TinyTimmyTokyo

The tech bro hive mind on HN is furiously flagging (i.e., voting into invisibility) any submissions dealing with Tesla, Elon Musk or the kafkaesque US immigration detention situation. Add "/active" to the URL to see.

The site's moderator says it's fine because users are "tired of the repetition". Repetition of what exactly? Attempts to get through the censorship wall?

Sneerclubbers may recall a recent encounter with "Tracing Woodgrains", née Jack Despain Zhou, the rationalist-infatuated former producer and researcher for "Blocked and Reported", a podcast featuring prominent transphobes Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog.

It turns out he's started a new venture: a "think-tank" called the "Center for Educational Progress." What's this think-tank's focus? Introducing eugenics into educational policy. Of couse they don't put it in those exact words, but that's the goal. The co-founder of the venture is Lillian Tara, former executive director of Pronatalist.org, the outfit run by creepy Harry Potter look-a-likes (and moderately frequent topic in this forum) Simone and Malcolm Collins. According to the anti-racist activist group Hope Not Hate:

The Collinses enlisted Lillian Tara, a pronatalist graduate student at Harvard University. During a call with our undercover reporter, Tara referred three times to her work with the Collinses as eugenics. “I don’t care if you call me a eugenicist,” she said.

Naturally, the CEP is concerned about IQ and want to ensure that mentally superior (read white) individuals don't have their hereditarily-deserved resources unfairly allocated to the poors and the stupids. They have a reading list on the substack, which includes people like Arthur Jensen and LessWrong IQ-fetishist Gwern.

So why are Trace and Lillian doing this now? I suppose they're striking while the iron is hot, probably hoping to get some sweet sweet Thiel-bucks as Elon and his goon-squad do their very best to gut public education.

And more proof for the aphorism: "Scratch a rationalist, find a racist".

In a recent Hard Fork (Hard Hork?) episode, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose described attending the recent "The Curve" conference -- a conference in Berkeley organized and attended mostly by our very best friends. When asked about the most memorable session he attended at this conference, Casey said:

That would have been a session called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, which was hosted by Eliezer Yudkowski. Eliezer is sort of the original doomer. For a couple of decades now, he has been warning about the prospects of super intelligent AI.

His view is that there is almost no scenario in which we could build a super intelligence that wouldn't either enslave us or hurt us, kill all of us, right? So he's been telling people from the beginning, we should probably just not build this. And so you and I had a chance to sit in with him.

People fired a bunch of questions at him. And we should say, he's a really polarizing figure, and I think is sort of on one extreme of this debate. But I think he was also really early to understanding a lot of harms that have bit by bit started to materialize.

And so it was fascinating to spend an hour or so sitting in a room and hearing him make his case.

[...]

Yeah, my case for taking these folks seriously, Kevin, is that this is a community that, over a decade ago, started to make a lot of predictions that just basically came true, right? They started to look at advancements in machine learning and neural networks and started to connect the dots. And they said, hey, before too long, we're going to get into a world where these models are incredibly powerful.

And all that stuff just turned out to be true. So, that's why they have credibility with me, right? Everything they believe, you know, we could hit some sort of limit that they didn't see coming.

Their model of the world could sort of fall apart. But as they have updated it bit by bit, and as these companies have made further advancements and they've built new products, I would say that this model of the world has basically held so far. And so, if nothing else, I think we have to keep this group of folks in mind as we think about, well, what is the next phase of AI going to look like for all of us?

Excerpt:

A new study published on Thursday in The American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that dosage may play a role. It found that among people who took high doses of prescription amphetamines such as Vyvanse and Adderall, there was a fivefold increased risk of developing psychosis or mania for the first time compared with those who weren’t taking stimulants.

Perhaps this explains some of what goes on at LessWrong and in other rationalist circles.

Molly White is best known for shining a light on the silliness and fraud that are cryptocurrency, blockchain and Web3. This essay may be a sign that she's shifting her focus to our sneerworthy friends in the extended rationalism universe. If so, that's an excellent development. Molly's great.