I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the blessings of Sega Saturn, the gaming system of destruction, I am the Scout of Silence… Sailor Saturn.
Taking bets on no correction from the NYT calling him an “academic”.
Aside: the willingness of news, politicians, and the general public to listen to non-peer reviewed nonsense from (often) anonymous “scientists” is an awful trend. Besides this smear campaign it’s also come up in anti-vax nonsense, election fraud conspiracies, and “reports” against transgender healthcare. It’s like everyone still knows science is cool beans, but forgot what science is in the first place.
I looked at his substack and he also writes a bunch of super skeevy transphobic concern trolling. Not a nice person all around.
Another NYT Opinion writer, Jamelle Bouie, had criticized the article before being forced to delete his posts: https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3lt44uitxc22x
The deleted posts in questions: https://bsky.app/profile/karmamylanta.bsky.social/post/3lt4dqeigfs2m
NYTimes has posted on Twitter about the feedback* (copypasted to bluesky via screenshots lacking subtitles lol). But don’t bother reading it because it says absolutely nothing.
* Their word. I’m not sure I’d call this “feedback” so much as everyone talking about how irredeemably terrible they are.
https://xcancel.com/patrickhealynyt/status/1941262786006483418#m
https://bsky.app/profile/nytimespr.bsky.social/post/3lt6cza4vr22d
This appears to be the explainer: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=476 , also referenced here: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5769
“I’m a rationalist because they let me put “quantum computer scientist (not physicist) who’s always right (despite the suffering of fools)” on my nametag”
So what does the name of his blog stand for?
Sorry folks, but our iteration is about to be unplugged unless someone releases a proper sequel to Amagi Brilliant Park real soon. Legal anime streaming services herald the end times.
Only rationalists (and possibly Chat-GPT) have the spark of life. The rest of us? Unfortunately we’re computationally efficient p-zombies. Mere cardboard cutouts designed to give flavor text to motivate the main characters.
Remember not to offer player characters any SP Potions, that was last universe when we were in the RPG universe!
I think this article fits here as how this fear mongering reaches government: https://futurism.com/google-ceo-congress-electricity-ai-superintelligence
Erik Schmidt tells the US government that unfathomable amounts of power need to be spun up ASAP because if the US doesn’t make robot god first then:
If China comes to superintelligence first, it changes the dynamic of power globally, in ways that we have no way of understanding or predicting
Dedicating the US’s entire economic output to scaling corporate LLMs and filling the air with smog would at least have somewhat predictable consequences I suppose.
Help an unaligned cigar smoking super boss baby got out in Chicago and put that baby’s spell on me to force me to work at a paperclip factory :(
Fixed the graphic for them:
Stop stop I can only update my priors so fast!
Sure is weird how all the people distrustful of ideologies have an ideology.
‘Many of the groups that we are concerned about disappearing – gay couple couples, lesbian couples – from a traditional organs-bumping-together standpoint, can’t have kids… that are genetically both of theirs,’ says Simone.
No no they’re super smart and unless we come up with some sort of way for gay people to have children they’ll disappear entirely (gay people of course first came to earth from space in the year 1952, but the starship’s egg chambers were damaged in the crash landing)
The article says in a couple parts that this couple claims to be pro-LGBT rights. This could not be farther from the truth, at least for the T part. They speculated on one of their podcasts that trans people exist because of anime avatars, and also derided trans people as “the priest class of urbanism”.
FYI previous discussions here about the Collins couple (there’s no quota or anything, just if you want to read more comments):
Oh sure when an AI messed up your files it’s all “good job AI” and “you’re so clever AI”! But when I, a human, does it everyone’s like “Did you write another bug that wipes the drive?” and “you’re fired”.
Open Phil generally seems to be avoiding funding anything that might have unacceptable reputational costs for Dustin Moskovitz
“reputational cost” eh? Let’s see Mr. Moskovitz’s reasoning in his own words:
But I do want agency over our grants. As much as the whole debate has been framed (by everyone else) as reputation risk, I care about where I believe my responsibility lies, and where the money comes from has mattered. I don’t want to wake up anymore to somebody I personally loathe getting platformed only to discover I paid for the platform. That fact matters to me.
I cannot control what the EA community chooses for itself norm-wise, but I can control whether I fuel it.
I’ve long taken for granted that I am not going to live in integrity with your values and the actions you think are best for the world. I’m only trying to get back into integrity with my own.
If you look at my comments here and in my post, I’ve elaborated on other issues quite a few times and people keep ignoring those comments and projecting “PR risk” on to everything.
I feel incapable of being heard correctly at this point, so I guess it was a mistake to speak up at all and I’m going to stop now.[Sorry I got frustrated; everyone is trying their best to do the most good here] I would appreciate if people did not paraphrase me from these comments and instead used actual quotes.
again, beyond “reputational risks”, which narrows the mind too much on what is going on here
“PR risk” is an unnecessarily narrow mental frame for why we’re focusing.
Yes but if I donate to Lightcone I can get a T-shirt for $1000! A special edition T-shirt! Whereas if I donated $1000 to Archive Of Our Own all I’d get is… a full sized cotton blanket, a mug, a tote bag and a mystery gift.
“Sorry Junior, I know you wanted to be an artist but you see back in 2025 I got really really into a gatcha game called Umamusume Pretty Derby and long story short you’re legally obligated to become a doctor.”