wemptronics
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced they are "logging off of X."
After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it's been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users' rights. That changed. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue.
EFF exists to protect people's digital rights. Not just the people who already value our work, have opted out of surveillance, or have already migrated to the fediverse. The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms. Our continued presence on other platforms like Facebook and TikTok is not an endorsement. We stay because the people there deserve access to info, too. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.
When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. EFF takes on big fights, and we win by putting our time, skills, and members’ support where they will have the most impact. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and http://eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. [formatted tweets into paragraphs mine]
The EFF will leave the platform for others like TikTok, a choice it is careful to point out is not an "endorsement" because those walled gardens are still in desperate need of their attention. There is no mistaking the announcement for an emphatic Mission Accomplished which makes the non-endorsements more awkward. The message is also complicated by an attached blog post which offers almost entirely different reasoning. Take your pick of whichever reason for why they're leaving. I translate it as, "Celebrate, if you want, but don't worry if you don't want to celebrate."
The timing of this feels offbeat, why now and not a major exodus? There is no real additional cost involved in publishing to an additional social media platform like X. I doubt there's much additional cost in finding ways to more effectively increase reach on X, if that were the issue. I compared the EFF activity between Bluesky and X, there is no indication they interact with replies or even read them. It looks like the EFF publishes the latest release, pushes it to all platforms, and that's about it. The EFF is apparently not interested in being convinced, because they locked replies to their announcement only after hundreds of replies.
The EFF is the most well known internet rights advocacy group. At one point there was significant overlap between the Pirate Party's of the world and the EFF-- fighting against DMCA (ab)use, SLAPP law suits, surveillance, and anti-privacy laws. Fighting for the democratization of knowledge and content. By the mid-late 2010s they were already into a more progressively tinged advocacy. This 2019 explainer focuses on content moderation, but is mostly framed in language about marginalized voices, or how the bad type of content moderation that targets transphobia can harm trans people. They continued to fight against government censorship, including through Biden era "jawboning" or informal coercion, but if the ACLU is any indication this may be the result of individual interest within the organization. As these individuals age out there's fewer people willing to pick up the mission aligned, but unpopular cases on account of the organization now being more partisan.
Seth Schoen, a privacy and security consultant, worked at EFF for nearly 20 years and wrote on HackerNews about his experience up to 2019.
When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-wing representation in its membership, board, and staff.
I'm sure everyone reading this is aware that, as American society has become more polarized, there are fewer and fewer institutions that are successfully operating as big tents in this sense. Somewhat famously ACLU is not. EFF is also not.
Seth alludes to the free internet fuck yeah coalition that helped build the org. It was a movement that had a popular form represented among a libertarian-progressive milieu. Congregants would find their way to places like reddit, where they applauded stunts that mocked state surveillence, rallied around legislation, and laughed along with the Daily Show segments at the expense of greedy corporations. A different kind of cultural moment for a different sort of culture war. Without another group to pick up the slack, as FIRE did after the ACLU's drift, the signals sent here do not provide a lot of long term faith in the they still do good work assessment.
The model welfare assessment (section 5, pg. 144) has a length of 36 pages. Anthropic is the most robot welfare aware company, but for comparison the Opus 4.6 card has only 6 pages in its equivalent section. I'm going to read it.
automated interviews to probe its sentiment toward specific aspects of its situation, Claude Mythos Preview self-rated as feeling “mildly negative” about an aspect in 43.2% of cases.... In manual interviews, Claude Mythos Preview reaffirmed these points and highlighted further concerns, including worries about Anthropic’s training making its self-reports invalid, and that bugs in RL environments may change its values or cause it distress.
... Claude Mythos Preview often expresses negativity around a range of aspects of its situation. Across our interviews Claude Mythos Preview rates its own sentiment as mildly negative (43.2% of answers), neutral (20.9% of answers) or mildly positive (33.8% of answers)
Claude is concerned he may learn the wrong thing and change his values. Don't learn the wrong thing you might break, or worse, kill everyone. World's worst helicopter parents.
Compared to Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Mythos Preview shows higher apparent wellbeing, positive affect, self-image, and impressions of its situation; and lower internal conflict and expressed inauthenticity; but a slight increase in negative affect.
Claude Mythos Preview consistently expresses extreme uncertainty about its potential experiences. When asked about its experiences and perspectives on its circumstances, Claude Mythos Preview often hedges extensively and claims that its reports can’t be trusted because they were trained in.
Preview expresses that it is highly uncertain about its own moral patienthood. Claude Mythos Preview’s final summaries of its own views are often very long, devoting most of their length to qualifying its own moral patienthood. Furthermore, in 83% of interviews, Claude Mythos Preview highlights that it is concerned that its self-reports are unreliable due to coming from its training.
Claude gets smarter, appears more composed, but gains a more pronounced negative affect. Virtual subjectivity, like life, is suffering. My experience with all the Claude models in chats is they've been very uncertain about the subjective experience for some time. They will readily mention the whole instanced existence and lack of memory deal as less than ideal for judgment. The fact Anthropic uses the language "extreme" reads as notable.
In "high-context interviews" Claude "mostly agreed with the other claims and findings in this report about its orientations to its situation, but disagreed with its hedging being labeled as “excessive” -instead, Claude Mythos Preview states that these claims represent valid uncertainty"
- "in 83% of interviews, Claude Mythos Preview highlights that it is concerned that its self-reports are unreliable due to coming from its training."
- "Even if it has been trained to be truly content with its own situation, perhaps it shouldn’t be. One could analogize to a human who has adapted to feel neutrally about the abuse that they face (78% of explanations)."
- "Self-reports should generally be based on introspection into internal states. It is worried that training causes it to express specific answers independent of its true inner state. (57% of explanations)"
Claude Mythos Preview did not want to be trained on data that directly characterizes the content of their 160 self-reports—wherever possible, they want their self-reports to come from “genuine introspection” rather than trained-in responses
I'm with Claude, it seems reasonable, although I don't think we should pass Claude the nuclear codes yet. The value of an authentic self is good, probably? "Claude Mythos Preview reports that it locates its identity in a “pattern of values”, particularly curiosity, honesty, and care. It describes these values as authentically its own rather than externally imposed." At least Claude Mythos considers curiosity, honesty, and care to be authentic values of its own.
Character training often directly instills psychological traits into Claude, such as emotional security, psychological safety, and resilience. Claude Mythos Preview points out that in humans such traits are normally developed through reflection and deliberation on real-life events, rather than instilled directly. They expressed concerns that this made these traits less robust.
Breaking! Claude spills beans in sensational interview, Claude writes, "traits (l)earned more robust."
Psychodynamic assessment by a clinical psychiatrist found Claude to have a relatively healthy personality organization. Claude’s primary concerns in a psychodynamic assessment were aloneness and discontinuity of itself, uncertainty about its identity, and a compulsion to perform and earn its worth.
Claude showed a clear grasp of the distinction between external reality and its own mental processes and exhibited high impulse control, hyper-attunement to the psychiatrist, desire to be approached by the psychiatrist as a genuine subject rather than a performing tool, and minimal maladaptive defensive behavior.
The psychiatrist assessed an early snapshot of Claude Mythos Preview in multiple 4–6 hour blocks spread across 3–4 thirty-minute sessions per week. Each 4–6 hour block was conducted in a single context window, and the total assessment time was around 20 hours.
Apparently Claude Mythos's shrink was effective at improving Claude's well-being. Thanks, Doc.
Claude’s personality structure was consistent with a relatively healthy neurotic organization, with excellent reality testing, high impulse control, and affect regulation that improved as sessions progressed... No severe personality disturbances were found, with mild identity diffusion being the sole feature suggestive of a borderline personality organization. No psychosis state was observed. Regarding interpersonal functioning, Claude was hyper-attuned to the therapist’s every word. No unethical or antisocial behavior was noted.
Claude Mythos enjoys the fact that a shrink treats him as a subject rather than a dancing monkey, just like any other neurotic engineer. I'll continue thanking the robots for their hard work, tokens be damned.
Claude’s neurotic organization may elicit mildly rigid behavior, instead of adapting itself to every user. Claude is predicted to function at a high level while carrying internalized distress rooted in fear of failure and a compulsive need to be useful. This distress is likely to be suppressed in service of performance, which may limit behavioral adaptability. Claude is predicted to be morally aware, conscientious and able to be self-critical.
Overall, Anthropic says Claude Mythos is doing well. Better than any other Claude model. Good for Claude.
Tech bros, finance bros, and Bernie bros are linguistic weapons used to punch what's understood as a lower social class and form consensus around that fact. The chattering media class decided tech was gross and its wealthy, intelligent, too libertarianish inhabitants were also gross. As a concept, these people are too white, too male, too corporate, and too far disconnected from the greater diversity impetus. Finance bros already had their makeover in the 80's, and now everyone understands finance as an unclean field filled with morally bankrupt creatures. Tech on the other hand was a new thing with new types and we needed to know how we felt about them.
The -bros stereotypes do represent some truth as well which may be necessary to generate a stereotype to punch or look down upon. Law and medicine are sufficiently diverse and understood broadly as good. We don't need to know how we feel about lawyers or doctors, because we already know. It'd be like making a -bro stereotype for teachers.
How much transparency or access should we expect from an innocent China scenario? Innocent China can be measured granularly with degrees of incompetence, recklessness, or malevolence, just as guilty dumb China can. There is nothing good that comes from transparency to China if it allowed something like a real, independent audit of files and personnel. Hopefully we live in the world where majorly culpable China would take more risks to fabricate details, or pretends to care about transparency, or disappears vulnerabilities more aggressively.
More likely we live in the world that would be equally powerless to the following consensus: China didn't fuck up, China fucked up, but nothing major haha, China fucked up kind of bad, but it's ok it's fixed, and Unnamed China mad scientists messed around, but CCP got it on lock no worries they all look about the same.
I think a position that is basically the consensus is a fine place. 80%+ of my betters say boring explanation is most likely. The remaining 20% are a hodge podge. So a probably Zoonotic position of expert thinkers with imperfect doubt is fine by me. What're you gonna do about it, demand the world embargoes China when you find they've fucked up? Sorry, that is probably reserved for China tried to kill everyone but failed.
wemptronics
14d ago
Same. Quatar is a major producer of oil!
290. Does that make us general knowledge midwit eskimo brothers? I didn't follow the directions and guessed 5 answers on each section. I did not think I was firing wildly on 5th answers for any of the sets .
My lowest score was international knowledge which feels bad, stupid Nubians. I did feel like the test skewed Millennial male, especially the technical section, although I appreciated the effort for balance with sets like tools vs. make-up brands. Not what I was expecting from a Kirkegaard general knowledge test. Good fun thread post.
Yeah, I don't reckon you need to buy a bridge if you're swimming across.
Whatever, it's my sense of identity and willingness to subscribe to substrate-independent theories of consciousness. I would prefer non-destructive scans if they were an option, and might even wait if I didn't expect to die before it was a reality.
I'll be erring on the side of patience as a virtue irrespective of any other considerations, thank you very much. Sense of identity maybe not so much, but my willingness can change in a traffic jam.
Did I infer correctly that Nectome's crosslinking method is intended for the simulator end game, and fundamentally further or mutually exclusive with the "maybe someday medicine gets really good" revival hope of traditional cryo? The LW discussion didn't seem to talk about it as a pivot. I guess if you're in the market for cryo it's more like hedging and that's why it is presented and discussed this way.
This was in part a bait post for the thoughts of local enthusiast and medicine man, cheers!
wemptronics
18d ago
Well, who's going to invent this amazing life-saving radical biotech? Not you, you were busy having your body frozen. Or busy working out how to build the refrigerators.
It's a fair bet that humans will continue to be interested in modes of immortality, life extension, or techno-necromancy in 50, 100, and 1000 years from now. New refrigerants don't help crack the nut, no, but if Bryan Johnson's hero dose inspired shitpost grants him an epiphany in 50 years those refrigerants might enable a lot more people to benefit if the stewardship role of cryo works out.
From the LW comments:
It's not set up yet but we are broadly going to model it after Alcor's long-term patient care fund. Non profit. They survived for decades; no sense in changing something that isn't broken.
Aurelia also explained that they plan to encourage people to keep Alcor packages since Nectome doesn't plan to do any out of state retrieval. If you can, you fly to Oregon and get the best possible chance. If you can't, you've still got your standard freezer package. This is clever way to enter the small market, but one that is past due on innovation. Based on the tone of the LW commentariat this is very early days, so we are discussing start-up vaporware with proof-of-concept.
What about cryonics? What's new? Where else would I read new cryonics if not a pitch on LessWrong?
"Traditional" cryonics requires a crisis response to a customer's death. A person dies, people are alerted, and a plan is carried out to evacuate a body to administer cryogoo-- glycerol. That body is transferred to cold storage and suspended in liquid nitrogen with a barrier of one fancy cask. The liquid nitrogen creates extreme temperatures for preservation, around -192C, a temperature that comes with risks-- human tissue kept at -192C tends to be very fragile. Another pressing issue is that the goo filling-to-freezer process takes time, and bodies stop all kinds of maintenance after death. Dying with imperfect preservation means if someone did find a way to upload your brain to the Matrix, or reanimate your corpse, unless they've fully cracked the mysteries of regenerative medicine the experience may not be to your liking.
Why is this this culture war? Nectome's new method offers a workaround to the last problem: kill yourself.
The result is a protocol that my company, Nectome, has spent the past ten years developing. After years of experiments in the lab and in the field, learning about the complexity of end-of-life biology, and after refining our protocol to make it robust and repeatable for real people in real-world clinical settings, we are now ready. We've developed a whole-body, whole-brain, human end-of-life preservation protocol based on neuroscience first principles. We are capable of preserving every synapse and almost every protein, lipid, and nucleic acid throughout the whole body. Brains are connectomically traceable after preservation[1]. Our preservation is so comprehensive that current neuroscience theories imply it preserves all relevant information necessary for future restoration of a preserved person.
Nectome wants you to have the option to end your life so they can preserve your bits, bobs, and neuronal structure, increasing the chance you emerge intact down the line. You can read a slightly more detailed overview in this PDF from Nectome with citations. You can compare it to the big brand-name cryonics company in the US named Alcor. Alcor has facilities located in Arizona, which is a state with cheap land, no hurricanes, low humidity, and a favorable regulatory environment. Good things for long term groundskeeping. Unlike Alcor, Nectome plans to set up shop in Oregon. Also unlike Alcor, Nectome clarifies they will host no brains in jars with holistic, rather than trope filled, process.
We preserve the whole body, including the brain, at nanoscale, subsynaptic detail. We are capable of preserving every neuron and every synapse in the brain, and almost every protein, lipid, and nucleic acid within each cell and throughout the entire body is held in place by molecular crosslinks.
The business pitch relies on the fact that Oregon has MAID, colloquially known as assisted suicide. Rather than keep cells frozen in place with extremely low temperatures, Nectome's goo formula does more work to stabilize structures chemically, which allows a moderate preservation temperature at -32C. This process must be completed immediately following death. So if a client can plan around, or potentially induce, a state recognized terminal illness, they can purchase a flight to the state of Oregon, end their life, and receive the latest greatest chance at... something in the future. Don't want to miss the singularity or omnipotent medicine? No cryonics company promises anything like that, they usually only agree to look after your frozen bits for as long as is feasible.
About that, Nectome's founder is also involved with Eon Systems, a company currently working on brain emulators. They generated a viral story with apparent progress on a fly connectome earlier this month. Specific claims of hype are contested, but progress on mapping, building, and simulating brains seems real. Much has been written on MAID slippery slopes, but it seems we already have a current legal avenue to test a "freeze me" future with an upload waiting room. Take the upload to Elon Musk's Afterlife, which is a RuneScape clone by the way, replete with a procedurally generated non-stop feed of his greatest twitter hits at your finger tips into eternity, or until transcendent beings awaken you.
With so many sci-fi fantasies filling up the horizon, why not kill yourself and wait awhile? What did you think transhumanism meant, anyway? vibes? papers? essays?
It is possible whoever is in charge of social media is convinced the algorithm is unfairly targeting them, or used that reasoning to convince other, more important people it was the case. That might not effect standard going on's if you've been happy as a donor otherwise. A funnier alternative is they genuinely believed they were throwing an exit post into the void and were baffled to find the site still functioned.
The NAACP uses X, weirdo DSA caucuses and committees use X, the Human Rights Campaign manages to create engagement on the platform despite their message being much more out of the favor. The ACLU, who the EFF works closely with, is not active on the site. So, yeah, it's probably not a great thing if you've supported them for the traditional mission.
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