One thing to keep in mind about Ptacek is that he will die on the stupidest of hills. Back when Y Combinator president Garry Tan tweeted that members of the San Francisco board of supervisors should be killed, Ptacek defended him to the extent that the mouth-breathers on HN even turned on him.

Let them fight. https://openai.com/index/elon-musk-wanted-an-openai-for-profit/

Same. I’m not being critical of lab-grown meat. I think it’s a great idea.

But the pattern of things he’s got an opinion on suggests a familiarity with rationalist/EA/accelerationist/TPOT ideas.

Do you have a link? I’m interested. (Also, I see you posted something similar a couple hours before I did. Sorry I missed that!)

So it turns out the healthcare assassin has some… boutique… views. (Yeah, I know, shocker.) Things he seems to be into:

• Lab-grown meat
• Modern architecture is rotten
• Population decline is an existential threat
• Elon Musk and Peter Thiel

How soon until someone finds his LessWrong profile?

As anyone who’s been paying attention already knows, LLMs are merely mimics that provide the “illusion of understanding”.

I’m noticing that people who criticize him on that subreddit are being downvoted, while he’s being upvoted.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, as part of his prodigious self-promotion of this overlong and tendentious screed, he’s steered some of his more sympathetic followers to some of these forums.

Actually it’s the wikipedia subreddit thread I meant to refer to.

As a longtime listener to Tech Won’t Save Us, I was pleasantly surprised by my phone’s notification about this week’s episode. David was charming and interesting in equal measure. I mostly knew Jack Dorsey as the absentee CEO of Twitter who let the site stagnate under his watch, but there were a lot of little details about his moderation-phobia and fash-adjacency that I wasn’t aware of.

By the way, I highly recommend the podcast to the TechTakes crowd. They cover many of the same topics from a similar perspective.

For me it gives off huge Dr. Evil vibes.

If you ever get tired of searching for pics, you could always go the lazy route and fall back on AI-generated images. But then you’d have to accept the reality that in few years your posts would have the analog of a geocities webring stamped on them.

Trace seems a bit… emotional. You ok, Trace?

But will my insurance cover a visit to Dr. Spicy Autocomplete?

So now Steve Sailer has shown up in this essay’s comments, complaining about how Wikipedia has been unfairly stifling scientific racism.

Birds of a feather and all that, I guess.

what is the entire point of singling out Gerard for this?

He’s playing to his audience, which includes a substantial number of people with lifetime subscriptions to the Unz Review, Taki’s crapazine and Mankind Quarterly.

why it has to be quite that long

Welcome to the rationalist-sphere.

Scott Alexander, by far the most popular rationalist writer besides perhaps Yudkowsky himself, had written the most comprehensive rebuttal of neoreactionary claims on the internet.

Hey Trace, since you’re undoubtedly reading this thread, I’d like to make a plea. I know Scott Alexander Siskind is one of your personal heroes, but maybe you should consider digging up some dirt in his direction too. You might learn a thing or two.

Please touch grass.

The next AI winter can’t come too soon. They’re spinning up coal-fired power plants to supply the energy required to build these LLMs.

Until a month ago, TW was the long-time researcher for “Blocked and Reported”, the podcast hosted by Katie ‘TERF’ Herzog and relentless sealion Jesse Singal.

It’s kind of fascinating how rotten the “New Atheist” movement turned out to be. Whether it’s Richard Dawkins revealing his inner racist-misogynist, Michael Shermer being rapey AF, or James Lindsay turning into a Christofascist, the movement seems to have spawned and/or revealed a lot of really problematic people. I guess it’s no surprise that the rationalist scene had such a membership overlap.

She seems to do this kind of thing a lot.

According to a comment, she apparently claimed on Facebook that, due to her post, “around 75% of people changed their minds based on the evidence!”

After someone questioned how she knew it was 75%:

Update: I changed the wording of the post to now state: 𝗔𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟳𝟓% 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘂𝗽𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁, 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻*

And the * at the bottom says: Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio. And of course this is not proof that everybody changed their mind. There’s a lot of reasons to upvote the post or down vote it. However, I do think it’s a good indicator.

She then goes on to talk about how she made the Facebook post private because she didn’t think it should be reposted in places where it’s not appropriate to lie and make things up.

Clown. Car.