SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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New member of the rationalist axis of evil just dropped (www.bennjordan.com)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by Architeuthis@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

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tl;dr: Tech youtuber who got way into studying the negative health effects of infrasound produced by data centers (to the point of his research being cited a bunch in relevant court cases) gets a voluminous substack hit piece published on his work by "an independent writer and researcher funded by a grant from Coefficient Giving to explore topics in AI and other areas"

So after some sniffing around, I realize I’m being brigaded by someone deep in the Effective Altruism community. The author is, quite literally, paid by rotational-wealth NPO to write this very article among many others. I know what you’re thinking, and I know how this sounds. The battle cry of the pseudoscientist is poisoning the well of criticism.

But please do browse his bibliography.

Andy lives in a parallel universe where datacenters don’t waste water, AI artwork is without victims, and using ChatGPT doesn’t harm the environment. This is one of the many takes that perfectly align with the board, contributors, and partners with Coefficient Giving, formally called Open Philanthropy, but changed after its close association with Sam Bankman-Fried was causing some well-earned skepticism.

Quite the coincidence that this comes out right around the time Kelsey Piper decided to get busy "debunking" Ed Zitron.

There's already a follow up about the same people moving on to allegedly debunk a recent neuroscience paper on adverse infrasound effects on bsky.

old sneer club thread

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[–] corbin@awful.systems 3 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Jordan wants to be a pilloried martyr because it means that he doesn't have to be a thoughtful or skeptical scientist. Meanwhile he's making more mistakes than the Mythbusters. Previously, on Awful, he was shilling for HarmonyCloak, now productionized as ArtyShield.ai. Personally, I disagree with Masley about the connection between infrasound and uncanniness; we have explained multiple paranormal reports by measuring infrasound on location and Masley gives no alternative mechanism. But I agree with Masley that Jordan's units are sloppy at best and don't pass a sniff test; they certainly don't accord with my experience of being inside several different datacenters.

We really are suffering something of a Spiders Elon effect with the xAI datacenter, which is so poorly operated that it has generated a cottage industry of YouTube skeptic-at-home motte-and-bailey rants where folks pretend that all datacenters are equivalent. It doesn't help that the youth seem to think that datacenters are 2020s tech rather than 1980s tech.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago

Whether Jordan is correct or not (and I do get crank-vibes from him) is not really interesting from a meta-perspective. The interesting thing is that EAs can deploy astroturfers and they're met with pitchforks and torches from the get-go. Everyone hates AI and datacenters, and Rationalist Explanations and Facts are not gonna change that in a hurry.

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