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 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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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[–] Evinceo@awful.systems 5 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Wow this is stupendously stupid: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/its-much-easier-to-hold-computers

Willfully misses the point that systems are unaccountable, not physical devices. Yes self driving cars are covered in cameras. But we revoke the licenses of drivers every day while allowing self driving cars on the road when the same model has caused accidents for which a human driver would have their keys taken away. We fire employees much more readily than we fire SAAS vendors. And if a person had posted what Grok did I suspect they would be in custody right now.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 4 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Good find, this is never-take-me-seriously stupid, and also does the beigeness thing of trying to gradually work around an accepted definition in order to almost make a point at the last minute, here being that since (we have apparently concluded that) (because of uh hypothetical brain surgery and stuff) accountability = improvability + punishability and nothing else so of course software can be held "accountable" in all the ways that matter.

His big mistake is not doing it at novel length so it's really obvious that he's being willfully stupid about it.