• 4 Posts
  • 607 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: September 7th, 2023

help-circle
rss

  • “You’re Scott Aaronson?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?”

    And then everybody clapped.

    (This is extra funny because he lost friends over the gaza genocide debate when his leftwing (and Jewish) friend told him ‘well we do have power over them’ re the protesting students, to which he has a good Rationalist replied with ‘FUCK YOU’. He himself describes the situation slightly differently, but he has shown he doesn’t always have the best ability to understand others in these kinds of emotional moment, and he cannot fathom he might be wrong (and that is how you end up stealing from the tip jar)).

    E: And so much references to ‘the sneerers’ and our arguments again, he promised he would stop reading our shit because it is unhealthy for him. But looking at the arguments, I’m happy to see that he has indeed not read our stuff. The I in TESCREAL/TREACLES(*) stands for Incel.

    Also, while the Rationalists are not incels, what does the name of your blog stand for Scott? (E: wanted to edit in a link but can’t find the explainer page, wonder if he read it again and went ‘wow yeah I get why people think that isn’t great’ and deleted it (I did find this congrats on being consistently wrong)).

    *: still think these are dumb abbreviations, but not letting that get in the way of a dumb joke.




  • E: sorry slight spoilers for old and popular science fiction series. (You’d think they would have picked some more positive but less well known transhumanist science fiction books with nice societies, or pick specifics they liked but nope).

    The Foundation is a horrible place to live, it is a frontier city created under false pretenses where you live under constant threat of a crisis, manipulated from afar by the second foundation, while ‘Rome’ falls apart around them. Billions die.

    Hyperion is a horrible place to live, the main hegemonic force is a hypercolonialist empire that destroys all variety, kills the dolphins, is secretly run by AIs who abuse humanity, power everything by destroying the energy that gives us love, and morph into a authoritarian theocracy secretly run by AIs who are now at war with the beings in the love dimension. Also, billions die when the first empire falls.

    Ringworld is … not a book series I remember much from, read it when I was young, might be ok might not be.

    Also all these worlds also have a big magical element in it, dune with all the spice stuff, hyperion with the love dimension, foundation with the psi powers and magical prediction powers. And they are setups for the stories conflicts (and well, stories).

    It is all a bit like saying you want Singularity skies Festival arrive without reading up on what happens afterwards. Helps if you actually read books not skim through them in 2 hours.

    E: I need to make a confession, this guy changed my mind on agentic LLMs. They should use them, it will improve their reading comprehension. (they should also add pronouns, if they don’t want to be called they)








  • Deleted earlier message, sorry I called Scott out for not doing things he had done. Even if the whole mods ‘restricting her messages now only after she went after Scott’ is quite iffy. (LW people write normally challenge failed “One upfront caveat. I am speaking about “Kat Woods” the public figure, not the person. If you read something here and think, “That’s not a true/nice statement about Kat Woods”, you should know that I would instead like you to think “That’s not a true/nice statement about the public persona Kat Woods, the real human with complex goals who I’m sure is actually really cool if I ever met her, appears to be cultivating.”” (The idea is good, this just reads like a bit of a sovcit style text and could have been replaced with ‘I mean this not as an attack on her personally, I’m just doubting the effectiveness of her spammy posting style’). (E: I do agree with them however, not the ‘we should check if this is effective’ but more that the posting style is low effort, annoying, boring, dated, bit cringe etc).

    Also: Scott: ‘Mods mods mods, kat spill my jice help hel help help’





  • and that’s how we should view the eventual AGI-LLMs, like wittle Elons that don’t need sleep.

    Wonder how many people stopped being AI-doomers after this. I use the same argument against ai-doom.

    E: the guy doing the most basic ‘It really is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’ bit in the comments and have somebody just explode in ‘not being able to imagine it properly’ is a bit amusing. I know how it feels to just have a massive hard to control reaction over stuff like that but oof what are you doing man. And that poor anti-capitalist guy is in for a rude awakening when he discovers what kind of place r/ssc is.

    E2: Scott is now going ‘this clip is taken out of context!’ not that the context improves it. (He claims he was explaining what others believe not what he believes, but if that is so, why are you so aggressively defending the stance? Hope this Scott guy doesn’t have a history of lying about his real beliefs).




  • Sorry I don’t think I actually have read anything from him apart from this story (at least not recently/logged) so I don’t know, heard a lot about permutation city, but that might be a harder read now esp if you are on the sneerclub side. (I’d assume that even then I would enjoy it, even if I eyeroll heavily (for example recently read and enjoyed Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton despite the very everybody except the main char is a strawman feeling, also really enjoyed looking at goodreads and seeing a negative review of someone who had missed the point so far they hit Andromeda). But I also enjoyed reading the horus heresy, so there is that). But yes, im also keeping notes on what to look into here.