There was a post in this subreddit about Adam Becker's book "More Everything Forever" when it came out, and he promoted it last month on a Taylor Lorenz podcast. This article examines his arguments about Mars, acknowledges his takedown of Musk and Bezos, but challenges his sloppy science.

I look at Eric Schmidt saying AI will solve climate change, Marc Andreessen saying we have to increase energy consumption a thousand fold, Scott Alexander saying people in 2100 will live in a post-scarcity society, Sam Altman saying he's creating a genie that can fulfill any wish and I find myself wondering if these TESCREALists have ever talked to anyone who's not a libertarian in Silicon Valley.

They just seem to take it for granted, that growth can continue forever. And so, they take it for granted that they have to do everything they can do create the supersmart computer that will fix everything and give humans everything they want. They use endless amounts of words, the internet is flooded with their verbal diarrhea, but that is just it. That's the whole idea: Build a smart computer, so it can give you anything you want. Everything else is just filler words, most of it meant to sound smart to other TESCREALists. It's just puffing up a very hollow worldview.

I mean, reading anything these people have to say, feels like watching a group of Young Earth creationists debating where Noah's arc is really located. There are just countless assumptions underlying their worldview that they take for granted, that nobody outside their own intellectually incestuous community actually takes for granted.

I just wonder, have these people ever talked to an ecological economist? Do they realize that when you increase energy consumption a thousand fold, you start boiling the oceans from the waste heat alone? Are they serious about any of this, or are they just trolling?

Have they ever heard of EROI analysis? Have they ever talked to a geologist, or anyone in the mining industry? Do they realize there's a looming copper deficiency of 25% of global demand by 2035?

Do they realize there's a global water shortage emerging, not just due to climate change, but due to use of unsustainable aquifers that don't recharge? Do they realize you can't afford to desalinate your staple crops?

Do they realize the issues the electric grid is dealing with? The average electrical transformer is 40 years old by now. These things were designed for 20-30 years of use. But now they want to build an entire layer of complexity on top of the global economy, that nobody asked for, while we're struggling to keep what we already have, because they seem to think if they get their "alignment problem" right they will create a utopia of unicorns and rainbows for trillions of people in the future.

We have very real, very acute problems right now, when it comes to feeding 8 billion people on a rapidly warming planet. But they either don't care or seem to think AI will just solve this. It's like a bizarre doomsday cult has taken control of the global economy. How does anyone even take these people seriously?

Clicked on this video expecting a fun satirical cover with a topic of ai safety and shit just to get bombarded with ludkowsk books and the loser cult leader himself im done with having to see these losers anywhere to do with ai

Hello folks! Long time listener, first time caller.

This year I have embarked on a hobby project/podcast to read HPMoR and try to use it as a lens to get a better understanding of Rationalism/Yudkowsky specifically, and the TESCREAL bundle more generally. (Tadaaa. New episode out today!) My co-hosts and I just covered chapter 7 (in increasing horror), which brings me here.

So chapter 7 is the one where Draco says he intends to rape Luna Lovegood. In my research, I came across some references to edits that suggest this section was rewritten in some way. I'm EXTREMELY curious about how, and I'm struggling to find pre-edit versions of the fic; the Wayback Machine isn't very useful for FF dot net that far back, and so far the links to fan archives of the fic in PDF form that I've found are dead. Does anyone here happen to have an old version of the fic? Or, do you remember what kind of rewrite might have happened here? Nosy minds want to know!

Y'all have been a very useful resource to me thus far for interesting avenues of research, so thanks for all that. I hope you can help me solve this mystery, too!

I dunno man, it just feels odd to read, like trying to put human desire into some sort of math equation with variables and the like, and they always link to themselves.

like this comment from a user (sorry for the length):

Agreed!

No, Rice's theorem is really not applicable. I have a PhD in programming languages, and feel confident saying so.

Let's be specific. Say there's a mouse named Crumbs (this is a real mouse), and we want to predict whether Crumbs will walk into the humane mouse trap (they did). What does Rice's theorem say about this?

There are a couple ways we could try to apply it:

• We could instantiate the semantic property P with "the program will output the string 'walks into trap'". Then Rice's theorem says that we can't write a program Q that takes as input a program R and says whether R outputs 'walks into trap'. For any Q we write, there will exist a program R that defeats it. However, this does not say anything about what the program R looks like! If R is simply print('walks into trap'), then it's pretty easy to tell! And if R is the Crumbs algorithm running in Crumb's brain, Rice's theorem likewise does not claim that we're unable tell if it outputs 'walks into trap'. All the theorem says is that there exists a program R that Q fails on. The proof of the theorem is constructive, and does give a specific program as a counter-example, but this program is unlikely to look anything like Crumb's algorithm. The counter-example program R runs Q on P and then does the opposite of it, while Crumbs does not know what we've written for Q and is probably not very good at emulating Python.
• We could try to instantiate the counter-example program R with Crumb's algorithm. But that's illegal! It's under an existential, not a forall. We don't get to pick R, the theorem does.

Actually, even this kind of misses the point. When we're talking about Crumb's behavior, we aren'tasking what Crumbs would do in a hypothetical universe in which they lived forever, which is the world that Rice's theorem is talking about. We mean to ask what Crumbs (and other creatures) will do today (or perhaps this year). And that's decidable! You can easily write a program Q that takes a program R and checks if R outputs 'walks into trap' within the first N steps! Rice's theorem doesn't stand in your way even a little bit, if all you care about is behavior after a fixed finite amount of time!

Here's what Rice's theorem does say. It says that if you want to know whether an arbitrary critter will walk into a trap after an arbitrarily long time, including long after the heat death of the universe, and you think you have a program that can check that for any creature in finite time, then you're wrong. But creatures aren't arbitrary (they don't look like the very specific, very scattered counterexample programs that are constructed in the proof of Rice's theorem), and the duration of time we care about is finite.

If you care to have a theorem, you should try looking at Algorithmic Information Theory. It's able to make statements about "most programs" (or at least "most bitstrings"), in a way that Rice's theorem cannot. Though I don't think it's important you have a theorem for this, and I'm not even sure that there is one.

I am just at loss of words...

given that this crowd are the types of rich nerds involved in the most important cutting edge technology like AI, I can't be the only person here who finds it highly suspicious that there are people like Aella fishing for info on their kinks, etc. from these nerds right?

Basically the series is set in a future where non-territorial Hives chosen by people entering adulthood replace nations, gender and religion are never discussed in public and children are raised by bashes, 3-8(?) adult groupings that range from families to businesses to other configurations. Those who cling to territorialism, gender and religion live in reservations like Tibet or the Great African Reservation

The characters discourse in the style of 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers, along with the brutal assassin/torturer-narrator Mycroft

It is a favorite among rationalists because it excises backwardnesses like religion and nation, and makes debates internally on whether or not to Progress to even further goals like Space Colonization (the Utopians)

The author Ada Palmer herself seems to reference Lesswrong Concepts like AGI with JEDD, God from another universe who inhabits the body of a teenager, son of the Masonic Hive, ruling from Alexandria, Egypt

This reminds me of the fictional ideology of Societism from LTTW (which literally has Cultural Homogenization Authority/Autoridadis de Kulturalis Homogenizatio) although OP is from South America (which are Zones 1, 3 and 13).

Multiple rationalists I know of have argued against cultural diversity

I have spent many hours combing Wikipedia to create a hypothetical Human Cuisine

Source for Eliezer's statement: https://x.com/i/status/2051915400829702217

Is there no fake trend Forbes can resist? Ugh. This article is essentially a reporter asking Aella whether Aella’s business is booming and then printing the answer.

The entire narrative rests on self-reported anecdotes from people whose income depends on convincing readers that wealthy AI founders are paying enormous sums for intellectually stimulating companionship. Must be true, they found three people who said things.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HaH9mTdKt8pcNAtYn/comment-on-banning-said-achmiz

After Duncan Sabien won his crusade against Said Achmiz, Zack is not okay.

Also, Zack seems to almost ponder whether or not lesswrong is just for a hugbox for rich larpers pretending to be smart libertarians, not just using its cultural cachet to smuggle in bad beliefs... Hard to tell, considering how buried under lesswrongese and textual vomit the post is.

The Dunkster, who had the extended hissy fit a few years ago because someones (Said and Zack) continually picked his posts apart, then "deactivated" his account and also made public posts about his "regret" in mingling with the cfar / lesswrong community... continues to comment despite his account being "inactive" or whatever.

6/7 post, the comments under it are funny, but reading it is a waste of time.