The Joscha Bach Substack article is a strange mix of self-pity, JAQing off, and eugenics. He compares Namibian babies he saw in a documentary to great apes in terms of their childhood development, cites studies showing lower cognitive ability among African American children, and then gets all emotional over the fact that people might think he’s a bit of a racist.

AI attracts so many racists – especially the kind who can’t tell that they’re racist. I guess it’s inevitable for any field of study that includes the word 'intelligence" in its name.

She seems to think Urbit became crappy, when in fact it was crappy from the start. It’s what you get when you throw a handful of D-tier engineers at a shitty idea promoted by a fascist loon who loves the smell of his own farts.

I get that, but most Christians don’t make plans to freeze their bodies after they die.

With his all-consuming fear of death, Thiel is about as far from being a Christian as one can get. All his antichrist talk is a nakedly transparent attempt to gas up the rubes so they remain on the side of the billionaires even after Trump gives up the ghost. He doesn’t believe a single thing he’s saying.

A nice thread linked in the comments on Peter Woit’s blog: https://xcancel.com/VikingFBR/status/1962222479008841730

It’s bizarre and pathetic how Scott disabled comments on his blog post but is now using Peter Woit’s blog to carry on a debate with all the people horrified by his views.

Never heard of Ishida, but he sounds like he’s yet another one of those people for whom politics and belief are just “vibes”. There’s no principle, no rational basis, just vibes. I feel like more and more of the world is becoming this way. Or perhaps it always was this way, but the Internet has just made it more evident.

Given how often it shows up in his writings, this incel victim narrative is a linchpin to his personality. He even trots it out in the middle of this genocidal screed – in what on first glance seems to be an irrelevant detour. But it’s really not irrelevant. His self-inflicted psychic damage is painfully real and manifests itself in all sorts of toxic and sociopathic ways, including abject dehumanization of an entire population.

lol

You don’t hear too many leftists saying things like this:

I think that the Democratic Party has two factions; they disagree on a ton of important stuff. I think that the neoliberals are right on nearly all of those disagreements, and the progressives are wrong on nearly all of the disagreements.

It’s reminiscent of the freakout among some of the rationalists when Roko’s basilisk first appeared. And they wonder why people keep calling them an apocalyptic cult.

It’s a really good article. This part stuck out to me:

If you are seriously, legitimately concerned that an emergent technology is about to exterminate humanity within the next three years, wouldn’t you find yourself compelled to do more than argue with the converted about the particular elements of your end times scenario? Some folks were involved in pushing for SB 1047, but that stalled out; now what? Aren’t you starting an all-out effort to pressure those companies to shut down their operations ASAP? That all these folks are under the same roof for three days, and no one’s being confronted, or being made uncomfortable, or being protested—not even a little bit—is some of the best evidence I’ve seen that all the handwringing over AI Safety and x-risk really is just the sort of amped-up cosplaying its critics accuse it of being.

The rest of that guy’s blog is a fucking neofascist mess. That’ll teach me to post a link without first checking out the writer.

Reading the comments led me to this entertaining sneer about our friends.

Apparently the NYT hit-piece’s author, Benjamin Ryan, is a subscriber to Jordan Lasker’s (Cremieux’s) substack.

That thread is wild. Nate proposes techniques to get his kooky beliefs taken more seriously. Others point out that those very same techniques counterproductively pushed people to into the e/acc camp. Nate deletes those other people’s comments. How rationalist of him!

Not surprised to find Sabine in the comments. She’s been totally infected by the YouTube algorithm and captured by her new culture-war-mongering audience. Kinda sad, really.

We should be trying to stop this from coming to pass with the urgency we would try to stop a killer asteroid from striking Earth. Why aren’t we?

Wait, what are we trying to stop from coming to pass? Superintelligent AIs? Either I’m missing his point, or he really agrees with the doomers that LLMs are on their way to becoming “superintelligent”.

Scott talks a bit about it in the video, but he was recently in the news as the guy who refused to sign a non-disparagement agreement when he left OpenAI, which caused them to claw back his stock options.

I’m fascinated by the way they’re hyping up Daniel Kokotajlo to be some sort of AI prophet. Scott does it here, but so does Caroline Jeanmaire in the OP’s twitter link. It’s like they all got the talking point (probably from Scott) that Daniel is the new guru. Perhaps they’re trying to anoint someone less off-putting and awkward than Yud. (This is also the first time I’ve ever seen Scott on video, and he definitely gives off a weird vibe.)