The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • Rinn@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    8 hours ago

    Question: anyone has a link to a good primer on the rationalists and especially how that whole environment influences/interacts with the large AI companies like Anthropic?

    I need something to bring some ppl I know up to speed on this bc when they ask me “wait, what do you mean when you say that Silicone Valley turned into an AI cult with orgies” I just stare into space overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task ahead of me.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      What type of documentation are you looking for? The big picture is easily googleable and wikipediable: EY got a few of the super-rich excited enough about doomer drama to bankroll the founding of OpenAI, whose governing body was mostly EAs (until the Altman-Nadella counter-coup) while Anthropic were the people who bailed because they though OAI weren’t serious enough about alignment, and suddenly getting dicked in a rationalist compound group house has immense career implications in the burgeoning AI sector.

      Also terms like AGI, ASI, AI alignment, existential risk et al started out as lesswrong shibboleths, and so-called alignment research is almost completely a rationalist circlejerk.

      Pinning the EA/rats down as a cult is where it gets murkier because it’s mostly them telling on themselves in social media and blog post implications, like how they foster a culture of zero personal boundaries, ingroup overdependence and rigid hierarchies stratified around claimed IQ and proximity to the Great Work of not messing up the robot god incantation that ends the world.

      You could do worse than the Behind the Bastards episode on the Zizians, mostly because unlike Leverage or MAPLE who kind of did their own thing but with rationalist funding and human capital, the Zizians can be fairly described as what happens if you actually take the more esoteric aspects of rationalism seriously.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        Also, the really powerful people keep the details mercifully secret. My elevator pitch is “remember how the exec team at FTX were living in a penthouse apartment, sleeping together, and posting harem fantasies? People who have met them the Rationalists and AI company staff live like that.”

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        2 hours ago

        It’s a catchy summary because he leans into the weird sex stuff instead of say the cosmism aspect, but the writer is a knob who doesn’t like EA/rats for basically the same reasons as Peter Thiel, so take him with a grain of salt.

        He’s also likened anti-data center activism to jewish pogroms and believes that AI resentment can be summed up as “curing cancer is less important than my job satisfaction”.