This week’s southpark makes fun of prediction markets! Hanson and the rationalists can be proud their idea has gone mainstream enough to be made fun of. The episode actually does a good job highlighting some of the issues with the whole concept: the twisted incentives and insider trading and the way it fails to actually create good predictions (as opposed to just getting vibes and degenerate gambling).

and the person who made up the “math pets” allegation claimed no such source

I was about to point out that I think this is the second time he claimed math pets had absolutely no basis in reality (and someone countered with a source that forced him to) but I double checked the posting date and this is the example I was already thinking of. Also, we have supporting sources that didn’t say as much directly but implied it heavily: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/42iv09/a_yudkowsky_blast_from_the_past_his_okcupid/ or like, the entire first two thirds of the plot of Planecrash!

So if I understood NVIDIA’s “strategy” right, their usage of companies like Coreweave is drawing in money from other investors and private equity? Does this mean, that unlike many of the other companies in the current bubble, they aren’t going to lose money on net, because they are actually luring in investment from other sources in companies like Coreweave (which is used to buy GPU and thus goes to them), whileleaving the debt/obligations in the hands of companies like Coreweave? If I’m following right this is still a long term losing strategy (assuming some form of AI bubble pop or deflation we are all at least reasonably sure of), but the expected result for NVIDIA is more of a massive drop in revenue as opposed to a total collapse of their company under a mountain of debt?

Side note: The way I’ve seen clanker used has been for the AIs themselves, not their users. I’ve mostly seen the term in the context of star wars memers eager to put their anti-droid memes and jokes to IRL usage.

It’s like a cargo cult version of bootstrapping or monte carlo methods.

That thread gives me hope. A decade ago, a random internet discussion in which rationalist came up would probably mention “quirky Harry Potter fanfiction” with mixed reviews, whereas all the top comments on that thread are calling out the alt-right pipeline and the racism.

I’m at least enjoying the many comments calling her out, but damn she just doubles down even after being given many many examples of him being a far-right nationalist monster who engaged in attempts to outright subvert democracy.

The Oracle deal seemed absurd, but I didn’t realize how absurd until I saw Ed’s compilation of the numbers. Notably, it means even if OpenAI meets its projected revenue numbers (which are absurdly optimistic, like bigger than Netflix and Spotify and several other services combined) paying Oracle (along with everyone else it has promised to buy compute from) will put it net negative on revenue until 2030, meaning it has to raise even more money.

I’ve been assuming Sam Altman has absolutely no real belief that LLMs would lead to AGI and has instead been cynically cashing in on the sci-fi hype, but OpenAI’s choices don’t make any long term sense if AGI isn’t coming. The obvious explanation is that at this point he simply plans to grift and hype (while staying technically within the bounds of legality) to buy few years of personal enrichment. And to even ask what his “real beliefs” are gives him too much credit.

Just to remind everyone: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent!

This feels like a symptom of liberals having a diluted incomplete understanding of what made past movements that utilized protest succeed or fail.

It is pretty good as a source for science fiction ideas. I mean, lots of their ideas originate from science fiction, but their original ideas would make fun fantasy sci-fi concepts. Like looking off their current front page… https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLFRkm3PhJ3Ty27QH/the-cats-are-on-to-something cat’s deliberately latching on to humans as the most lazy way of advancing their own value across the future seems like a solid point of fantasy worldworldbuilding…

To add to blakestacey’s answer, his fictional worldbuilding concept, dath ilan (which he treats like rigorous academic work to the point of citing it in tweets), uses prediction markets in basically everything, from setting government policy to healthcare plans to deciding what restaurant to eat at.

Every tweet in that thread is sneerable. Either from failing to understand the current scientific process, vastly overestimating how easily cutting edge can be turned into cleanly resolvable predictions, or assuming prediction markets are magic.

He’s the one that used the phrase “silent gentle rape”? Yeah, he’s at least as bad as the worst evo-psych pseudoscience misogyny posted on lesswrong, with the added twist he has a position in academia to lend him more legitimacy.

He had me in the first half, I thought he was calling out rationalist’s problems (even if dishonestly disassociating himself from then). But then his recommended solution was prediction markets (a concept which rationalists have in fact been trying to play around with, albeit at a toy model level with fake money).

Chiming in to agree your prediction write-ups aren’t particularly good. Sure they spark discussion, but the whole forecasting/prediction game is one we’ve seen the rationalists play many times, and it is very easy to overlook or at least undercount your misses and over hype your successes.

In general… I think your predictions are too specific and too optimistic…

Every time I see a rationalist bring up the term “Moloch” I get a little angrier at Scott Alexander.

I use the term “inspiring” loosely.

Putting this into the current context of LLMs… Given how Eliezer still repeats the “diamondoid bacteria” line in his AI-doom scenarios, even multiple decades after Drexler has both been thoroughly debunked and slightly contributed to inspiring real science, I bet memes of LLM-AGI doom and utopia will last long after the LLM bubble pops.

Lesswronger notices all of the rationalist’s attempts at making an “aligned” AI company keep failing: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBd7xPAh22y66rbme/anthropic-s-leading-researchers-acted-as-moderate

Notably, the author doesn’t realize Capitalism is the root problem in misaligning the incentives, and it takes a comment directly point it out for them to get as far as noticing as link to the cycle of enshittification.

Given that the USA has refused more comprehensive gun laws or better funding of public mental health services even after many many school shootings, I think you are far too optimistic about the LLM induced mental health crisis actually leading to a ban or even just tighter liability on LLMs. My expectation is age verification plus giant disclaimers, and the crisis continuing. The inference cost will force the LLMs to be more obviously dumb and unable to keep track of context, and the lack of a technological moat will lead to LLM chatbots becoming commoditized, but I’m overall not optimistic.

The LLM induced skill gap will be a thing yes… I predict companies trying to address it in the most hamfisted and belittling way possible. Like, they keep using code interviews (that are close to useless at evaluating the actual skills the employee needs), but now they want you to do the code interview with spyware installed to make sure you aren’t using an LLM to help you.