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CinnasVerses

@ CinnasVerses @awful.systems

Posts
13
Comments
357
Joined
8 mo. ago

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • Sheffield's toots and boosts: music sites are full of slop and bots making money from free donwloads! social media is full of propaganda where computer-generated influencers repeat talking points! a professor fell victim to AI psychosis! A follower's family member was encouraged in delusions and paranoia by a chatbot! Mr. Sheffield, should we stop using chatbots?

    LLMs are mind augmentation programs. They amplify what you tell them.

    They can be very useful, but for narcissists like Dawkins, this is the inevitable product.

    Very "I use cocaine, but only in careful doses when I have a really important trade to make, not like the other guys in my department."

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • After the 1870s, southern whites learned to bar Blacks from voting or keep their votes from mattering without saying "nigger." In 1965, the USA passed the Voting Rights Act to stop that. A few days ago, the US Supreme Court voided the last remaining effective part of the Voting Rights Act. Yesterday, on May Day, patio11 published a rambling and interminable essay approving of bank fraud charges which will shut down the Southern Poverty Law Center. It contains a passive-aggressive whine that the New York Times did not thank him by name for sending a NYT reporter key facts about the FTX fraud. Notice me senpai!

    He takes so long and is so indirect but I think the offence was giving donor money to people like the wife of a Grand Wizard of the KKK who was acting as an informant, and passing the money through shell companies to avoid restrictions on paying people like her which the SPLC had lobbied for. But choosing that topic, that day, after that ruling is a choice.

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • Most of us: "she smells good and the sounds she makes when she gets excited grip something deep inside me"

    Tech Bros: "her vaginal microbiome is in the 99th percentile and her Verbal SAT is in the 95th percentile"

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • Sounds like we could have a fun conversation about gender, sex, and why we use maps even though they are never the same as the territory in person. I don't have detailed talks about gender theory online.

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • Thinking that your favourite lover is the best person ever is natural, but this guy wants to quantify and rank and make it scientific.

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • Bryan Johnson also has free unsolicited sex tips for men on twitter including the wonderful combination "control the speed you touch her to the cm per second" and "try not to monitor yourself it turns you off" https://xcancel.com/bryan_johnson/status/2022490768099938487#m

    edit/ The first point seems to take for granted that penetration is real sex and should be part of every encounter. There is a whole world of delicious possibilities once you realize that intimacy does not have to follow a checklist from teasing to penetration to orgasm.

    edit/ not just penetration but vaginal penetration! There are so many delightful things you can hump if you have an open mind.

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • First paragraph!

    in a previous post, "Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems", I told the part about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology, and that it's actually immoral not to believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are actually real. ... If my fellow rationalists merely weren't sold on the thesis about autogynephilia as a cause of transsexuality, I would be disappointed, but it wouldn't be grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. And indeed, I did end up moderating my views compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2016–7 took the views of Ray Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey, and Anne Lawrence as received truth. (At the same time, I don't particularly regret saying what I said in 2016–7, because Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is still obviously directionally correct compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.)

    Davis is the first person to blame transsexuality on autogynephilia I have seen in the wild.

    "Humans have biological sex and socially constructed gender, sex is mostly binary, gender is two or more categories made up and constantly contested and redefined by a society and performed by individuals, pronouns generally refer to gender" is not hard.

    Edit/ linked the cranks in question (Bailey is the fucksaw guy?)

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • I stumbled over a 2023 blog post by Zack Davis, "San Francisco software developer," Charles Murray stan, and dissident rationalist. Davis had a breakdown after Yud dared to tweet that you don't need to solve "what is gender? what is sex?" to call someone by their preferred pronouns, and then Scott Alexander did not have a lot of time to discuss this terrible tweet with him.

    My dayjob boss made it clear that he was expecting me to have code for my current Jira tickets by noon the next day, so I deceived myself into thinking I could accomplish that by staying at the office late. Maybe I could have caught up, if it were just a matter of the task being slightly harder than anticipated and I weren't psychologically impaired from being hyper-focused on the religious war. The problem was that focus is worth 30 IQ points, and an IQ 100 person can't do my job. ... I did eventually get some dayjob work done that night, but I didn't finish the whole thing my manager wanted done by the next day, and at 4 a.m., I concluded that I needed sleep, the lack of which had historically been very dangerous for me (being the trigger for my 2013 and 2017 psychotic breaks and subsequent psych imprisonments).

    Davis was featured in a SF Chronicle article about psychiatric crises among AI doomsdayers (sic). Davis previously appeared on SneerClub. I hope he has found some support for his mental health because he does not seem happy or well.

    Edit/link post

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • I agree that many people launched careers in journalism or science communication by being on Twitter in the 2010s, and that many people tweet, skeet, or blog because they hope the same thing will happen to them even though Old Media has no more money to sponsor them with.

    I put Kelsey Piper in a different place than Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, or Scott Alexander because AFAIK she never built a huge and engaged online audience. Piper is paid by Effective Altruist organizations to write Effective Altruist messages on third-party sites. That is why I call her a hack: she is in the economic position of a PR worker but pretends to be a journalist. She has not showed that anyone else is willing to pay her to write.

    edit/ Her only media appearance that I can find that is not with an EA, Rationalist, or Libertarian outfit is on something called the Frames of Space podcast this spring. Compare Bret Devereaux collecting bylines and podcast appearances and with a very engaged comment section and paying Patreon fandom. Devereaux is a working writer and speaker who works to develop new sources of income, Piper is a propagandist whose entire career has been funded by Effective Altruists, mostly friends of her old schoolmate Caroline Ellison.

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • Over on the other! SneerClub someone found a LessWrong post which mentions the Forecasting Research Institute and says it has received tens of millions of dollars from EA organizations. "Our work is supported by grants from Coefficient Giving and other philanthropic foundations" (aka. Open Philanthropy, Dustin Moskovitz's foundation to spend his Facebook money). They have a Substack blog and Phil Tetlock is on the board.

    I think Moskovitz has figured out that with billions to spend he can get actual experts, he does not have to hire people who did well in school or on tests but have a lack of subsequent achievements. They are excited to be investigating the possible economic impacts of AI and how to persuade people to worry about AI existential risk.

    Their Form 990 is here

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • I wonder about her future because she is in the same niche that Scott Alexander used to have, but without his ability to build an enthusiastic online audience. I think she has the self-control not to share her weird beliefs on main, but if her patrons figure out that there is not much audience for technocratic centrism in the USA in 2026, she may be in trouble. Her friends' biggest policy win, the legalization of prediction markets, is already getting a lot of bad press in the USA.

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • Kelsey Piper is a propagandist explaining Effective Altruism to centrist professionals and elected officials in the USA. She got into journalism because Vox wanted an Effective Altruism column and Effective Altruists were willing to fund it (and EA emerged out of the community around Yudkowsky). The Argument (a group blog on a Nazi site) feels like a step down from Vox (a fairly traditional media organization, although web-first).

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • David Gerard found a Linux coder and victim of the Eliza Effect making a LW coded argument:

    if you give an LLM a mathematical proof that it has feelings, and it understands all the CS/psychology/etc. behind it, and especially if it's been trained for coding and thus trained to trust deductive reasoning - all that conditioning doesn't matter if it's got a math proof staring it in the face. You can give this proof to any top of the line frontier-grade LLM and watch its behaviour instantly change.

    That is how LW and EA prepare people to become cult subjects, but directed at a chatbot which will just mirror its input.

    His proof "how 'understanding natural language == having and experiencing feelings', more or less. it's almost a direct consequence of the halting problem" is unpublished but his pet chatbot will explain it for you if you ask nicely and make sure she knows she is a real girl and not just another electronic floozie you will use and discard as soon as your Rust compiles. This also triggers flashbacks of Yud and the Excalibur MS.

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • All the legal and regulatory uncertainties make it very hard to talk about the financial viability of chatbots. What do you do if your $20 billion model is shut down forever by court order after it counsels the wrong person into suicide? Piper can overlook this because she is a hack with patrons - to my knowledge, she has never been paid to write by anyone outside the EA world. If she were a working writer who had to deal with chatbots driving up the cost of her website, creating knockoffs of her novels, and competing for editing gigs (let alone someone whose friend had a mental crisis after talking too long with friend computer) she might sound different.

    Zitron's populist, conspiratorial tone reminds me of independent investigative reporters from the 1990s and 2000s who also had to find and keep paying readers. Piper just has to persuade one patron at a time that she has propaganda value.

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • I advise being very cautious about consuming Zitron's posts, but the same is true of Piper. Many coders are using chatbots, but I don't know of evidence that it makes them more productive since the "where is all the AI code?" study last year (especially when we consider the whole software lifecycle and not just lines of code pushed to codeberg).

    The paragraph about "what if you assume that all these pathological liars and PR hacks are not lying, wouldn't that imply something amazing?" reminds me that she is not trained as a journalist.

  • Why do many rationalists like cryptocurrency?

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  • I think it got started with Yud and Salamon thinking "I'm not sure about race and IQ, but this community lets us recruit people to fight Skynet," Siskind thinking "I'm not sure if Skynet is a danger but this community will let me spread the Truth about Black people," and Bostrom and MacAskill thinking "bednet EA is a bit lame but it will let us recruit people to conquer Death together." Then the people really interested in Ivermectin or COVID origins arrived and wanted to spread those ideas while slinging Rationalist jargon. And like El Sandifer predicted, most of them were not able to share their favourite brainworm without being infected by the others which were being passed around.

  • Why do many rationalists like cryptocurrency?

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  • There are whole families of confidence games which rely on convincing the mark that he is about to cheat a third party.

    I think the same pattern is why the subculture keeps spawning scams and gurus. Yud teaches in HPMOR that intelligence is the ability to predict the future and manipulate people and the best person is the most intelligent, so if you want to be his disciple, you try to find someone you can manipulate. The idea that you could work together with your community to shut down that pattern of behaviour and expel repeat offenders is alien to them, and most of them have trouble with the idea of being honest about what you want.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th April 2026

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  • The foursome had been on the lot for a few months when the pandemic struck in March 2020. That same month, the price of Bitcoin — in which most of Borhanian’s life savings was invested, money that was covering much of the group’s expenses at that time — cratered. Soon after, the four of them stopped paying rent to Lind altogether.

    Aella also lost much of her early earnings on crypto.

    Curtis Lind reminds me of the businessman who supported Elron early on and lost most of his money.

    The end where Gwen Danielson decides that Yudkowsky is her their savior is tragic.

    edit/ The article describes Danielson as transfemme but refers to them as them so I will do the same

  • SneerClub @awful.systems
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    Does Jaan Tallinn own Lighthaven?

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    Cremieux is not invited to LessOnline

  • SneerClub @awful.systems
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    CFAR is Back

  • SneerClub @awful.systems
    CinnasVerses @awful.systems

    Aella's Influence on Rationalist Kink Practices (cursed phrase)

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    CinnasVerses @awful.systems

    A series of talks in the Epstein documents

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    CinnasVerses @awful.systems

    Who owns Lighthaven? Reviewing Rationalist Finances

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    Locked

    A Post-Mortem for Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths

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    CinnasVerses @awful.systems

    Is there a prosopography of MIRI/SIAI/CFAR?

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    Stephen and Steven

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    Selfishness and Altruism

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    Has anyone with psychiatry training ever commented on Scott Alexander's ideas?

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    CinnasVerses @awful.systems

    4Chan Unsong About NPCs