SneerClub

First, let me say that what broke me from the herd at lesswrong was specifically the calls for AI pauses. That somehow 'rationalists' are so certain advanced AI will kill everyone in the future (pDoom = 100%!) that they need to commit any violent act needed to stop AI from being developed.

The flaw here is that there's 8 billion people alive right now, and we don't actually know what the future is. There are ways better AI could help the people living now, possibly saving their lives, and essentially eliezer yudkowsky is saying "fuck em". This could only be worth it if you actually somehow knew trillions of people were going to exist, had a low future discount rate, and so on. This seems deeply flawed, and seems to be one of the points here.

But I do think advanced AI is possible. And while it may not be a mainstream take yet, it seems like the problems current AI can't solve, like robotics, continuous learning, module reuse - the things needed to reach a general level of capabilities and for AI to do many but not all human jobs - are near future. I can link deepmind papers with all of these, published in 2022 or 2023.

And if AI can be general and control robots, and since making robots is a task human technicians and other workers can do, this does mean a form of Singularity is possible. Maybe not the breathless utopia by Ray Kurzweil but a fuckton of robots.

So I was wondering what the people here generally think. There are "boomer" forums I know of where they also generally deny AI is possible anytime soon, claim GPT-n is a stochastic parrot, and make fun of tech bros as being hypesters who collect 300k to edit javascript and drive Teslas*.

I also have noticed that the whole rationalist schtick of "what is your probability" seems like asking for "joint probabilities", aka smoke a joint and give a probability.

Here's my questions:

1. Before 2030, do you consider it more likely than not that current AI techniques will scale to human level in at least 25% of the domains that humans can do, to average human level.

2. Do you consider it likely, before 2040, those domains will include robotics

3. If AI systems can control robotics, do you believe a form of Singularity will happen. This means hard exponential growth of the number of robots, scaling past all industry on earth today by at least 1 order of magnitude, and off planet mining soon to follow. It does not necessarily mean anything else.

4. Do you think that mass transition where most human jobs we have now will become replaced by AI systems before 2040 will happen

5. Is AI system design an issue. I hate to say "alignment", because I think that's hopeless wankery by non software engineers, but given these will be robotic controlling advanced decision-making systems, will it require lots of methodical engineering by skilled engineers, with serious negative consequences when the work is sloppy?

*"epistemic status": I uh do work for a tech company, my job title is machine learning engineer, my girlfriend is much younger than me and sometimes fucks other dudes, and we have 2 Teslas..

Someone posted this on ssc with a warning about talking to cops, but really just marvel at what's going on here.

Aaronson manages to turn a story where he is briefly arrested for a theft (which he did commit on video!) into paragraphs and paragraphs of indulging in his persecution fantasies.

Zero empathy on display for the people he stole from, the people just doing their jobs, or reflection on the fact that it wasn't a simple little mistake anyone could make but rather... a fairly weird move? Do people usually put change in cups?

This is a classic sequence post: (mis)appropriated Japanese phrases and cultural concepts, references to the AI box experiment, and links to other sequence posts. It is also especially ironic given Eliezer's recent switch to doomerism with his new phrases of "shut it all down" and "AI alignment is too hard" and "we're all going to die".

Indeed, with developments in NN interpretability and a use case of making LLM not racist or otherwise horrible, it seems to me like their is finally actually tractable work to be done (that is at least vaguely related to AI alignment)... which is probably why Eliezer is declaring defeat and switching to the podcast circuit.

the r/SneerClub archives are finally online! this is an early v1 which contains 1,940 posts grabbed from the Reddit UI using Bulk Downloader for Reddit. this encompasses both the 1000 most recent posts on r/SneerClub as well as a set of popular historical posts

as a v1, you'll notice a lot of jank. known issues are:

• this won't work at all on mobile because my css is garbage. it might not even work on anyone else's screen; good luck!
• as mentioned above, only 1,940 posts are in this release. there's a full historical archive of r/SneerClub sourced from pushshift at the archive data git repo (or clone git://these.awful.systems/sneer-archive-data.git); the remaining work here is to merge the BDFR and pushshift data into the same JSON format so the archives can pull in everything
• markdown is only rendered for posts and first-level comments; everything else just gets the raw markdown. I couldn't figure out how to make miller recursively parse JSON, so I might have to write some javascript for this
• likewise, comments display a unix epoch instead of a rendered time
• searching happens locally in your browser, but only post titles and authors are indexed to keep download sizes small
• speaking of, there's a much larger r/SneerClub archive that includes the media files BDFR grabbed while archiving. it's a bit unmanageable to actually use directly, but is available for archival purposes (and could be included as part of the hosted archive if there's demand for it)

if you'd like the source code for the r/SneerClub archive static site, it lives here (or clone git://these.awful.systems/sneer-archive-site.git)

It will not surprise you at all to find that they protest just a tad too much.

See also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZjXtjRQaD2b4PAser/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning

Geoffrey "primalpoly" Miller tweets thusly:

Imagine you're single & want to use a dating app to find a good mate.

What's one question you wish everyone would answer in their dating app profile?

PS in my experience, the question 'What's the heritability of IQ?' tends to separate the wheat from the chaff.

In the far-off days of August 2022, Yudkowsky said of his brainchild,

If you think you can point to an unnecessary sentence within it, go ahead and try. Having a long story isn't the same fundamental kind of issue as having an extra sentence.

To which MarxBroshevik replied,

The first two sentences have a weird contradiction:

Every inch of wall space is covered by a bookcase. Each bookcase has six shelves, going almost to the ceiling.

So is it "every inch", or are the bookshelves going "almost" to the ceiling? Can't be both.

I've not read further than the first paragraph so there's probably other mistakes in the book too. There's kind of other 'mistakes' even in the first paragraph, not logical mistakes as such, just as an editor I would have... questions.

And I elaborated:

I'm not one to complain about the passive voice every time I see it. Like all matters of style, it's a choice that depends upon the tone the author desires, the point the author wishes to emphasize, even the way a character would speak. ("Oh, his throat was cut," Holmes concurred, "but not by his own hand.") Here, it contributes to a staid feeling. It emphasizes the walls and the shelves, not the books. This is all wrong for a story that is supposed to be about the pleasures of learning, a story whose main character can't walk past a bookstore without going in. Moreover, the instigating conceit of the fanfic is that their love of learning was nurtured, rather than neglected. Imagine that character, their family, their family home, and step into their library. What do you see?

Books — every wall, books to the ceiling.

Bam, done.

This is the living-room of the house occupied by the eminent Professor Michael Verres-Evans,

Calling a character "the eminent Professor" feels uncomfortably Dan Brown.

and his wife, Mrs. Petunia Evans-Verres, and their adopted son, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres.

I hate the kid already.

And he said he wanted children, and that his first son would be named Dudley. And I thought to myself, what kind of parent names their child Dudley Dursley?

Congratulations, you've noticed the name in a children's book that was invented to sound stodgy and unpleasant. (In The Chocolate Factory of Rationality, a character asks "What kind of a name is 'Wonka' anyway?") And somehow you're trying to prove your cleverness and superiority over canon by mocking the name that was invented for children to mock. Of course, the Dursleys were also the start of Rowling using "physically unsightly by her standards" to indicate "morally evil", so joining in with that mockery feels ... It's aged badly, to be generous.

Also, is it just the people I know, or does having a name picked out for a child that far in advance seem a bit unusual? Is "Dudley" a name with history in his family — the father he honored but never really knew? His grandfather who died in the War? If you want to tell a grown-up story, where people aren't just named the way they are because those are names for children to laugh at, then you have to play by grown-up rules of characterization.

The whole stretch with Harry pointing out they can ask for a demonstration of magic is too long. Asking for proof is the obvious move, but it's presented as something only Harry is clever enough to think of, and as the end of a logic chain.

"Mum, your parents didn't have magic, did they?" [...] "Then no one in your family knew about magic when Lily got her letter. [...] If it's true, we can just get a Hogwarts professor here and see the magic for ourselves, and Dad will admit that it's true. And if not, then Mum will admit that it's false. That's what the experimental method is for, so that we don't have to resolve things just by arguing."

Jesus, this kid goes around with L's theme from Death Note playing in his head whenever he pours a bowl of breakfast crunchies.

Always Harry had been encouraged to study whatever caught his attention, bought all the books that caught his fancy, sponsored in whatever maths or science competitions he entered. He was given anything reasonable that he wanted, except, maybe, the slightest shred of respect.

Oh, sod off, you entitled little twit; the chip on your shoulder is bigger than you are. Your parents buy you college textbooks on physics instead of coloring books about rocketships, and you think you don't get respect? Because your adoptive father is incredulous about the existence of, let me check my notes here, literal magic? You know, the thing which would upend the body of known science, as you will yourself expound at great length.

"Mum," Harry said. "If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Wesley Crusher would shove this kid into a locker.