It feels like a teenaged argument about Batman v. Superman or the USS Enterprise v. a Star Destroyer. I think many LessWrongers are not serious about the belief system as something to act on, but the problem is that when they are serious you get Ziz Lasota. Its also similar to how they love markets in theory, but don’t want to start a business or make speculative investments.

While I tend to think Yudkowsky is sincere, some things like his prediction market for P(doom) are hard to square with that https://manifold.markets/EliezerYudkowsky/will-ai-wipe-out-humanity-by-2030-r (launched June 2023, will resolve N/A on 1 January 2027 if the world has not ended yet. It has not moved much since 1 January 2024)

An early hint of Gwern’s rejection of chaos theory in the sequences from 2008 (the “build God to conquer Death” essay):

And the adults wouldn’t be in so much danger. A superintelligence—a mind that could think a trillion thoughts without a misstep—would not be intimidated by a challenge where death is the price of a single failure. The raw universe wouldn’t seem so harsh, would be only another problem to be solved.

Someone who got to high-school math or coded a working system would probably have encountered the combinatorial explosion, the impossibility of representing 0.1 as a floating-point binary, Chaos Theory, and so on. Even Games Theory has situations like “in some games, optimal play guarantees a tie but not a win.” But Yud was much too special for any of those and refused offers to learn.

Banking in Canada is dominated by the Big Five. A branch in a big city should be able to change most currencies into CAD, but they might want you to wait overnight or give notice to change that much money. Not sure about private currency exchanges. Selling RMB, yen or HKD in Vancouver would be easy but you might have trouble selling Kuwaiti Dinars at a small currency exchange in Halifax.

Substack had the same message after their latest $100 million fundraising:

We’ll buy yachts for the board of directors invest in better tools, broader reach, and deeper support for the Nazis and eugenicists writers and creators driving Substack’s ecosystem

Is Trace (Tracing Woodgrains) the only one of our friends who has served in the military? A lot of neurodivergent young people spend some time in the US military and some of our friends were the right age to get in before the War on Abstract Nouns began.

It is a pity that we are not going to see a Bits about Money article on OpenAI since Patrick MacKenzie is Basilisk-curious.

If OpenAI goes public with a lot of preferred shares liability, smart money is going to be reluctant to buy.

Gwern’s turn to “what if I just make people believe I won at pinball?” also come back to their idea that the smartest being is the best manipulator, even though some excellent manipulators like Trump don’t have a lot of logical-analytical intelligence, and some brilliant thinkers like John Nash get into a fight with the inside of their own head and lose. It also reminds me of how they love markets in theory but are not interested in starting a business which would compete with other businesses.

I forgot that she published novels alluding to anti-trans tropes under a male penname! Sorry Joanne “Robert Galbraith” Rowling, facts don’t care about your feelings.

I was never on twitter. Can you point me to a concise list of what Rowling said and when she said it?

Most social media posts and online news stories just talk around what she said.

I feel so sad because so many of his examples are ways to make people think you won. And we are about to see what happens when you take 20-30% of global fossil fuel and helium production offline for six months to a few years. Public relations and cooking the books can’t change that.

Its easy to make people believe you are wise and know the future. There is no way to predict the weather one month out much better than we can now, and if you plant your crops and the sun scorches them, those crops are dead and you have to wait until next season to replant.

They also don’t want to believe in chaos theory. This post tries to explain it to them, but check out Gwern in the comments being skewered by a book written by Freeman Dyson around the time he was born. They want the future to be perfectly predictable (even though Yud says that 1 and 0 are not probabilities) and they don’t like game theory, repeated games, or non-zero-sum games, because those reward people from building trust then violating it.

Sounds like someone in a jurisdiction which requires all-party consent to record a conversation could sue them

Yes, promising “returns like a good year on the stock market, but no risk” usually says Ponzi.

When the forensic accountants go through OpenAI’s books in 2027 or 2028 I would like to see whether anyone but staff and suppliers made money from it.

The subtext sounds like “we guarantee your returns, then go public. If we go bankrupt you get the retail investors’ money, if we become the next Google you get your own private island.” All you have to do is trust Sam Altman and (breaks out in hysterical laughter).

Do they mean 17.5% a year? My balanced bond-equity portfolio made 14-15% annual returns over the past three years by the radical method of buying “shares of companies that make profits” and “bonds backed by my local and national government.” (Update: I made about 12% a year because I backed out of American stocks years ago, but the blandest 60% stock, 40% bond index fund in my country returned that 14-15% a year after expenses).

My first degree was a professional degree, so after college I went out and got a paid job doing that, using the experience I had developed in paid summer jobs. Even when I was young I think I would have said no to Leverage Research.

Back and forth a few years ago on the SlateStarCodex subredit, roughly:

Scott Alexander: Bay Area rationality is wonderful, we have foundations and group homes and jolly social activities and a Solistice ritual and even “Reciprocity and Propinquity: two different rationalist dating/matchmaking services”

Rando:

I don’t know, I live in a nice community in a different city where people I know have lots of Shabbat dinners, choirs, board game nights, discussions, etc. And zero people I know have joined a cult, and one person I know has developed psychosis, but she had a family history of psychosis, starting having symptoms in early adulthood, and pretty quickly went on antipsychotics and got a lot better.

Is it just that California attracts weird shit and if you put people in California, whatever they’re already doing will get culty?

Alexander: base rates! how do your demographics compare to ours?

Rando:

Probably similar size and age? Nearly everyone I knew has parents who are teachers/lawyers/doctors/therapists/etc, so I guess upper middle class according to that book you wrote about a while ago.

It’s not like everyone’s doing great, lots of people have depression and anxiety and probably smoke more weed than is good for them. Most of those people already had those problems from their adolescence.

But our rates of weird problems, like multiple people with overlapping psychoses tied to some guy, are low.

Gleiberman’s paper on the longtermist foundations of the Effective Altruism movement is great!

I read a post by someone leaving LessWrong-the-site who said that from now on he would only donate to Aubrey de Grey because obviously we are so close to curing aging. Found it http://lesswrong.com/lw/m81/leaving_lesswrong_for_a_more_rational_life/

An Aella-curious blogger in SoCal has noticed something:

But what I find more interesting than broadly “weird sex” is the specific interest in BDSM, kink and particularly full-contact CNC; a relatively common fantasy in individuals, but one I’ve never seen such widespread community interest in outside the Bay Area.

Kink and power-play are practices of manufactured risk, with CNC clocking at a more intense point on the same spectrum. The idea that many of these people are devoting their 9-5s and beyond to eliminating the ultimate consequence (death), only to go home and collectively play-pretend violence (scaffolded with extensive rules and consent forms) is fascinating, and- to me- makes complete sense.

The rationalist interest in manufacturing risk is the direct byproduct of their commitment to flushing it out.

The blogger attended Aella’s SlutCon. I don’t know if she knows that many of our friends have problems with consent as most of us understand it (their understanding is more “if they are old enough to sign the contract, and they sign, that is on them”).

Zoe Curzi reported that IFS was used within Leverage Research and that after she escaped the cult, she used Internal Family Systems therapy to heal and accept that Leverage did not offer unique insights.