

The author of that piece outsources his thinking to the slop machine.
If anyone wants to read the discussion by the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary), it starts here.


The author of that piece outsources his thinking to the slop machine.
If anyone wants to read the discussion by the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary), it starts here.


LessWrong, a group blog supposedly devoted to the science of living rationally, but in practice ground zero for some truly culty behavior. The Zizians arose from that community, for example.


Bye.


Don’t post slop.


I have fond memories of a Universal Soldier sequel because it was one of the weird movies we discovered randomly while away from home for academic-team tournaments.


Ah yes, Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979), The Island (2005) and probably at least one direct-to-DVD sequel to Universal Soldier (1992), who even keeps track of those


… an Anthropic cofounder was specifically thanked during the Pope’s speech where he said that they will "work together to “find the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence.” Chris Olah wasn’t a random attendee. The Vatican had been cultivating these relationships for many years.


3 and 10 look like the overconfident, amateurish poser villains whom Dr. Lecter kills by the end of the episode.


And also, like, laptop bags exist? They come in basic black. You can use them for books, emergency chocolate, manila envelopes stuffed with students’ homework that you need to grade… I bought one at a camping-goods store, and it’s lasted about 20 years.


If, like some of my male housemates you object on principle to the concept of a bag
then you need to watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade again. From there, you can graduate to the Tom Holland “Umbrella” video, which is clinically proven to make cis het women ovulate.


My wild guess is that if you put a few lesswrongen into a room and told them to invent a “research institute”, they’d write a book of procedure for the sake of having a lot of words about procedure, without any actual sense of how to allocate responsibilites properly.


🎶 sing us a song you’re the nano man 🎶


This is not debate club. Nor is it the room for gloating about how you, like, totally touched a nerve by providing facts and logic, bro.
Please enjoy your free trip to the egress.


From elsewhere in the comments:
… I am constantly aware that having an angry outburst is massively socially unacceptable, to the point where if I let such things happen regularly I would lose my job / my standing in the community / all my friends / everyone close to me. This creates an extremely strong incentive for me to self-regulate at least my outward reactions, even when it’s really hard. But because Nate is so high-status, he is allowed to make such outbursts without being faced with losing his job, his standing in the community, or his friends. This means he is insufficiently incentivized to self-regulate, and thus has been unable to learn.
High-status? Why?!! Jesus H. Fuck, I hope that if anyone ever gives me a get-out-of-social-consequences-free card, it’s for a better reason than my blogging.


From the post linked therein:
There’s this thing Nate and Eliezer do where they proclaim some extremely nonobvious take about alignment, say it in the same tone they would use to declare that grass is green, and don’t really explain it.
Gambling? In this establishment?!
Nate thinks in a different ontology from everyone, and often communicates using weird analogies
This feels like a misuse of the word ontology, but what do I know?
when Nate thinks you don’t understand something or have a mistaken approach, he gets visibly distressed and sad. I think this conditioned us to express less disagreement with him. I have a bunch of disagreements from his world model, and could probably be convinced to his position on like 1/3 of them, but I’m too afraid to bring them all up and if I did he’d probably stop talking to me out of despair anyway.
Wow, that’s a bad research supervisor.
The structure where we would talk to Nate 4h/day for one out of every ~6 weeks was pretty bad for feedback loops. A short meeting every week would have been better, but Nate said this would be more costly for him.
Wow, that’s a bad research supervisor.
(Every functional research group I’ve been part of has had weekly staff meetings. Even the undergrads were encouraged to participate and got at least that much talking time with the professor.)
In my frustration at the lack of concrete problems I asked Nate what research he would approve of outside of the main direction. We thought of two ideas […] I worked on these on and off for a few months without much progress, then went back to Nate to ask for advice. Nate clarified that he was not actually very excited about these directions himself, and it was more like “I don’t see the relevance here, but if you feel excited by these, I could see this not being totally useless”.
Wow, that’s a bad research supervisor.


It can be buffaloed by Buffalo buffalo.
No, but it does seem important to point out before anyone starts trying to parse the exact words line-by-line or otherwise give more attention to the details than it deserves.
And anyone who describes admitting to AI use as “coming out of the AI closet” deserves to be publicly shamed.