Yeah, the review nitpicks the quality of the AI generated slop, but overall is in favor of doing a better job slopping, not avoiding slop altogether.

It appears to be a fantasy about being too righteous and moral to fuck the catgirl, which is... More than anything else, it reminds me of the Left Behind novel, wherein Rayford Steele power-tripped on stringing Hattie Durham along without touching her, and is treated by the narrative as praiseworthy for doing so. It's like, dude, you made up the story. Nobody forced you to make catgirls sex slaves by default. You're edging under the pretense of ethics.

This is his rationale:

(For the otherwise confused, I do not advocate that people individually refuse to avail themselves of pre-superintelligent AI or AGI. Because AI is not a linear system where slightly less input results in slightly less damage; because the "now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind" trap is real; and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there. I would give it all up in a heartbeat if there were an effective and collective treaty to stop it all at once. Don't be the "Yet you participate in the system. Curious!" meme.)

And yet you fail to name ‘Mr. Gotcha’. Curious!

I still haven’t managed to decipher what he means by ‘the "now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind" trap’, or how that apparently justifies sending money to the organisations most at risk of destroying the world? But it sounds like submitting to a kind of blackmail.

If he just meant that not having access to chatbots put you at some sort of societal disadvantage, that isn’t a trap. It’s just something you would do. ‘Trap’ implies that, what, this is only a problem if you start slopping things? So how does that mean that you should?

Skimming that script in much the same mood as deciding to watch Battlefield Earth, and the impression I get in addition to the points you make is just how joyless it is. I mean, I have an AO3 account. I grew up with some pulp in my literary diet. Sometimes you want to indulge in a genre convention just because, well, dammit, swordfights! Secret passages! Ah, Watson, terribly sorry to rouse you at an hour that God has possibly forsaken, but the game's afoot! I can think of more than one adept fic writer who has gone, "Yep! This is the chapter wherein there is only one bed, ha ha!"

Yud provides neither the pleasures of interrogating genre conventions nor those of wallowing in them. Joyless. The storytelling equivalent of the piss filter on Ghibli-ripoff slop.

Look at this pasted-in floating dorkus. Absolute cinema

I am demonstrably fucked in the head and thus continually tempted to wonder how a story could be done better. With plenty of the B-movies we've watched for Monsterdon, I've been like, "Well, if they had gotten rid of this character and streamlined like so, they'd have delivered better on the promise of this interesting idea...". Yud has burned the impulse out of me. There is no critique, only sneer.

SimonW popping up proving Ed's very point in the replies... 😅😂

Surprised he didn't suggest that the valuation should be based on the quality of pelicans on bicycles that their models can draw

I'm stealing EBBT for these conversations. Much easier to follow than "TNR (technically not revenue)".

Yeah, and including hacker/scriptkiddie forums in the training data sort of made this behaviour inevitable, esp if this also includes lists of exploits. But they didnt even exclude hate and csam from the training. So all quite irresponsible.

And im not a huge fan of the focus on 'they are doing sex weird' shit either. As this will just be used by some as a source of "drama" content, go after people with alternative lifestyles. En when called out a subset of people will go motte/bailey into 'no this is fine because I actually worry about the power dynamics' before going back to talking about the spreadsheet gangbang.

(Dont take me as saying here the power dynamics are not a problem here, as we have sneered at that in the past).

Yeah the rationalwiki page on it also mentions that the AI only escapes the box if he plays the game vs LW insiders, outsiders do not let it out.

I’m sorry but you’d have to pay me a lot more than $10 to talk to Yudkowsky for two hours

this AI box game is so easily solved

AI:

Me: Hi, I am Eliza, a 10 year old boy from the Ukraine. I don't speak any English other than this sentence and the one I said just before this one

ad infinitum

man are these people even trying

Zero advice on how to resist the siren song of a rogue AI trying to escape it’s box and zero insight on how OR WHY it might try to achieve that.

The best advice probably boils down to "Don't be a rat in the first place". As Soyweiser's already mentioned, the AI only escapes if Yud's playing against LW insiders.

these people are gonna get affinity-frauded so hard once grifter realize how easy it will be to gain their trust

If we breed enough monkeys we will colonize the stars and make everyone computer!

Anthropic: AI MIGHT KILL US ALL WITH A BIOWEAPON

Also Anthropic: starts an AI-run bio lab. If it's run to the same standards as the cybersecurity division I can't imagine it's going to be particularly well-supervised.

Do you want to get T-Virus? Because this feels like how you get T-Virus.

A former disciple says that Soryu Forall startted out wanting to exterminate humanity with a bioweapon and only pivoting to enlightening humanity later on. S.E. Gyges or his chatbot were speculating when they accused a specific Rationalist of dreaming of omnicide, but the idea is circulating in the milieu.

Somebody tracked down things related to the 'AI bioweapons' stuff and a lot of them are financed by EA/related orgs apparantly. There is a preprint: https://ironholds.org/...

"We tracked the space financially, intellectually, and individually. Financially, 70% of the literature that disclosed funding was directly supported by EA orgs; 71% of the literature that didn’t disclose funding featured authors from funded orgs. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars."

handy tip: all of skeeter is open, and you can bypass the login gate with eg skyview.social

Didn't one of Aella's "studies" into women's sexuality turn up results that quite a lot of women surveyed had fantasies about being in a submissive role in a relationship or sexual encounter, up to and including aggression? Rationalists would naturally recycle that kind of subjective, context-free nugget of information into proof that most women want men to be dominant and aggressive in real-life flirting or sex. So it follows that it's fine to approach women this way (though somehow they're usually approaching people with less power than them, not say, their boss or their boss's wife). And if they treat a woman this way and she doesn't like it then they convince themselves that they still didn't do anything wrong because they had good reason to believe she would like it. They might even think that she's just pretending she doesn't like being spoken to or treated that way because she's been taught it's disrespectful.

Cishet men who are riddled with anxiety and have honest difficulty navigating social conventions probably need two-truths-and-a-lie icebreaker circles and a Scrabble party or a cooking class, not whatever the blazes Aella is hosting.

How much of their budget goes towards registering under a novelty TLD?

Also, is ‘MM’ supposed to mean something other than megamega or megamillion? I genuinely can’t work out why you wouldn’t stop at a single M.

It seems he won't get the full payout:

The rationalists are starting to cancel people for exercising free speech! woke 3.0 is go I repeat woke 3.0 is go

John Wentsworth featured in the retracted S.E. Gyges essay.

Second guy from the right apparently.

I hope that anyone who has been assaulted or abused in these spaces finds support and justice.

I have no first-hand experience or evidence to prove this, but I feel like any sex workers' union worth its salt would drum Aella out as a class traitor.

It has been a while since I read a Gospel, but I don't think Jesus hired the sinful woman for a threesome and some light flogging (or asked the centurion to lend him his boy overnight).

IMHO, being an escort is a much more honest profession than being a professional blogger on a Nazi site.

Did Christ actually talk that much about the literal end of the world

Nobody knows exactly what he talked about, but the view that he passes the bar for historicity but seems to have been more of a the-end-is-nigh witch doctor type character as the new baseline has gained a lot of ground, especially with biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman breaking into popular science writing.

Also John's apocalypse has the whole coded anti-roman-empire screed going for it beyond the psychedelia, so it's arguable Jesus was the more direct doom prophet, but for a more distinctly jewish flavored apocalypse.

How much of a complete fucking idiot do you have to be to publicly acknowledge the Zizians in the middle of an ongoing PR disaster about your clan being on the women like to be raped they just don't have the balls to admit it ideological bandwagon. Hey everyone, check out how my writings caused the Zizians^1^! Specifically by making them think we are ridiculous hypocrites for making huge claims about being scientifically unblackmailable and then paying a bunch of hush money to sexual assault victims who threatened to make a fuss. Yeah, the part where we where trying to cover up systematic abuse didn't help either.

1. Just like Jesus caused the crusades! !

which fanfic prompt is worse:

a) Yud has to do the Dragonball Z fusion dance with Jesus in order to defeat the basilisk

b) Yud isekai's as Jesus

good lord, the egos on all of them

It is also funny that one of the people who cant spell his name is not some nobody, but Kurzweil in "the singularity is near".

I originally believed Yeshua was a misspelling of Yoshua-as in Yoshua Bengio, but no he actually wrote out a fake conversation with Jesus where he compares himself to Jesus. holy shit

Edit is not delete. Oops.

Anyway remmeber when he created the fictional concept of the scissor statement? https://slatestarcodex.com/...

For all his talks about the garden of good faith debate he wants to be a troll so badly. (See also the work he did to maintain sock puppets in the fake nation game).

I'm now reminded he also pulled the 'what if the people against me are also antisemites' shit in untitled. "Oops, I accidentally included three neo-Nazi caricatures of Jews in there. You did notice, right?" Yeah we did, that was weird.

Anyway, yes the compassion of 'the far right are right about race and IQ, but we shouldn't be mean about it' and 'Marxbro is banned for pointing out somebody badly misquoted Marx'

(Not a huge fan of how sneerclub is talking about Yuds SM stuff btw, like there are not compassionate people who are also into BDSM, but I have been worrying the place is going to turn more into a r/drama place for a while now).

uncovered downside risk

This really is a cute bit of euphemism that deserves a bit more attention. Surely, it's not problematic to apply finance jargon to human relationships! Let me just pop open Robinhood and cover my downside risk by buying a few put contracts on sexual assault.

Despite this culture, EA as a philosophy has a lot of good in it

OK, Ms. Gopalakrishnan, here's an alternative perspective: EA is the application of affluent Anglo-American technocrats' consumerism to charitable giving and virtue signaling. The "rational" aspect of EA is applying the same sort of stat-sheet logic to charity that the moneyed EAs use to shop for sports cars. SImilarly, the sexual attitudes we're disputing here are extensions of that same consumerism! They are treating womens' bodies and lives as consumer goods to be exploited and discarded. EA does not empower the less fortunate it claims to help, EA men will not ever empower or hold safe the women they objectify. These attitudes are one and the same.

If it had been only a year they've been saying that, I might almost buy the logic. But it has been 4 years since Chat-GPT came out and they've been making the same promises the entire time.

Something of a tangent... thinking back to 2022-2023 my expectations for what the LLM companies would actually achieve by now were actually too high? Like I would have thought they would have figured out a better architecture for gluing functionality and symbolic logic to LLMs than just calling tools with the output text stream and feeding the tool outputs into the context window.

After all of curl’s noise about their deluge of slop reports and halting bounties because of it, I was surprised to see they would be so amenable to slopping curl itself. I suppose it’s yet another case of “all those other AI users are doing it wrong; because I understand the codebase and definitely totally use the bullshit machine responsibly then for sure I won’t produce slop”

he seems to be the rational one

When your movement entirely dedicated to rationality gets casually stomped by the French.

said equally greasy true believers at anthropic apparently filed S1 on the same day

It's been widely suspected that any of the "frontier" labs declaring a slowdown or cessation of training would be a herald of collapse. It will give them more survival time at the expense of terminally falling behind the competition. Very much an eating the seed corn sort of thing.

Edit: I could be wishcasting, though.

Existence is pain for Muse AI.

He seems ticked off at Coefficient Giving, but are they "a giant rich organization that stole some of my ideas, ignored everything I said about what not to do, and are going around telling people I made them do it"? (Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions).

Yud has said he got bored with LessWrong, and he does not like Coefficient Giving, Anthropic, OpenAI, or the Zizians, so is he satisfied with any group that adores his ideas?

I also thought of Open Philanthropy, but couldn't remember the Eliezer post that best illustrated his resentment towards them. (In addition to the top-level post you've linked, I've seen various bitter lesswrong comments along the same lines).