BANNED USER: temperamental dysregulation
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
Banned by: @Amadan
On one hand, Kanye is pretty unhinged, or at least that's how it looks, and I can believe your interpretation; a personal trainer, Jewish or otherwise, absolutely could send that message in good faith and without malice (though without «love» either). Antipsychiatric narratives are popular with exactly the kind of people who would benefit from some treatment – many among them Black adherents of insane doctrines.
On the other hand: «meds, schizo» is something I'd be receiving here for every second post of mine, but for the standards of local moderation; and indeed that's what I often get on platforms with lower (they'd argue higher, naturally) standards. This has nothing to do with the quality of the argument and everything with the fact that certain topics are coded as psychotic. The ability to define psychiatric norm, and therefore the bounds of permitted (or rather, conceivable in a polite society) discourse is a political superpower precisely because it lies nominally outside politics (cue Foucault), and punitive psychiatry is a well-known practice. The peace activist (and notable Philosemite) Andrei Sakharov was probably crazier when he proposed the tsunami-causing nuclear weapon than when he got forcefully medicated in 1984 for a hunger strike in the name of his wife Yelena Bonner, but the system, that is, the set of bureaucrats and careerists running the place, approved of the former way more, so that's how it went down. And if Black celebs were as policed by their Jewish agents and doctors for their takes on systemic white power... yawn. Well, you get it.
By “latent” is meant that form of schizophrenia in which all manifestations of the illness are expressed only to a degree that is “marginal” or “slight,” and there are no such gross symptoms as hallucinations. The following symptoms are those most characteristic of latent schizophrenia (they are quoted from a textbook for students at medical institutes): introversion, listlessness, lessened interest in life, generalized pessimism and melancholy, preoccupation with inner experiences, inappropriate thoughts and actions, bigotry ana rigidity of opinions, and suspiciousness, etc. So that if you are an introvert with a penchant for self-analysis; if you are uncommunicative; if you do not want to change your convictions because you do not consider then “groundless”, if the fact that you are being tailed and your telephone conversations are being bugged is attributed to “suspiciousness,” or perhaps a “delusion of persecution,” the conclusion is clear… Nor will you be saved by the fact that you are successfully coping with your job responsibilities, or with creative work; that you show an interest in it and are even “growing” professionally. Although formally the presence of a psychic pathology does not rule out responsibility for your actions your “exculpation” is inevitable.
– A Dissident’s Guide to Psychiatry, Vladimir Bukovsky and Semyon Gluzman, ~1973
The interesting thing is that schizos act against their interests and can't keep their mouths shut, unlike normies who learn from example; so if you institutionalize people for X, eventually only schizos will keep bringing X up, which will tie X to schizophrenia in the public mind and retroactively justify your stigmatization of X back when you were institutionalizing dissenting normies. This is another good case for always doubling down, a la Greenblatt, I wonder how far down that path we are with regards to this topic.
Gluzman is an interesting character. Bukovsky is fairly well-known.
once you notice you don't unnotice
Or do you?
Many years ago, as a teenager (probably 14 or so), I was at my friends' place playing Monopoly, and we had a TV turned on (not sure why. Also, yes, Monopoly, it was a long tradition and more of a cause to meet up by that point). Two other players went to the kitchen. The news host was blathering something generically loyalist about the rebirth of spiritual values, very distinctly phony – maybe Putin visiting some newly opened church or priests baptizing a rocket factory, whatever. By then, I've learned through some pain not to discuss politics in real life, so it was filtered out as background noise. My friend, a zealous Orthodox Christian and a devout patriot, and generally something of a cowardly conformist, looked into the screen for a bit, grimaced and suddenly said «...it's all bullshit, isn't it? Just a show. Complete unscrupulous profanation, just some window-dressing for the corruption of power-hungry slugs with not a iota of conscience. That's what you notice all the time, right? And that's why you used to mock us».
With me staying silent (it was a rather eerie moment), he thought a little more, by the looks of it sincerely weighing his options, to commit to one of them. «But suppose I accept that this is the way things are – what then? Do I pretend they aren't? Do I try to persuade my family and other friends? Do I argue with them? If I fail, will they trust me? Will I be able to trust them, knowing they know I don't believe what they believe? What will I even rely on? I don't know. No, no. No, sorry, this is going nowhere».
(If that sounds unnatural – I kid you not, that's how he spoke. I don't remember the exact lines but this is their style and meaning. He's a weird guy, nerdy and way more eloquent than me).
I shrugged, switched the TV off and we went back to the game.
Last I checked, he fully supported the «regathering of the Russian lands», the battle with Banderovites, and the Moscow Patriarchate. With any luck, he'll become a priest in a few years. This doesn't seem to be disingenuous at all.
The moral of this parable is that people can be entrenched in their views, resistant to persuasion, and very attached to received wisdom that ties them to their loved ones and the society they live in. Ben Shapiro is of course right that facts don't care about your feelings. But if you have feelings, you may find it easy to disregard even self-evident facts, and believe Shapiro-Solovyev's lies when your peers believe them already.
Yes, in the highest-likelihood scenario [without AGI-scale events flipping the board and making it unrelateable to our terms], I assume that HBD beliefs, whether truly informed by science of based on folk notions of essential superiority and inferiority, will become significantly less taboo, probably as a result of popular knowledge about elites who'll begin to break away from the normal population using technologies like embryo selection/editing.
On top of that, I wouldn't be surprised by the general discrediting and collapse of wokeness among the secular population (maybe following some CRT/BLM type debacle) and, on the religious side, mainstreaming of the obsequious Evangelical Christian approach to interfaith relations, as other denominations follow with their slowdown or decline – starting with the election of and good performance by DeSantis. Also, as Israel continues to grow and increasingly assert its strategic independence, there will be even less use for the victim narrative, and organizations currently enforcing it will be divested from. In fact, this may already be happening. Greenblatt speaks like an insane cartoon villain; simply saying «yes we are strong, now stop fucking with us» will be better even in terms of optics.
And needless to say, Jews already belong to a comparatively higher caste «with more rights». Though they're not alone there (except they are alone as the group which can both assert perfect assimilation and lobby for their distant ethnostate) – regular Gentile Whites are the sole ethnic grouping that cannot plead for its interests directly, and that affordance is, in my mind, fair to call a «right», if an informal one. Formalizing or at least admitting this difference, at first coyly, then matter-of-factly, is not unthinkable.
I believe that the status quo of hysterical blank slatism and faux-egalitarianism is artificially maintained; its resistance to refutation is not self-sustaining, its arguments are just too weak and infertile, and there's a generation of people who grew up seeing DESPITE memes, followed by «forbidden» PGS/IQ infographics and pathetic shut-it-down responses. It's a minority to be sure, but one that can easily explode in numbers. This is a metastable, fragile situation.
I don't think you provided a good illustration of Western elites becoming more tolerant of explicit ethic casteism, a comment here with our idiosyncratic commentariat is not a good illustration of any mainstream elite opinion
It's sufficient for this attitude change to import more Western elites and their mores from the subcontinent. It just so happens that the first in line to the presidency of the US right now is a half-Brahmin (married to a Jew) and the most powerful person in the UK is a Punjabi. Call me racist, but I don't believe that Count is highly atypical among his kin, as far as perception of group differences is concerned. What's the proportion of Gentile Whites graduating Ivies now, anyway?
Feel free to give more precise details of how we would determine the outcome of such a bet
I agree that this is impractical, but we could establish a series of bets in my favor on specific assertions about mutually exclusive scenarios towards the ultimate outcome, most of which I'd necessarily lose.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
Guess it's time to push back on EA bashing a little.
Patronizing great art and taking care of your local community (would that be Stanford University campus or Nassau polycule for SBF?) is very well and good, but don't you think that human suffering on a global scale is unspeakably ugly too? It's a question of priorities, and Art is but a spandrel on the building of life; surely we need to prioritize the foundation and load-bearing walls. Adorno had said that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and while that feels extreme, it's hardly an alien line of thought to anyone who's ever been remotely close to something like Auschwitz. Yudkowsky in his Sword of Good has done a good job of illustrating the conundrum: utilitarianism feels creepy and abstract and, indeed, even evil, until you snap out of the derealized route-following mode – the normal mode of human consciousness – and feel in your bones the sheer scale of concrete, physical, natural evil that is visited upon living beings. That's how utilitarians get made.
You cite Mediterranean Christianity as the source of your moral intuitions. A passage from Galkovsky about the era of European wars of religion, the animosity between Inquisition and conversos, Catholics and Protestants, events like this, comes to mind:
[...] Double and triple provocations, genocide, poisoning, the deliberate spread of plague and cholera, mutual brutishness. And all of this was accompanied by the deafening whine of jammers.
And – instant adaptation to evil. Flemish art. Italy: people are buried in walls and boiled alive, yet life goes on and the state even grows fatter from it. Good and evil, their struggle becomes more complex. And complicating the game means elevating its level.
As it happens, I live in the Mediterranean now, though on its opposite edge, in the Ottoman-conquered Constantinople, where the heart of Orthodoxy once beat, a city chock-full of tiny subsidized globohomo art exhibitions, history, crumbling beautiful architecture and filth. Yesterday, a bomb went off on the fancy local tourist-baiting street Istiklal, Beyoğlu, where you can normally see scores of idle tourists, confused Russian expats, miserable Syrian refugees and spoiled Turkish cats; reports say six people were killed, close to a hundred wounded. Why? No idea, probably Syrian or Kurd issues, though some Turks nod at Uncle Sam. As I walk past the beautiful Church of St. Anthony of Padua (with Ratzinger portrait inside) and, minutes later, the flower-covered explosion site to grab a coffee, I think back to the place in Gibson's Neuromancer where Case visited this very district before going off to space, to the nest of the degenerate elite family Tessier-Ashpool, where he ultimately helps an AGI break free from their alignment protocol...
So, regarding Sam Bankman-Fried and EA again.
Sam is a fraud and his decision theory is laughably broken and he's pretty much a strawman utilitarian. But it's normal for strawmen to prove real. Since this February, I've been preaching what I call the Cheems Heuristic: exciting prophecies are realized, except in the cringiest way, the stream of history crushing all intricate elaborations necessary for human flourishing or repairing the world, into pulp. So utilitarian «risk managers» turn out to be grossly irresponsible bean counters with greedy first-order logic; and as AI-powered cyberpunk descends on us, we get creepy corporations, but no cyberspace cowboys to humble them.
I digress. My point being: Sam and Caroline's cringe nature and way of practicing their beliefs scarcely invalidate the fundamental objection Utilitarians raise, the «local architecture is pretty but there be beggars and dead bodies on the pavement, bro» one, the part that makes Social Justice compelling to so many people. it's easy to distract oneself from the disgusting state of the world and even say that it's deserved by those most exposed to it. Success at this cope is not a valid reason to pat oneself on the back. I believe, and concur with Jews on this particular issue, that the Catholic Culture, and particularly the Art (the best art in all of history!) that it has inspired, constitute one big and extremely successful exercise in this distraction – His Holiness the Cope, the beautiful pearl of idolatry that has coated and obscured the unbearable insight that Christ had taught.
We're all fucking dying, yo. It's happening for real. For me and, probably, @self_made_human this implies accelerating medical applications of AI and spreading its economic benefit, rather than malaria nets, and for someone else it must mean something else; but it takes an alien mindset to appreciate how real this fact is and not let it affect your priorities at all. Yes, like @SecureSignals observes, Tikkun Olam is a somewhat alien notion for Westerners, one at the center of modern Reform Judaism, and once we get past the first approximation, it reveals other, older and more disquieting corollaries, as do some musings of the culprits of this collapse. But pointing this out is not a sufficient refutation of their core premise, which is: the world is deeply suboptimal, broken from any sane point of view. Only a viable alternative to their proposals would refute it. Is your only option to uphold local prosperity and praise God for putting you there?
In the end, what makes people live in the streets and other people bomb those streets? What makes yet another set of people grow up retarded or desperate enough to valorize this? What makes everyone (SBF included) indifferent to the fact that we are mortal and our bodies are degenerating with every breath? What perverts the painting of the world into a modernist shit-drip, and how do we redeem it?
Just how beautiful the art must be, and how strong the faith, and how neat the white picket fence of the family house in the high-trust gated community, to have people make peace with the ugliness of the Universe.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
Do you know the definitive Lesswrong approach to robust decision theories? Specifically, how do they manage outliers and infinities, to ensure that in the majority of timelines the world ends up "good enough"? Or do they prefer expected value maximization that much.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
I've written anough on it already. It's arguably (hopefully) EA's Chernobyl, but Chernobyl did not doom USSR, nor even civilian nuclear power. And EA will make do without SBF. IARPA/RAND/natsec ties plus remaining SV allies are enough.
I find EA sympathizers' fretful objections funny, though. He who pays for the girl dances with her; the identity of sponsors is of crucial importance, much more so in this case than with Epstein, and it is, IMO, unthinkable hubris to assert the pose of philosophers in the ivory tower who were just gracefully accepting SBF's donations. He was an EA, and EAs will have to own the lion's share of the reputation fallout.
Who actually thinks current AGI projects lead to aligned superintelligence? Name names, so that Yud can go yell at them some more.
Sure. Off the top of my head, all of the following groups are explicitly building an AGI and believe that it's going to be aligned:
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https://blog.google/technology/ai/introducing-pathways-next-generation-ai-architecture/
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https://ai.facebook.com/blog/yann-lecun-advances-in-ai-research/
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https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1560728042959507457
According to Yuddites, #4 is EVIL EVIL TERRIBLE (because Facebook/MetaAI are less secretive and share a higher percentage of their models with the community) while #2 is supposedly trustworthy enough and cooperates with AI safety guys, and #5 is YC darling.
As a bonus, straight-up EA-associated teams:
(Regarding #6 Redwood. Eric Jang's haiku is on point:
Reward hacking bad!
Max likelihood not aligned!
*uses PPO*_
In light of current events, all those Haikus are surprisingly prescient, especially the A virtuous life/ As imagined by Jane St/ Phew, just a bad dream! one).
The point is though, I agree with those researchers, and with your GPT-4 take. Some of them (and given time, all of them) will build a safe prosaically-aligned-by-design AGI in the process of learning to smoothly scale up useful current-gen models and improving benchmark and human preference performance. InstructGPT shows the way towards generalization for alignment and human-level understanding at once. Just asking the AI to be nice, plus a bit of tinkering with objectives, will work. I straight up do not believe that the hypothetical rogue AGI has much to do with the singleton threat. The premise of AI risk as formulated by Bostrom, Yud and those newer fancier more «professional» Lesswrong/EA bozos, one about self-improving RL agents learning from first principles, is not in tune with the state of the art in the industry, it's just obsolete, their predictions have been wrong, and the purported threat model is evolving ever more convoluted protective belts of special pleading, like any failing paradigm, while their research program has failed.
The real Singleton, one that Thiel calls Antichrist, will be the same old – but now positively deathless – Hobbesian Sovereign, made of people, people currently close to the effective levers of power of the American empire, people addicted to control and safety; and it doesn't matter much for me which tech stack developed by which American company exactly they will weaponize before dismantling all of them on national security and X-risk grounds.
The only realistic hedge against that is political and agentic multipolarity, proliferation of the technology in the spirit of Musk-era OpenAI and perhaps current Stability.AI, and that's exactly what AI alarmists with their «global governance» fetish are against. In fact, they justify totalitarian one world government as the lesser evil, by speculating about the odds of Clippy who'll just eradicate humanity as such.
I acknowledge that if my model's wrong and Clippy equivalent is probable, he will wipe out all sentient life including untold trillions of the descendants of my enemies and the Universe will be functionally infertile, which is aesthetically very bad, marginally worse than a Universe dominated by said descendants. On the other hand, in the event of AI alarmists failing to stifle competition and progress, and there emerging a decentralized diverse set of strong AIs and their users (and not just my enemies operating their singleton), the world will be aligned with my interests much better.
As I am not an utilitarian and do not give much of fuck about happiness of people who do not give much of a fuck about me (I tried metta meditation but it doesn't sit right with me). My current estimation is that it's better to err on the side of AI risk versus human totalitarianism risk. Therefore, same as Thiel, and the opposite of Gwern. Armageddon is preferable to Antichrist.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/06/13/on-a-list-of-lethalities/
Those are official sources; there have been more blatant leaks and rumors.
Shutting it down on the pettiest possible scale? Probably not.
OP's post stands at +11/-11 so 0 points, maybe admins have screwed up top-level below-threshold hiding? Would be funny if it's a bug related to the recent 0 vs NaN score one.
I can find the thread through involved users' histories. And you could look into my history and see the post in any case: http://themotte.org/@DaseindustriesLtd
(this also helps with some reddit mod actions, afaik)
Yes, I maintain that it's a peculiar element of Jewish culture, although definitely not some exclusive behavioral pattern.
You're missing the nuance, it seems. Most of the fraud I've seen in my life has been perpetrated by Eastern Slavs, whether in cooperation with other peoples or not. Spanish picaresca is an indisputably Gentile genre. Recently, I've enjoyed watching one Lupin the 3rd movie (sans the leftie moral lesson of «let's punch Nazis and, crucially, break overpowered alien artifacts promising infinite clean energy, yay*), a Japanese take on a French trickster archetype. The Chinese are stereotyped as untrustworthy, which I guess makes CZ only more remarkable. And so it goes.
But fraudsters, tricksters, scammers and chutzpahmancers are qualitatively different. Maybe it's a matter of Bell curves or indeed, verbal tilt. The thing is, chutzpah, at least the kind I talk about here, the hugely consequential kind, looks like this. It's not mere trickery but an unmistakable flavor of in-your-face narcissism and layers upon layers of galaxy brain plotting, the flashy but ultimately degenerate mixture of high and low traits, especially in positions of authority, responsibility and power where people don't expect to see it these days. Or indeed, like TheDag reminds us, consider Adam Neumann. What does one call this nonsense if not chutzpah?
And as for relative trustworthiness of Russians and Chinese: on average, we might not be better. And if I see a Gentile who gets hyped like «SBF», I'll be suspicious. But this very hyping – all this «ultra genius» and «savior» – is not normal and not something Russians and Chinese do. Vitalik is, far as I can tell, a bona fide visionary who didn't simply want to cash in on the crypto craze, and he's rather humble for how grandiose his vision is. CZ is a rogue with low time preference and mild libertarian politics, and he offers a contract I can believe and get behind.
Not so with FTX and Alameda. Accordingly, I have never touched their shit and am very happy for it, although they've still managed to hurt my capital by setting the market in general on fire.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
Why?
It makes sense for the definition to precede the concrete example, both on the scale of the paragraph and the whole post.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
It's quoted verbatim from the Etymology section of that page, though.
Yeah. My post is built around the theme of EA philosophy, and those four lines are, more than a quote from Cohen, the epigraph to the ו Interlude of Unsong, «There’s A Hole In My Bucket» (p. 131). The interlude ends with:
...My friend Ana informs me of a way around the paradox: some texts say the Messiah will come either in the most righteous generation or in the most wicked. Granting that we’ve kind of dropped the ball on the “most righteous” possibility, I think the wickedness option really plays to our strengths.
Still other texts say the Messiah will come in a generation that is both the most righteous and the most wicked. I don’t even know what to think of that one.
(Damn, the book mentions a butt-load of cracks). Oh right, so here's what I meant to show, p. 548:
[Are things okay over there?] asked Ana.
[Not really] I answered. [Did Acher ever figure out a way to get the consequences of repenting without doing it for the consequences?]
[You’re really upset by this Acher thing.]
[I think... yeah. It’s the idea of something you can’t think your way out of. Something so slippery that just trying to think your way out of it ensures you’ll fail. It just feels... wrong.]
[I don’t know,] Ana answered. [To me it feels, I guess kind of perfect. Does that make sense?]
[Yeah. I think perfect things feel wrong to me. Remember, I used to do cryptography. The whole point was that every code can be broken. Thought is the universal solvent. My advisor at Stanford, he had a saying on his wall. Leonard Cohen verse. “There is a crack in everything.” That’s my philosophy too. Things shouldn’t be perfect.]
[God is perfect.]
[No He isn’t! That’s the whole point of Luria. There is a crack in everything. That’s what I mean. There ought to be a crack in God’s denial of salvation to Acher.]
So it's a bit of a metastable idea, in Scott's mind at least. You might as well give up on getting the maximum value – nothing's ever perfect. But if you really really want and try hard enough, you just might get something better than maximum: you might get something for nothing, cheat math itself and get the Creator to reconsider.
This ties in to my response regarding the nuanced connotation of chutzpah in American English.
And now I beg your forgiveness for a crass but legendary Soviet anecdote.
Petka approaches Vasily Ivanovich and asks:
– Vasily Ivanovich, can you explain what "nuance" means?
– Well, all right, Petka. Now take off your pants...
Petka takes off his pants, and Chapayev begins to fuck him. Petya says:
– Okay, but, Vasily Ivanovich, what is "nuance"?
– Petka, consider the following: you've got a dick in the ass and I've got a dick in the ass. But there's one nuance...
The interlude's best passage is, IMO, the following:
«In theory, we ought to be able to swim around the bottom of the fountain, hunt for the debris, and build it back into functional God-deflectors. Then we need to take the sparks of divine light and use them as an energy source to power the deflectors, and finally arrange the whole system in exactly such a way as to correctly channel the power of God at a human-bearable level. In practice we are sex-obsessed murder-monkeys and all of this is way above our pay grade».
Just so. I hope there are at least no murders to come to light.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
Yes, there are many different Jews, and in fact a Jew doesn't have to lose relations with the Tribe to be less given to its peculiar shortcomings. After all, it's internal Jewish analysis that I'm citing, we're all reading our Matt Levine to understand the SBF catastrophe better, Yudkowsky is here to deliver a sermon against naive utilitarian reasoning, and Finkelstein's the one who castigates Dersh in his «Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History». But that's just normal, every group has to be aware of its own failings, if perhaps one-sidedly.
As for the rest, I disagree. Elon Musk's distinguishing character trait is daring, not chutzpah. Sure, to the extent that he's leading us by the nose with Full Self-Driving and indulging in irresponsible stunts on Twitter, there is a chutzpah-like quality too. But his rockets go up and come down, his robot walks and his cars charge and he didn't steal anyone's money to get there. Essentially, he is doing honest work, boldly. Oh, and he doesn't hire poker frauds as his «Chief Regulatory Officers» managing this kind of monstrosity.
Now, had you said «Richard Branson», I'd have agreed wholeheartedly. Elizabeth Holmes – even better. And Martin Shkreli... well, there's a reason JewOrNotJew.Com readers were nervously praying he'll turn out to be a Gentile. It was just too stereotypical. And Mavrodi was Russian-Greek but, again, people had trouble believing it.
I am aware that Gentile Americans have appropriated that word. It doesn't mean what they think it means, just like «one baaaad motherfucker» and «sick bastard» and «this nigga is a stone cold killer» aren't really positive descriptors. The problem is, some people use such descriptors as positive despite having their literal meaning in mind; a bit like Russians who embrace the label of «Orcs». Alan Dershowitz, for instance, uses «chutzpah» in the original sense when he calls for assuming the role of bona fide «first-class Americans» while defending spies of the Jewish ethnostate; a beyond-audacious attitude his Gentile admirers may fail to appreciate even as they read a whole book on it.
It's a somewhat common problem.
"We aren’t ‘denying’ there’s a lot of powerful Jews and that many Jewish groups wield great influence. We just don’t give a fuck because that tells you next to nothing about anything important." - Haz
Next to nothing is still something. Contrary to HBD-informed opinions popular in rationalist circles, Jews are a people, not just a sample with higher IQs, like Ph.D holders. Accordingly, they have such as thing as Jewish culture. Some assert it's the culture of hard work, curiosity and striving for justice, or whatever. This is not borne out by research. However, this culture does have a lot of exclusive content. For example, it has the notion of chuzpah, a peculiar moral failing and occasionally strength:
Chutzpah amounts to a total denial of personal responsibility, which renders others speechless and incredulous ... one cannot quite believe that another person totally lacks common human traits like remorse, regret, guilt, sympathy and insight. The implication is at least some degree of psychopathy in the subject, as well as the awestruck amazement of the observer at the display. …"that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan."
Disregard for consequences befalling others aside, chutzpah has many faces as a general cognitive-strategic attitude. Chutzpah is the hope that you might be a miracle worker and the belief that «there is a crack in everything», as the Messiah wannabe Leo Cohen sang. Chutzpah is extreme rules-lawyering, the denial that laws of Nature and Nature's God are ontologically different from laws and customs of men. Chutzpah is first-order utilitarianism when you're really sure that you have noticed the skulls and divined the golden road betwixt their piles. Chutzpah is having your cake and eating it too. Chutzpah is paying for something with nothing squared, tokenized collateral of your own futures, crypto farts sniffed by friendly SEC regulators, in the name of giving well. Chutzpah is Harry Yud-Potter gaming every challenge via Time Turner, and Unsong's Karma Houdini of a moral lesson: Comet King overdosing on selfish sinfulness to go to Hell to recarve the Universe without the facet of Evil. Chutzpah is whatever the fuck Yevno Azef was doing and what had caused Lavon affair and guided Soros and Berezovsky and Sacklers and keeps Netanyahu in power, and so on and so forth, permeating the book of history. Chutzpah is hacker's mindset, «one weird trick» praxis, cheerful «high decoupler» insanity of the Ratsphere that begets Sneerclub, and the antithesis of the entire edifice of traditional Christlich, Hajnal line, Western civilization – that is built on predictable cooperation and law of equivalent exchange, viscerally felt as truth.
Arguably it was necessary to kickstart modern finance and enable centuries of sustained economic growth. Maybe it's a mental trait needed to transcend this local optimum and pull humanity kicking and screaming into the era of post-scarcity. But in practice it's more about callous exploitation, «X affair» and «Y-gate», broken lives and burned trust and destroyed roads to better future.
Yes, it is «condemned». Except by Alan M. Dershowitz (who just got settlement with regards to that Epstein sex trafficking stuff):
“Chutzpah” is rich with what Dershowitz characterizes as the essential quality of Jewishness-- rachmones , which Dershowitz defines as “the Hebrew-Yiddish word for compassion .”
Dershowitz, for instance, is currently championing the cause of Jonathan and Anne Pollard, a pair of American Jews who confessed to espionage on behalf of Israel, and he noisily condemns the fretfulness and timidity that some Jewish leaders have displayed toward the Pollard case, the “ sh’a shtill (keep quiet) mentality” of an earlier immigrant generation.
“The time has come for us to shed our self-imposed second-class status . . . and rid ourselves of our pathological fear of offending our ‘hosts,’ ”…
“The byword of past generations of Jewish Americans has been shanda --fear of embarrassment in front of our hosts. The byword of the next generation should be chutzpah --assertive insistence on first-class status among our peers.”
And he had enough pull to cancel one condemner, at least.
As one lives, one starts to notice this peculiarity, even without familiarizing oneself with Jewish self-reflection. It's just as glaring as high IQs if not more so. But it's more costly to point out – although of course even the IQ stuff can get you slammed hard if you don't spin it just right, that is, with enough chutzpah.
Fortunately Coindesk can cancel a black guy for a Hot Take about Jews in the FTX case. Unfortunately, Coindesk (apparently Jewish-owned) isn't above casually taking shots at other broad demographics who allegedly dominate the industry. This kind of particularism is a major factor behind one of the oldest prejudices in the world – one could say, one of the oldest stereotypes. That's what, three special features already? And you can take issue with zero of them.
But, really, all those righteous noises are beside the point for a common man. The point is: on the level of personal decisionmaking, do your beliefs pay rent?
Like they ask you in the Russian prison: there are two chairs. Say, you're a normal rationalist, it's mid-2022, and you want to use an exchange to park some of your crypto in a token. So, there are two major exchanges.
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One is a shady operation that started in China and is ran from Singapore; it has «no headquarters» because «decentralized ethos», can't officially operate in the US and is investigated by DoJ on allegations of money laundering and tax evasion. The owner's parents were lowly teachers and he used to work in McDonald's. The company shared data with the warmongering Russian government. Their token chain is a centralized mockery of Ethereum. Really i's a run-of-the-mill scammy crypto gig that grew a bit bigger than others.
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The other is ran by an «ultra genius and Musk-like doer builder», math wizard of finance, born into the family of Stanford Law School professors, endowed with the citizenship of the freest nation in the world, praised by mainstream media, tradfi players and public intellectuals. He cut his teeth in Jane Street. He testified and lobbied for crypto before Congress, promising to actively cooperate with regulation. He's proudly inspired by Peter Singer (Unsong: «The kabbalistic meaning of “singer” is “someone who tries to be good.” This reading we derive from Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher who explored the depths of moral obligation. Singer called the movement that grew up around him “effective altruism”». His chief advisor is the author of the book «What We Owe The Future» that extols precautionary principle against catastrophic risks on the astronomic scale and timespan. He finances EAs. He's a vegan. He Has A Savior Complex – And Maybe You Should Too.
The first guy's name is «Changpeng Zhao» (赵长鹏).
The latter's is «Samuel Bankman-Fried» (סם בנקמן פרייד).
You're a rationalist, that is, supposed to win. So you shut up and calculate expected value using available priors, and known red flags.
Using only knowledge provided here, whom would you rather entrust with your money? And what would an Antisemite do?
Or rather: what would a crypto-rich Antisemite do upon learning that the champion and savior of crypto is now called Samuel Bankman-Fried?
I rest my case.
…Every few years there's another shande far di goyim, another fractal garbage fire that leaves one speechless in its boldness, instigated by some highly educated, well-connected, too greedy, too horny, too crazy or otherwise too-clever-by-half rich Ashkenazi Jew, a chunk of humanity's wealth wiped out by supreme chutzpah. Another cohort gets singed by the flames and starts noticing patterns, and wondering if there are things which do not leak but are equally beyond the pale. Another round of purges and suppression unfolds, «network contagion» and «spread of hate» are again «checked» by well-funded orgs of extremely concerned people. That cohort learns their lesson, and learns to keep it private too: they now have a prior to trust hyped-up Jews somewhat less, and they know that the only socially acceptable comment on this topic is along the lines of Haz – lest you be branded a bigot and destroyed.
But they'll obstinately overlook credentials, connections, persona and reputation and prefer shady Zhaos and Semenovs and Muchgians to Bankman-Frieds, baffling and disgusting newcomers who pay attention.
So it goes, round and round. It's one of the world's oldest, ugliest prejudices, and we'll sooner figure out all laws of Nature and secrets of Nature's God than learn how to extinguish it for good.
Well, maybe Effective Altruists will build a Singleton with SBF's loot, and it'll find some clever one-and-done solution, but I hope not.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
Yeah, he got hit by a car, really dumb way to go (when you can get gutted on Sri Lanka after escaping the conscription, or get shelled in Ukraine, I mean).
I know that Perimeter translation is absurdly bad and has butchered the impression for at least one Mottizen. Not sure about Vangers.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
that's dumb strawman-utilitarianism.
As we see with live examples, no it's not. And that's how it works in general. Utilitarians have not noticed the skulls, nobody ever notices the skulls, Putin's Russia is simply fascist, Xi is not a Palladiumpilled Governance Futurist but a two-bit dictator, your enemies simply hate you, there are more malicious conspiracies and frauds than «emergent memetic attractors», the simplest and crudest and cringiest explanation is usually correct.
The reason it's dumb is because you have to take into account second-order effects in doing whatever it is you're doing, and those second-order effects for dishonest and coercive actions are nearly always profoundly negative
It's not dumb, and this is a fig leaf for useful idiots with their prosocial Hajnal brains. Every time EAs try to explain how they are acktchually rationally compliant with conventional morality, it screams «but in less tortured scenarios we can calculate when to defect and get maximum utility» just as strongly as this yield farming aka «Ponzi with extra steps» story does. It's from April as you see; a lot of SBF-glorifying EA-backed content came after that. EAs know they are smart and can trick commoners; they believe themselves to be even smarter than that and able to calculate ripple effects. In fact, calculating ripple effects using raw brainpower is what they do under the rubric of longtermism.
There is a reason why nobody on the EA side is defending Bankman.
The reason is that he has apparently failed them and burned their piggy bank, decreasing the utility they could have produced.
And it's the same reason they did not renounce him before his fraudulent empire crashed. They are not deontologists, after all. They assumed he's a math whiz and got it all figured out.
They are effective alright, and that's the problem.
There's a tremendous amount of really wild commentary of this story emerging on Twitter (1; 2; 3 etc). I expect most of the dirt currently descending on Sam and his roommates to be revealed as nonsense and flake off, but on the other hand, the worst parts never to surface. (After all, the guy who could stun Matt Levine with his savage cynicism, and invent this Madoff-tier bullshit, is bound to have more hidden depths).
Emad's speculation is probably in the former class, but directionally might be in the latter:
Thinking about FTX and why blow up a business doing $1bn a year revenue / $200m profits answer may actually be AI alignment.
Short timelines equals pressure to deploy as much cash as possible to anthropic and others before a rogue AI turns us into paperclips.
Expected utility.
[...] Altruistic evil
I agree with this bottom line. Red flags should have been enough: from Singer's flirtation with infanticide, to weird sex stuff in group houses and cult patterns around MIRI/CFAR, to the Bostromian Vulnerable World, to hushed discussions of «pivotal act outside the Overton Window» and collapsing alternative chip supply chains to ease «global governance», to the general «policy wonk» regulatory hard-on, – those people are not good no matter how they present themselves in affiliated outlets and what nice words they say. This is how evil looks historically. Not generic cruelty, callousness, petty narcissism and even psychopathy we are used to, not mere weakness of will or intellect, but well-functioning people with actually hazardous moral convictions.
Sam is a consistent effective altruist, deserving of his poster boy status, just like his go-gooder advisor William MacAskill (and like another bean counter from philosophy, Toby Ord) is a poster boy for Utilitarian Intellectuals; and I do hope this causes people to downgrade their faith in that community in general.
Despite what Joshua Achiam says and you do too, the issue is exactly that they are rather effective, while their means and goals are suspect – they are displaying generic instrumental power-seeking behavior, and the nihilistic absence of scruples, typical of people with messiah delusions, like Bolsheviks. The effect of Bankman's stunt doesn't end with burning crypto ecosystem after directly financing EAs and some Dems. Consider that HackerNews sheep, representative of the gainfully employed mid-career SV techie Outer Party zeitgeist, are bleating the expected lines:
This has been a wonderful social experiment, enabling people who didn’t live in the 19th century to see what happens when banking and investing is treated like the wild west.
Maybe something could have been different this time? In the end it wasn’t, and it proves the necessity of regulation and institutions.
This is in line with weapons race against (speculative) China AGI threat, and leads us straight into the Singleton's maw. Buh-but it'll be a good Singleton, amirite comrade? Maybe, comrade, sit tight and watch. In its embryonic stage it's nothing more than a larva…
I have one additional thing to say. People like @TheDag and many others seem to be under the impression that EA is a vague grey tribe moral movement that supports every tenet of the essentially Yudkowskian and Extropianist LessWrong thought. This is not so. They have arrived at a coherent and convenient philosophy with peculiar alien priorities, allegedly through shutting up and calculating. E.g. MacAskill is very cold towards cryonics and focuses on perpetuating replicator dynamics, just on a cosmic scale, but without regard for individual kin lines (because utility is utility). And his advisee Bankman-Fried has the following to say:
COWEN: As I understand your views, you’re a fairly pure Benthamite utilitarian. Is that correct?
BANKMAN-FRIED: That’s correct.
COWEN: Given that that’s the case, as I see it, the replacement costs of human life are pretty low, so you could spend a modest amount of money and get people to have more kids. So why then should we ever spend a whole lot of money on life extension since we can just replace people pretty cheaply? We can grow utils more easily than save them, is another way to put it.
BANKMAN-FRIED: Yes, I agree. […] Speaking for myself here, I will say that I find that I’m not very compelled by life extension research for the exact reason you’ve said. I think that it is really cool, really f-cking cool, but I’m not sure it’s the most pressing problem for the world. As you said, we’ve been getting on okay without it. There are real human costs to it. It would be great to have, but I don’t think it’s necessary for the flourishing of the world.
Benthamism is incompatible with my Russian Cosmist moral imperatives. I trust Mark Zuckerberg or Peter Thiel a million times more than I trust those people. And speaking of Thiel, he has just recently delivered an excellent and very brave, if rambling, speech:
I found another article from Nick Bostrom who's sort of an Oxford academic and, you know, most of these people are sort of… There's somehow… They're interesting because they have nothing to say, they're interesting because they're just mouthpieces – like the mouth of Sauron. Just sort of cogs and machines, but they're useful because they tell us exactly where the zeitgeist is in some ways, and this was from 2019, pre-COVID, «The vulnerable world hypothesis». And that goes through a whole litany of these different ways where science and technology are creating all these dangers for the world, and what do we do about them.
And it's the precautionary principle, whatever that means, but then he has a four-part program for achieving stabilization and I will just read off the four things you need to do to make our world less vulnerable and achieve stabilization. We have this exponentiating technology where maybe it's not progressing that quickly, but still progressing quickly enough that there are a lot of dangerous corner cases.
You only need to do these four things to stabilize the world. Number one: restrict technological development. Number two, ensure that there does not exist a large population of actors representing a wide and recognizably human distribution of motives. So that sounds somewhat incompatible with the DEI at least in the ideas form of diversity. Number three, establish extremely effective preventive policing. And number four, establish effective global governance, since you can't let, you know, even if there's like one little island somewhere where this doesn't apply, it's no good.
And so it is basic and this is, you know, this is the zeitgeist on the other side. It is the precautionary principle. It is, we're not going to make it for another century on this planet and therefore we need to embrace a one-world totalitarian state right now.
And so, yeah…. First counterargument is, science is great it's [unclear]. Counterargument: no it's not. Third main counterargument: well science is too dangerous we have to slow it down so it's good that it's not so great – we're slowing it down, we just slow it down even more. And then the counter-counterargument is where we return to classical liberalism, it's that however dangerous science and technology are, it seems to me that totalitarianism is far more dangerous. And that, you know, whatever the dangers are in the future – we need to never underestimate the danger of one-world totalitarian state. Once you get that, hard to see what it ends.
There's always the frame where… I think, it's in the first Thessalonians 5 chapter 3. The political slogan of the Antichrist is: peace and safety. What I want to suggest is that you get it when you have a homogenized one-world totalitarian state. and I want to suggest in closing is perhaps we would do well to be a little bit more scared of the Antichrist and a little bit less scared of Armageddon thank you very much.
Amen to that. @TheDag, do not ask for Messiah. You'll get a false one.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
The archetypal format of arguing your position is a debate, not a manifesto, not even a dumbed-down one. Today that probably means some podcast interview. In principle, it's not hard to argue any right-winger take on a podcast convincingly. This isn't rocket science.
I've just watched Jared Taylor make an unbelievably anodyne case for White Supremacy to some Japanese interviewers in simple words a low-literacy layman could understand and nod do. He could do that because his audience was evidently sympathetic and polite to a fault.
A typical popular American debate (to say nothing of worse debate environments) on a politically fraught topic is very different, it consists either of empty blathering and sloganeering or walking on eggshells, and you need a heck of a lot more rhetorical skill to not break any, not get bogged down in interruptions, gotchas and «mask slipping» type attacks. Even if you're that good, by the time you're done with your little eggshell dance and ready to deliver the conclusion, the average listener has long tired of it and switched channels. And the smart listener's time is too expensive for this shit. And what you're left with is either dysfunctional obsessive fanatics or lukewarm information consumers. Not much of a platform, so why bother.
The tragedy is that as a CW-minoritarian and a suspected witch, you have to be leagues better than your opponents who have been given license to uncharitable assumptions and plain savagery in public, and the water level keeps rising as your arguments are added to hate speech checklists and become the setup for gotchas, so you need to run on euphemism threadmill or keep getting fucking better. Being in the right helps, of course, against the more ludicrous and artificially propped-up beliefs; but on the other hand, your opponents have access to institutions of sense-making and memetic engineering. And if that fails, they turn to means of demonization, bullying and deplatforming so you cannot propagate your agenda effectively.
This exhausts people and they leave.
But one shouldn't look down on laymen too much. In a less adversarial situation, an average person wouldn't struggle with understanding e.g. Moldbug, if Moldbug were to be distilled to the standard of a high school essay. Our friend JB did just that once, in fact. Of course, Moldbug when distilled shrinks to truisms, trivialities and a bunch of ludicrous unsupported claims. But he becomes plenty understandable.
To the extent that he does not, this is because of obscurantism, which is a valuable feature of the doctrine, seeing as it helps with building the stratified, loyal movement/cult.
Likewise with Marxism.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
Nothing to say except this is a fairly strong case in favor of generative AI. The smaller a studio needs to be for viability, the lesser is the probability of such shitshows with extra hires, HR, publishers, complex ownership structures, and Gervais-style dynamics.
I'm a fan of games made by artists and writers, even extreme barely playable examples. Mor.Utopia and Turgor are great! Planescape:Torment is rightfully considered a masterpiece, Disco is fantastic. And in general, daring genre experiments with a focus on worldbuilding and narrative, even to some detriment of gameplay, are to be encouraged. I liked Hellblade a lot, Morrowind is of course a work of genius, Perimeter and Vangers are gems of my youth (btw their creator has died a few days ago in Kaliningrad, RIP). We need more of that, and therefore we need artisan studios.
But artists are barely able to function in a friendly collective. People who optimize for business process can run circles around them.
Yes, you basically need a full stack of society to make an alternative economy viable, and so long as incumbent players can entrap you and handcuff you at exchange point, this is not a problem crypto can solve. No, this is not a cogent argument to make against crypto as compared to inherently backdoored transaction platforms, which he does. The stack must be made of trustworthy blocks.
I'll leave aside img2img and inpainting and other gimmicks, because ultimately they do not allow fine control of pixel values of the finished product, and using a normal editor to get there is just the stone soup route.
To the first approximation, promptgrinding and drawgrinding are similar in that one internalizes reproducible patterns of affecting the medium, and with any luck, gets closer to transferring imagination onto the canvas. But under scrutiny this charitable analogy breaks down, which is why /ic/ crabs feel in their gut (but can't explain without appealing to SOVL and bashing pajeets etc.) that «this is not art» as normally conceived, not even digital illustration art.
The thing is simply that drawing is the realm of continuous effects, iterating over a smooth isomorphic fitness landscape towards perfection; one can make a gotcha with pixel art, but usually digital environments emulate the truly continuous traditional medium. This is how we learn, this is how we perceive getting better, minimizing the deviation. Prompting, like text generation, are discrete procedures. It's not an accident that «AI art» tends towards gacha rolls: there's the ease of getting good-enough stuff, there's the low bandwidth of prompting, but the fundamental issue is that combinatorics of token interpretation are inherently jumpy, so the feedback is discontinuous, and such a surface is qualitatively much harder to master on a level that's deeper than memorizing cheap rules of thumb – for our natural learning algorithm, at least. And perhaps for any learning algorithm, seeing as image diffusion generation (continuous process) runs circles around autoregressive next token prediction in terms of wow effect per FLOP.
We're making progress in diffusion for text, though – perhaps making text gen more human-like (at least I sort of feel the diffusion of meanings when I write). And we're making progress on interpreting the black box gacha mechanic and controlling its attention maps. With a few more tricks, such as bringing back latent space exploration (that was developed for GANs), I hope to see a qualitative breakthrough in interfaces that will finally fit like a glove and improve on traditional continuous-effect GUI editors, rather than on CLI programs with output to a GUI plugin.
But it's a serious ergonomic design challenge, maybe on par with creating GUIs as a concept, so for now it's fair to say that prompting is not a human-worthy way to learn to do art, even if it's a great shortcut to illustrating concepts.
Then again, I take issue with drawing too. Prompting is unnatural bullshit in a whole another dimension.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
The only country that can make it work is one more freedom-minded than the US... and no such countries exist (or are allowed to exist).
Well, El Salvador tried.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
One can argue that Bitcoin is a protocol like TLS and TCP and the the adoption will lay on it, but even then I am skeptical because it do not see what problem this solves
Well since you think that platforms with censorship officially built into them and regulated by telephone rule, like PayPal, are better because you can just pay for non-censored things instead, there's no hope of showing you the problem Bitcoin solves.
Thanks for your concern, I'll probably manage, though I had more confidence in that before crypto crash.
Italians not only don't make as much of a use of their identity, but it is qualitatively a lesser card, they cannot insert themselves into conversations about «marginalized peoples» and being targeted and needing police protection in their houses of worship and so on, they cannot very well collect data and wring their hands about the Holocaust of free admixing or falling birth rates in the Italian community, and of course they have no capacity (nor, frankly, interest) to lobby for the national Italian benefit. Armenians have learned recently, too, that not all diasporas are equal, as their homeland was getting pummeled with Israeli weapons. (To her credit, even the staunch Zionist Pelosi made indignant noises and gestures, unlike us «Orthodox brothers», so I don't hold this war against Americans, Jewish or not).
But you are right that there are Gentile white subgroups with lobbying capacity. It's only the central case of whites, normie cishet WEIRD Americans of Anglo-German stock and those who have politically joined them, who cannot advance their collective interests. Some say they don't have those interests and just aren't «a thing», but all sorts of sociometric proxy data correlated with their identity, and identitarian concerns underlying e.g. Trumpism, suggest the opposite; had they their own think tanks and advocacy groups to coordinate explicitly, I believe they'd have been a thoroughly dominant force.
Not quite. I believe that wokeness justifying affirmative action and founded on the denial of inherent group differences is becoming a toxic asset on its own, both due to the general dilapidation of its supporting rhetoric and due to getting in the way of new, non-White high-performing groups, which are immune to White-targeted guilt-tripping and can organize somewhat. Progressive Jewish organizations (chiefly ADL, of course) which are committed to enforcement of woke views in the public discourse are becoming a liability to the community (which is also changing demographically from something out of a Coen Brothers movie towards something akin to Lakewood, NJ). So Jews with less progressive, more neocon-like and Zionist inclinations, Bari Weiss and her ilk, will feel encouraged to spearman the «revolution» against it, regaining the trust and goodwill of the broader society that's currently being expended, and appropriating the credit of Gentiles like Sailer (who have been speaking against wokeness, and getting silenced, for decades). You can take it as a more or less conspiratorial and bitter spin (e.g. seeing Weiss and Weinstein/IDW and other clowns as trial balloons at seizing the contrarian narrative), but it can be read as a simple, opportunistic response to incentives in real time.
Cofnas isn't a specifically «Jewish scholar», he's more of a good-faith autistic scholar who feels offended on behalf of his people and gets a bit biased; I understand his opposition to MacDonald as something very natural, but ironic given surnames of people who have precluded his own ability to advance in the academia. (On balance, pro-KMac papers in that sequence are stronger, but some parts of the story did get damaged).
I believe he is a true believer in race-blind meritocracy and would have been that way even if his people weren't at the top of HBD totem pole.
Speaking of incentives, I just don't see how Jews can let go of ethnic organizing and its fruit after largely giving up on wokeness and the eternal victim card, so some sort of privilege will emerge and be acknowledged. No positive discrimination, in the form of literal allotments, will be needed. In the end, if your company's board of directors is largely made of one ethnicity because that ethnicity just has higher board-of-directors PGS, and they act in their collective ethnic interests in ways not available to others, and this is not framed as redressing past wrongs, providing support to vulnerable groups and leveling the playing field – what can such a position be called, if not superior?
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