fi books all day.

I do read sci-fi all day, though... Maybe we're not so different...

I was incorrect; the paper is about famine and aid in Bengal.

Bonus sneer! Quote from Singer's paper (p9):

Another, more serious reason for not giving to famine relief funds is that until there is effective population control, relieving famine merely postpones starvation. … The conclusion that should be drawn is that the best means of preventing famine, in the long run, is population control. It would then follow from the position reached earlier that one ought to be doing all one can to promote population control (unless one held that all forms of population control were wrong in themselves, or would have significantly bad consequences). Since there are organizations working specifically for population control, one would then support them rather than more orthodox methods of preventing famine.

Isn't Singer so polite to leave us an escape hatch just in case we happen to "[hold] that all forms of population control [are] wrong in themselves"? But we have enough experience to know now that sterilization (USA), rules against too many children (CCP), and straight-up forced starvation (USSR) are inhumane. So while his ignorance could be acceptable in the 70s, I think that our half-century of intervening experience shows that he was, uh, naïve.

At risk of going NSFW, it's obvious that none of these folks have read Singer 1971, which is the paper that kickstarted the EA movement. This paper's argument has a massive fucking hole right in the middle.

Without cracking open the paper, I seem to recall that it is specifically about Oxfam and famine in Africa. The central claim of the paper is that everybody should donate to Oxfam. However, if one is an employee of Oxfam, then suddenly the utilitarian arithmetic fails; his argument only allows for money going from non-Oxfam taxpayers to Oxfam employees.

Can't help but notice how the main problem with EA charities is the fucking nepotism. Almost as if the EA movement rests on a philosophical foundation of ignoring when charities employ friends of donors.

Nah, they're okay with it because it reinforces their belief that a person is either high-empathy or low-empathy, with higher EQ being better. In general, conservatives love standardized tests and grades, because it grants the appearance of merit, which is essential for meritocracy.

Unlucky 10000: There is an EQ, or emotional quotient, and I was given an EQ test in high school (like age 17-18, don't remember exactly). Fortunately, it was just done for fun by a lone teacher, but I could see it becoming popular in a future school system.

Rumor is that GPT-4 is also underpriced; in general, rumors are that OpenAI loses money on all of its products individually. It's sneerworthy, but I don't know what it means for the future; few things are more dangerous than a cornered wild startup who is starving and afraid.

We really ought to gatekeep Russell fans harder. Oh, you like Russell? What's your favorite logic and how many theorems have you proven formally? How many theists have you debated?

I suspect that, prior to watching the film, Sam did not know the part of the story where Oppenheimer is a communist. It must have hurt to realize that his heroic physicist was not a John Galt.