Science-fiction solutions for science-fiction problems!

Hey it’s just like The Clockwork Rocket if Greg Egan was an AI-doomer, an idiot, a nazi, and hated fun!

The gratuitous hate for washing machines in this is so funny. Dudes rock.

The French urologist by day eugenicist transhumanist crank by night Laurent Alexandre had an interesting perspective on the subject fifteen years ago. We should do eugenics and edit our brains to be better so as to counter the emergence of Artificial Intelligence. The robots will replace us if we don’t do rigorous embryo selection.

Incidentally he also warns that a modern day Stalin in possession of neuromachines and gene editing technologies would create what he terms “neuro-gulags”.

I don’t remember seeing Lesswrongers play with these sorts of ideas, which is a little surprising. But they’re reluctant to diminish the AI’s omnipotence I imagine.

I’ve played Geneforge. This is going to go badly for everyone involved.

Enders Game

you mean HPMOR of course

It’s really funny how HPMOR inherits the exact same problems from Ender’s Game like there was nothing at all to learn. Harry and Ender’s violence is recognised as maladaptive, a result of trauma, they might end the world or do a big genocide, but that’s because they’re so much smarter and more competent than anyone around them! They can keep their evil half (!!!) in check with the power of their big ethical brain (the good hemisphere???).

That’s an interesting palette choice on your generated illustrations my guys

Genopolitical

ew

Fucking hell, I don’t know how seriously I should take this (could it be Errol making things up?) but it is so utterly bizarre. I’ve just been staring off into space for a minute.

may the gods bless you and your crops

blueanon

BlueAnon (a portmanteau of blue and QAnon) is a term used to describe conspiracy theories which posit Donald Trump’s engagement in elaborate schemes to unlawfully seize or maintain control of the United States Government, independently or as the object of manipulation by foreign governments.

Huh? This doesn’t sound unreasonable.

Another BlueAnon theory posits that Ivana Trump was secretly cremated by Donald Trump to free room in her coffin to hide self-incriminating documents so as to conceal them from discovery by investigators.

Oh. All right.

I don’t think you can see the [tweet? “article”?] without an X account? It’s not working for me at any rate.

Also in the comments to the followup you’ve got people debating whether believing that there are genetic differences between races constitutes scientific racism.

Steve Sailer doesn’t think so. To which Philip replies

The point isn’t that what you’re saying isn’t true, that point is that for most people who have heard of Steve Sailer, Steve Sailer is the textbook example of a scientific racist. So I think we have a good working definition of scientific racism, which is just, whatever Steve Sailer says. I say this unironically with no disrespect; I also consider myself a scientific racist.

TGGP asks

Who doesn’t think there are genetic differences between the races?

gottem

In the followup

One possible answer is that the causal pathway is high GDP → lots of education → lots of practice with abstract reasoning → high abstract/symbolic IQ. I don’t think this can be the whole story, because some countries that “cheated” to get high GDP (eg oil sheikhdoms) can’t translate it into IQ points at the same rate as everyone else. I’m stuck with the boring basic explanation that maybe you need to do a lot of abstract reasoning tasks to get high GDP.

You can’t possibly be this dumb. Tfw you’re so blinded by racism you transfer yourself to the platonic realm where numbers are things in themselves.

Hi Deborah what’s up wait so what the fuck, am I getting this right: this person found a new ficus, potentially, and is in contact with a ficus expert who’ll get back to them in a few weeks. The person can’t accept this insignificant delay because??? (is there a lot of pressing demand for advances in ficus taxonomy?) so they write this bizarre screed about … about huh … how the invisible hand of the market should drive ficus research? You know, like bees, or Batman? For some reason? Because having to wait a few weeks is the same as being left to drown?

Someone’s on a lot of adderall.

you know you’re on a fascist blog when you see so many AI illustrations

my personal theory is he refused makeup because it’s an unnatural affectation that could have compromised his bioengineered skincare immortality routine

WHY DOES HE LOOK LIKE THAT

One particular safety concern is that venture capitalists might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether venture capitalists have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the capitalist to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier financiers on a suite of six agentic evaluations where capitalists are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming.

Remilia are still going??? Why??

God I’d feel sorry for fascists if they weren’t trying to make our world as ugly, boring and miserable as they are.

What’s Kudu exactly? The tech bullshit I’ve been able to find was impenetrable to me.

Do we agree that

When students have questions about course material, they’ll have the option of asking Kudu for help. But unlike ChatGPT and other public large-language models, Kudu will draw information only from the resources Stahuljak has uploaded.

is a straight up lie? That’s not how LLM chatbots work. It’s going to be a kitchen sink LLM with some stupid “you’re a very nice and very smart comp lit professor” prompt engineering, right?