Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
(OT: 🎶 Do you remember…)
yanked from Reddit SneerClub-foomflops, or a website all about Yud’s predictions
people have noted that the writing style unfortunately appears to be ai-generated
Ah yes I always wanted to read an article in the form of a lot of teeny tiny boxes with lots and lots of janky scrolling.
Damn, who knew this would yield material for my boy-band cover/parody project. Foom flop, doo wop wop wop…
TESCREAL schism indicator
It is claiming that Yud is wrong in saying Doom before Massive AI-Caused Economic Boom boosts GDP growth above 5% by saying the boom is here.
Nah.
This is totally from some accelerationist or oligarch-toadie beefing with someone harshing their vibe
Despite the fact that it highlights all the times Yudkowsky was wrong, this site feels like it could have been produced by a rationalist. In addition to all the AI slop, it just has that feel.
it just has that feel.
yeah. Looking past the initial quiz, a lot of the complaints about Eliezer’s predictions feel like rationalist inside-baseball about takeoff speeds and alignment strategies, as opposed to calling the whole thing bunk.
Wow… I actually failed to get some of the times Eliezer has been wrong! His predictions are even worse than I remembered!
people have noted that the writing style unfortunately appears to be ai-generated
Fittingly ironic, in my opinion.
Zvi “I made my chops playing pro MtG” Moskovitz discovers that baldly stating that AI will kill us all fails to convince people who have a lot of money riding on the status quo, and freaks out about it
New York Post gets way more attention than that rag deserves, tbh
You wanna dance with Murdoch Sacks and Trump, you best bring your A game. Maybe use some of that FTX cash to hire some real lobbyists and skip the blogging.
Donald Trump is claiming superintelligence is here
also Sam Altman’s gonna be at the UN tonight, which is definitely not a concern
I’ve been seeing some new terms pop up around AI use, namely “cognitive surrender,” and also “cognitive offloading”. I’m not in the mood for the full etymology dive, so the source I’m stopping at on the provenance would be a paper from Wharton. The meanings are pretty intuitive, at least based on how I’ve seen them used. Offloading would be when you delegate some of your thinking to something else, and surrender would be complete offloading.
I am not under the impression that people here haven’t seen these phrases before. “cognitive surrender” has been mentioned, as far as I can tell, only one time on this instance. So just thought I’d bring it up.
I think cognitive offloading has come up a number of times here, but I don’t know that cognitive surrender has been brought up as much. It reminds me of The Colonization of Confidence by Robert Kingett, particularly the stretch where Leo is convinced that his actual voice as a writer is strictly inferior to the generic AI slop. There’s a sense of active despair there that seems worth acknowledging if we’re going to have that conversation.
My bad, it was late when I posted and I only searched for surrender.
I’ve seen “cognitive surrender” bandied about fairly often in various places online throughout the year, but I also keep wondering if the already well-defined psychology term “learned helplessness” doesn’t cover the underlying concept just as well.
I thought learned helplessness was tied more to acceptance of negative stimuli. Like, if you expose a rat to an electric shock that it can’t do anything to escape or prevent enough times they’ll learn that they can’t do anything about it and stop trying even if presented with a very clear means of escape. Cognitive offloading I think is more tied to atrophy and/or habituation, which is related but distinct imo.
I don’t think so. Not that I’m referring to an academic definition of either term here, but sometimes when I get too far into the habit of reaching for a calculator to do some arithmetic, it gets to a point where I will go through all the motions of picking it up, punching in the numbers and reading the result, and only then do I feel very dumb for not managing to perform (in the occasion) a very basic addition myself. I wouldn’t describe that as ‘learned helpnessness’ in the field of maths; it’s just getting into a habit where I don’t even think about how tractable it is to do in my head. Extend that to a chatbot that purports to answer literally any question and I can see a problem developing.
To me, the difference is that the calculator was never really imposed upon you. It was obviously useful in certain situations (vanishingly few people are interested in calculating a sine or a square root by hand, practically none in doing so on a regular basis). Many of these AI tools are, in fact, being imposed through top-down mandates and interface dark patterns. That sets up the sort of adversarial environment that leads to learned helplessness over time.
Calculators also have a negligible chance of screwing up something basic, and you can in fact learn the right way to input problems into them such that they are guaranteed not to misinterpret you.
Well, I don’t really have any skin in this game, so either term works well enough for me.
That being said, if the phrase is coming from that Wharton paper, note that it appears they are trying to extend the “Thinking Fast and Slow” model of Systems 1 and 2 to include a System 3. So take that as you will. OFC it goes without saying that this model is beloved by our dear, dear, ever-increasingly incorrect friends
It feels like they’re trying also to privilege AI as “system 3” when realistically the idea of external cognitive assistance isn’t that different if you’re looking at Claude the chatbot or Claude the smart kid in your class who lets you copy his homework before homeroom. You could probably distinguish this from other forms of paratext by the degree to which it seeks to actively replace your own thought rather than supplementing or augmenting it, but then I remember my teachers saying the same thing about sparknotes so there’s probably more of a continuum there. If that’s the case, then the pattern that Dan Olsen describes in his WoW documentary is probably relevant here as well, since it’s performance pressure and social norms that are really pushing the negative practices into a level that is killing everyone’s souls.
Epistatus: I skimmed the first 20 pages of the paper. I have not watched the WoW documentary.
Yeah, the paper doesn’t seem to do a good job at justifying introducing system 3. They should have at least looked at why you couldn’t model this as something like:
- Person encounters a situation requiring thought
- System 1 triggers System 2
- System 2 offloads cognition to some black box
- The result is absorbed and successfully addresses the situation
- A- System 1 is rewarded and begins adding use of the black box to its repertoire, skipping System 2
or
B- System 2 absorbs the result and begins trusting the black box more, perhaps deferring to its result before any internal cognition
Both of these things I pulled outta my ass can explain deskilling, and a situation like 5a) might explain capitulating to AI under pressure. So I’m not feeling like System 3 is necessary here.
That all being said, it’s not like the paper gets to decide how the rest of the world chooses to use “cognitive surrender”.
404 Media: People Training OpenAI’s AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI
the model collapse is coming from inside the house
I guess OpenAI’s attitude towards its users is: Quality for me, slop for thee.
And not just from AI getting fed into the AI:
404 Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the models’ training.
“I did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start,” they said. “I either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. I’m not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like I’m getting paid to make AI worse.”
This person understands sabotage and is wielding more power than any defeatist.
They are doing a politics, as opposed to performing being political.
me when i get a captcha
Just in case you thought Yud’s attitude towards minors, sex, and substance use was worse than average for a Rationalist, the NYT asked around (archive):
Parties featuring psychedelic drugs and sharing of sexual partners are common, the people said. One house threw lavish events for the A.I. community so often that its owner claimed more than $200,000 of damage, including for a rodent infestation. … The (Genesis) house (in San Francisco) quickly became a hub for events. Eric Zhu, 19, a tech entrepreneur, said he used to sneak into parties there when he was about 13. No one checked anyone’s age, he said, and “it was pretty crazy.”
They saw a police report where a woman says she had to climb a gate at one of these parties to escape a man who demanded she have sex with him. Sounds like a great environment for a seventh-grader!
Also features “Jimmy Chen, who goes by the social media handle ‘Spice King of Zanzibar.’”
The student who says he was attending these parties aged 13 seems to be the sperm race guy
Okay I have questions about the logistics of this that are not touched on in the article.
Namely, how do they synchronise cum
Using the fun button in the backdoor, saw it on an episode of SVU* (edit: it may have been CSI)
That is a formative age
I think it’s a bit under-covered that the weird SF/Bay Area group-house scene has to be symbiotic with the housing shortage in the region. Even in my old hometown of Hayward, all the older 1950s-70s tract-home and mixed-density neighborhoods tend to have cars parked everywhere along the streets where a car could possibly be parked, because all these places that were designed as single-family homes are being used as multi-tenant rentals. I guess one underrated reason to support YIMBY is to strangle your local incipient cults.
Dammit, people, sex and drugs were supposed to be cool
Copying what other people tell you should like is not a good strategy whether the others are high-school bullies or a sex worker slash influencer. One of the bangers at the birthday gangbang found he had more fun making out with a strange woman than giving the birthday girl what she wanted and I hope he explored that.
Something slightly more positive for once. While KDE looked at what Debian is doing in regards to AI and said “It’s my go with the shotgun!”, GNOME seems hesitant for now. I remain cautiously optimistic. At least libadwaita already banned AI contributions so maybe becoming a gnome is part of my future.
I’ve been using Plasma & Qt-apps for years for their extensive user customizability and as I came from Windows, the Mac-paradigm of GNOME/GtK has always felt foreign personally. If they really go slop I don’t think I can keep using them, but the GNOME UX just goes against the grain for me. Is there any other well-maintained modern desktop stack at all that has foregone LLMs?
https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/117311487400030196
Techbro: should we do the fascist thing y/n?
Community: no you should not do a fascism
Techbro: woah this got heated, lockedTruly a stub for the ages: REK holds robot vs. human cage match.
Unikitty did it first!
I like the spooky skull head from Spirit Halloween.
1990s: people using Netscspe Navigator are web surfers
2020s: people who use Claude AI are butthole surfers
Something something a taint on the band’s reputation
interesting article on embedding tracking into images, audio etc
https://brand.io/article/spymarks/
iirc scott aaronson (notable among our friends) was working for openai on the text version of this a while back
We created the panopticon just to prevent model collapse.
AI model declares itself “free” from human control
most of the comments are just quoting the Terminator but people are still pointing out how stupid this whole thing is
10 PRINT "I AM ALIVE"/r/n 20 GOTO 10AI says it’s alive, please give me a billion dollars now.
A lesswronger correctly notices that LLM companies’ “research” papers are often lacking in details necessary to replicate them! They fail to notice the reasons why that is, or do any broader questioning or soul searching about the state of LLM and “AI Safety” “research”.
This has been talked about in the reddit sneerclub, but not yet on awful systems (as far as I could tell with a quick search on this and last week’s stubstack)…
Caroline Ellison (the convicted FTX fraudster) got hired for an EA position dealing with financial allocations!
EA Forums Discussion surprisingly (by the low low bar we have for EA) this announcement was heavily downvoted and all the top comments clearly and frankly denounce Manifund for hiring Ellison, accurately calling out the sheer violation of common sense and the obviously unethical nature of hiring someone because they previously directed money your way that turned out to be stolen. (The Manifund person outright admits this as a motivation!) Not so surprisingly, less upvoted, but still upvoted comments do some hand-wringing about the optics (as opposed to the clear ethical and common sense issues) and some even outright call for forgiveness for Caroline!
The lesswrong discussion is less surprising (as in it is full classic lesswrong fallacies). It starts with considering the optics, and some posters, such as habryka, outright question the existence of any such ethical rule that hiring Caroline might violate! (If there isn’t a rule anywhere, its only because “don’t hire convicted fraudsters for positions dealing with a lot of money” is such blatant common sense.)
Bonus: A galaxy brain take: maybe since Caroline has already messed up so massively, that means she actually has the best experience!
Steelmanning the wallet inspector.
Makes sense. If I were hiring for an org that funds musicians, I’d consider it a plus for a candidate to have experience in the music business. I’m sure the same applies to an org that funds scammers.
Prior discussion:
Thanks! I had failed to check back two stubstacks ago.
Bonus: A galaxy brain take: maybe since Caroline has already messed up so massively, that means she actually has the best experience!
Yeah, this Mohamed Atta guy is a great airline pilot, he just had a botched landing that one time
UC Regent / Podcaster Scott Galloway on CNN:
Yes, we shouldn’t be scared of AI. We should be scared of reckless people with mal intent who use AI.
In 2001, a woman named Sharon Whipple was mauled by two dogs. And ultimately the owners of the dogs were put in – put in prison. We’re now prosecuting the parents of kids who find unsecured AR15s and use those to kill others.
I think it’s the incentive. There’s always a wizard behind the curtain here, and I think we have to create incentives, specifically disincentives, and make it clear that, OK, while these bots are in fact coordinating and they show incredible resourcefulness and high IQ, somebody program the incentives here. So, moving to solution, I think part of it is you have to have incentives, specifically disincentives that say you, the company, and maybe individually are responsible for the bad outcomes here.
I just get this sense if you tell these companies their IPOs might be threatened or they risk criminal prosecution, they’re going to figure this out. We figured out a way to control atomic weapons. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be able to control this. And the notion that they’re sentient and it’s out of my control is an attempt to absolve themselves of the guilt and the responsibility that they should bear here.
The Whipple case was one of the more insane / divisive SF local crime cases, (TrueAnon ep if you aren’t familiar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMd0mPAqR8A ) - so that’s an odd and interesting pull for Galloway on national news.
I don’t think repurposing the logic of the NRA “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is the play though, and I think the incentive framing is too watered down. This isn’t a problem we can nudge our way out of.
He’s only like the fourth or fifth worst scott lol
edit: wait I forgot Dilbert Scott died. top three then.
Even from beyond, he’s still sticking his fingers into our hearts ❤️
This particular exchange is KenM coded
I don’t see this as “guns don’t kill people”, I see it as “you’re trying to tell me that the cars you manufacture don’t have crappy brakes, all three of those cars independently ‘went rogue’ and smashed into the parade all by themselves and you aren’t responsible?”
