this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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How to explain our very good friends to normal humans? (awful.systems)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems
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Thinking about how the arsing fuck to explain the rationalists to normal people - especially as they are now a loud public problem along multiple dimensions.

The problem is that it's all deep in the weeds. Every part of it is "it can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong."

With bitcoin, I have, over the years, simplified it to being a story of crooks and con men. The correct answer to "what is a blockchain and how does it work" is "it's a way to move money around out of the sight of regulators" and maybe "so it's for crooks and con men, and a small number of sincere libertarians" and don't even talk about cryptography or technology.

I dunno what the one sentence explanation is of this shit.

"The purpose of LessWrong rationality is for Yudkowsky to live forever as an emulation running on the mind of the AI God" is completely true, is the purpose of the whole thing, and is also WTF.

Maybe that and "so he started what turned into a cult and a series of cults"? At this point I'm piling up the absurdities again.

The Behind The Bastards approach to all these guys has been "wow these guys are all so wacky haha and also they're evil."

How would you first approach explaining this shit past "it can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong"?

[also posted in sneer classic]

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[–] istewart@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

Yes, Kurzweil desperately trying to create some kind of a scientific argument, as well as people with university affiliations like Singer and MacAskill pushing EA, are what give this stuff institutional strength. Yudkowsky and LW are by no means less influential, but they're at best a student club that only aspires to be a proper curriculum. It's surely no coincidence that they're anchored in Berkeley, adjacent to the university's famous student-led DeCal program.

FWIW, my capsule summary of TPOT/"post-rationalists" is that they're people who thought that advanced degrees and/or adjacency to VC money would yield more remuneration and influence than they actually did. Equally burned out, just further along the same path.