It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.
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Today in relevant skeets:
transcript
Skeet: If you can clock who this is meant to be instantly you are on the computer the perfect amount. You’re doing fine don’t even worry about it.
Quoted skeet: ‘Why are high fertility people always so weird?’ A weekend with the pronatalists
Image: Egghead Jr. and Miss Prissy from Looney Tunes Foghorn Leghorn shorts.
“I’m a colossal cunt who thinks being coy about holocaust denialism as just another potential grift” - The Yarvinator
I’ll just make a wild assumption that the author of that post is also a raging antisemite who thinks the jews control the world, so being jew-unaligned is probably a point of virtue in his book.
Also I bet the non-secular jews were in actuality not that crazy about Russia either and he just means judeobolshevism.
I mean, it’s not like the holocaust acceptance in that thread is much better.
https://xcancel.com/x_apotheosis/status/1910766575923101837
transcript
The fight is for the inheritance of Rome. The main players are the Anglos, Deutsch, and Russians. The Deutsch are the true heir and have the highest culture. The Anglos and Russians are usurpers.
The Holocaust cannot be taken out of context but must be understood as part of the conditions of total war and the spirit of the age. To this end we need to rethink the nature of morality and consider the true inevitability of tragedy.
The secular Jewish elites have aligned with the Anglos. The Orthodox Jewish elites have aligned with Moscow. The Deutsch have been left to the abyss.
Old and busted: whitewashing hitlerism by pretending the holocaust didn’t happen.
New hotness: pretending the holocaust just sort of happened one day, completely unrelated to the explicit ideology of the people who planned and executed it and the regime that sanctioned it, and anyway they had their hands full defending themselves against unprovoked attacks by the so-called allies, who can blame them.
The vibe I get is that by ‘enjoyers’ he means people who thought fighting the nazis in WW2 was morally justified.
Here’s a screenshot of a skeet of a screenshot of a tweet featuring an unusually shit take on WW2 by Moldbug:
transcript
skeet by Joe Stieb: Another tweet that should have ended with the first sentence.
Also, I guess I’m a “World War Two enjoyer”
tweet by Curtis Yarvin: There is very very extensive evidence of the Holocaust.
Unfortunately for WW2 enjoyers, the US and England did not go to war to stop the Holocaust. They went to war to stop the Axis plan for world conquest.
There is no evidence of the Axis plan for world conquest.
edit: hadn’t seen yarvin’s twitter feed before, that’s one high octane shit show.
9·7 days agokarma
Works the same on LessWrong.
sarcophagi would be the opposite of vegetarians
Unrelated slightly amusing fact, sarcophagos is still the word for carnivorous in Greek, the amusing part being that the word for vegetarian is chortophagos and how weirdly close it is to being a slur since it literally means grass eater.
I am easily amused.
Mesa-optimization
Why use the perfectly fine ‘inner optimizer’ mentioned in the references when you can just ask google translate to give you the clunkiest, most pedestrian and also wrong part of speech Greek term to use in place of ‘in’ instead?
Also natural selection is totally like gradient descent brah, even though evolutionary algorithms actually modeled after natural selection used to be their own subcategory of AI before the term just came to mean lying chatbot.
The kokotajlo/scoot thing apparently made it to the new york times.
So this is what that was about:
stubsack post from two months ago
On slightly more relevant news the main post is scoot asking if anyone can put him in contact with someone from a major news publication so he can pitch an op-ed by a notable ex-OpenAI researcher that will be ghost-written by him (meaning siskind) on the subject of how they (the ex researcher) opened a forecast market that predicts ASI by the end of Trump’s term, so be on the lookout for that when it materializes I guess.
edit: also @gerikson is apparently a superforcaster
Reminds me of an SMBC comic that had a setup along the same lines, that if male birth order correlates with homosexuality and family size trends being what they are, the past must have been considerably gayer on average.
No idea where they would land on what to mock and what to take seriously from this whole mess.
Don’t know what they’re up to these days but last time I checked I had them pegged as enlightened centrists whose style of satire is having strong beliefs about stuff is cringe more than it is ever having to say anything of even accidental substance about said things.
The first prompt programming libraries start to develop, along with the first bureaucracies.
I went three layers deep in his references and his references’ references to find out what the hell prompt programming is supposed to be, ended up in a gwern footnote:
It's the ideologized version of You're Prompting It Wrong. Which I suspected but doubted, because why would they pretend that LLMs being finicky and undependable unless you luck into very particular ways of asking for very specific things is a sign that they're doing well.
gwern wrote:
I like “prompt programming” as a description of writing GPT-3 prompts because ‘prompt’ (like ‘dynamic programming’) has almost purely positive connotations; it indicates that iteration is fast as the meta-learning avoids the need for training so you get feedback in seconds; it reminds us that GPT-3 is a “weird machine” which we have to have “mechanical sympathy” to understand effective use of (eg. how BPEs distort its understanding of text and how it is always trying to roleplay as random Internet people); implies that prompts are programs which need to be developed, tested, version-controlled, and which can be buggy & slow like any other programs, capable of great improvement (and of being hacked); that it’s an art you have to learn how to do and can do well or poorly; and cautions us against thoughtless essentializing of GPT-3 (any output is the joint outcome of the prompt, sampling processes, models, and human interpretation of said outputs).
They look like the evil twins of the Penny Arcade writers.
It is with great regret that I must inform you that all this comes with a three-hour podcast featuring Scoot in the flesh: 2027 Intelligence Explosion: Month-by-Month Model — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo
That was a good one. Also, was he the first to break the coreweave situation? Not a bad journalistic get if that’s the case.
Imagine insecure smart people yes-anding each other into believing siskind and yud are profound thinkers.
Wish I’d found a non clunky way to work “cult incubator” into that.
To be clear, it’s well known L Ron Hubbard quote originally about starting a religion, to my knowledge Altman didn’t really say that.