This comment is gold:

I particularly agree with the point about the style being much more science-y than I’d expected, in a way that surely filters out large swathes of people. I’m assuming “people who are completely clueless about science and are unable to follow technical arguments” are just not the target audience. To crudely oversimplify, I think the target audience is 120+ IQ people, not 100 IQ people.

I haven’t read the damn book and I never will, but I have a hard time imagining there’s any modern science that can’t be explained to 100IQ smoothbrains, assuming the author is good enough.

deep down they realize that as soon as the machines become superintelligent they’ll realize how fucked up humans are and decide it’s a net postive to delete us

I think it’s a very “edgy teenager” thing to say, regardless of what cultural or political tribe this mental teenager pledges allegiance to.

JFC man, stop digging

Not the first time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=scottaaronson.blog

An update, a Concerned Citizen furrows their brow and Has Questions on how this was handled, about a week later

https://lobste.rs/s/zoirhl/appealing_ban_user_friendlysock

A predictable shitshow erupts, which leads to the creator of Anubis quitting the site, along with a few others.

At least I get more entries in my “lobste.rs assholes” list.

Worth noting is this text from the mod (https://lobste.rs/s/zoirhl/appealing_ban_user_friendlysock#c_6prapm)

This pattern was that every couple years there’d be a long string of cruel, dismissive, or discouraging comments. Not necessarily wrong, not outright abusive, not spam, not any one over the line, but all of them… just endless “ugh, this guy again?” and other users, more or less quietly, leaving rather than deal with it. This final comment called out in the modlog is one more example. The entire goal of the rhetoric is that it’s not explicit, it’s not outright libelous, it doesn’t even take personal responsibility for holding the opinion of the smear it insinuates. It’s deniable out of context, whether the missing context is the author’s writing history or the missing context is the old bigotry that trans people are pedophiles.

I’m not missing that context. The only thing I’m missing is the charity to think that somehow this time it’s different, that after a decade, this time it will the last time would be the last time I have to explain that this is a community where everybody’s going to be treated with some basic dignity. The other mods suggested the idea of a public apology but that didn’t work out, and absent a persuasive reason to expect this pattern wouldn’t continue, this ban stands.

yeah sorry I had the username (“friendlysock”) in a first draft then forgot to add it

good riddance to bad rubbish

tbf being able to write thousand word long blog posts and using phrases like “good and important” is part of his job description

lobste.rs just banned an 11 year old account with almost 5,000 comments and 45k karma for being a transphobic jerk. No muss, no fuss, no apologetic blogpost where the user could defend themselves and rile up the masses.

That’s how you do it, people.

edit I have now skimmed the comments where banned use Said can explain himself, and he’s using his last efforts to nobly defend himself, thanking his admirers, and generally projecting an image of a man wrongly accused.

j/k he’s doubling down on being a dick.

Funniest are all the commenters loudly complaining about this decision and threatening/promising to delete their accounts.

Those examples are the Ingroup. We are the Outgroup.

We live in an era of unprecedented passport checks, visa quotas, and detention centers, a world that regulates human movement more tightly than at any other point in history.

Uh… internal passports anyone?

Rest of post is ok.

Granted, I played a bit fast and loose with the term ancient. “Long-running” is better.

This is in the running for most LW comment ever.

Someone mispelled “painfully triangulated center” as “left”.

I hate to “give it to them”, but the targets of TESCREAL are reprehensible BUT fascinating. It’s kinda fun to learn about people like the Cosmists or Nick fucking Land. But the targets of this dude are basically unknown academics. The right doesn’t need a convoluted acronym to dump on those, they already have “woke”.

Look, I am shockingly uninformed about the current conflict in the Middle East - mostly b/c I got sucked into Ukraine-watching and then Oct 7 + Trump II basically killed any motivation to learn more depressing things. But then I’m just a nobody, while Yud aspires to change world leaders’ minds about AI so it doesn’t kill us all[1]. And the Arab/Israel conflict is one of the longest-running in our world, it hinges on important stuff like national self-determination, how to treat civilians in war, how limited natural resources can lead to conflicts - all the kind of stuff you might want your robot god to be “aligned” about, in whatever direction.

It’s ok to say you can’t be bothered about Gaza, or not having the energy to learn more. But then people might just not be interested in reading about your ideas on how LLMs will destroy the world.

[1] latest outburst here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kgb58RL88YChkkBNf/the-problem

old timey eugenicists were all about preventing “unsuitable” people from having kids, thereby circumventing natural selection. It’s as if they didn’t purposefully misunderstand the phrase “survival of the fittest”

I’ve read some SF/F where the author is way more into worldbuilding than their readers are…

I read HP before JK came out as a rabid reactionary, and while I didn’t rate the later books the first 3 or 4 were decent YA fantasy. You could see the lineage of classic British public school stories (if you want a better example, check out Kim Newman’s Drearcliff Grange series) and there’s enough allusions to classic myth and fantasy to keep the wheels on the cart. But somewhere around there Rowling became richer than God and could basically fire anyone who disagreed with her.