It would be hilarious if the AI doomers actually did manage to get Trump to sign some of their ideas into action with executive orders, only for him to reverse course or fail in implementation details, and then a hard tide of anti-Trump sentiment in the next administration to totally undo them.

Sadly it looks like we will only get the more immediate humor of Trump going hard against them.

Lol, I called it without even having to see it. Doubling down and blaming EAs for being too left even as the right curbstomps them. How does that boot taste?

Also, WTF does Eliezer even think “leftist” means?

This is hilarious. I didn’t think it was possible, but maybe the lesswrongers and EAs will finally realize they are in a leopards-eating-face moment?

Or maybe they will double down? I.e. they conclude that if they were less woke maybe Trump wouldn’t have turned on them? Haha.

Are we gearing up for a lepoard face moment from the cultist faction of the cultist / oligarch-technofedual-lord / grifter / authoritarian alliance?

Nah, lesswrongers don’t even have that level of introspection. Plus a lot of them are outright pro-oligarch-technofedual-lord, at least enough so that it outweighs their doomer-cultists allegiance.

“Democrat-polarized” is such a word choice. Like, ah yes, it is clearly the Democrat’s fault the right goes batshit at even a hint global warming is real or at any sort of gun regulation or any social safety net expansion.

The lesswrong reactions are hilarious: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s76hbGpaMkhiNwbTX/matrice-jacobine-s-shortform?commentId=B2WSExeg8wfgDqZiM

One commenter realizes the truth, but is heavily downvoted:

For anyone who was at all unclear on the subject: He’s not on your side. He’s against you. He wants you to fail. Stop trying to fix him. AI safety is in the same situation as measles prevention, free trade, military readiness, or the prosecution of the remaining Epstein offenders. Trump & co. are against these things, and they’re not going to be converted just because you tell them again how important these things are.

Sorry bud, if lesswrongers were capable of grasping this they wouldn’t have fallen for FTX, or kept falling for Anthropic’s half-hearted gestures of placation to doomer-cultists. And of course, many lesswrongers are genuinely very right wing and will thus rationalize justifications for the more centrist lesswrongers to suck up to Trump.

Because rationalists distrust mainstream normal science and skepticism, they are far more willing to dabble in mysticism and the supernatural than normal skeptics.

I am also questioning OpenAI’s strategy of strip-mining math for PR, since it seems like advances in math do not actually register that well in the public.

They want to sell the claim that they’ve “achieved AGI”. For the general public they can sell on the vibe of “the computer talks back to you”, but for more sophisticated audiences, they need something firmer. Everyone with even a fraction of the ability to think for themselves has stopped trusting benchmarks, so OpenAI and Anthropic has been looking for things associated with intelligence they can claim success on. Math proofs have the property of being somewhat automatically checkable, having lots of ideas scattered throughout the literature to let their LLMs sift through, and being associated with intelligence.

The /r/singularity and orange site responses have been gross, lots of commenters willing to totally overlook the multiple different ways OpenAI has been utter scum in this debacle in order to celebrate another LLM “success”.

I don’t exactly why, but based off the dates of various classic lesswrong posts I know it has existed since before 2010 in rationalist culture.

As to inexact reasons why… some key big name starting rationalist (i.e. Yudkowsky for sure, but probably a few others) were into polyamory. (Probably for the obvious reasons of getting to sleep with more people.)

This view on the community also explains his recklessness not only with aggressively monetizing HPMOR, but also his willingness to risk drawing JK Rowlings attention to his fanfiction (towards the end of HPMOR, one of his author’s notes was looking for someone to reach out to her).

I would try to get in touch with J. K. Rowling to see if HPMOR could be published in book form, maybe as HJPEV and the Methods of Rationality, with all profits accruing to a UK charity. I’m not getting my hopes up, but I do have a rule telling me to try rather than automatically giving up and assuming something can’t be done. If any reader thinks they can put me in touch with J. K. Rowling, or for that matter Daniel Radcliffe, regarding this matter, I do hereby ask them to contact me at yudkowsky@gmail.com.

Rowling (and Warner Brothers) have been litigious with their IP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_disputes_over_the_Harry_Potter_series#Other_accusations_of_infringement . So this was a reckless move on EY’s part, possibly indicating that he doesn’t appreciate the delicate place fanfic (and its communities) are in.

Edit: thinking about the way Rowling has shown her true face over the past decade… “with all profits accruing to a UK charity” makes me wonder if in whatever fantasy universe Eliezer did talk Rowling into allowing published fanfic to be monetized for “charities”, that money would all end up going to TERF “charities”.