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Cake day: August 29th, 2023

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  • I was thinking this also, like it’s the perfect parody of several lesswrong and EA memes: overly concerned with animal suffering/sapience, overly concerned with IQ stats, openly admitting to no expertise or even relevant domain knowledge but driven to pontificate anyway, and inspired by existing science fiction… I think the last one explains it and it isn’t a parody. As cinnasverses points out, Cetacean intelligence shows up occasionally in sci-fi. to add to the examples… sapient whales warning the team of an impending solar flare in Stargate Atlantis via echolocation induced hallucinations, the dolphins in hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, and the whales showing up to help in one book of Animorphs.



  • I have context that makes this even more cringe! “Lawfulness concerns” refers to like, Dungeons and Dragons lawfulness. Specifically the concept of lawfulness developed in the Pathfinder fanfiction we’ve previously discussed (the one with deliberately bad BDSM and eugenics). Like a proper Lawful Good Paladin of Iomedae wouldn’t put you in a position where you had to trust they hadn’t rigged the background prompt if you went to them for spiritual counseling. (Although a Lawful Evil cleric of Asmodeus totally would rig the prompt… Lawfulness as a measuring stick of ethics/morality is a terrible idea even accepting the premise of using Pathfinder fanfic to develop your sense of ethics.)



  • It’s a nice master post that gets all his responses and many useful articles linked into one place. It’s all familiar if you’ve kept up with techtakes and Zitron’s other posts and pivot-to-ai, but I found a few articles I had previously missed reading.

    Related trend to all the but achskhually’s AI booster’s like to throw out. Has everyone else noticed the trend where someone makes a claim of a rumor they heard about an LLM making a genuine discovery in some science, except it’s always repeated second hand so you can’t really evaluate it, and in the rare cases they do have a link to the source, it’s always much less impressive than they made it sound at first…







  • I actually think “Project Lawful” started as Eliezer having fun with glowfic (he has a few other attempts at glowfics that aren’t nearly as wordy… one of them actually almost kind of pokes fun at himself and lesswrong), and then as it took off and the plot took the direction of “his author insert gives lectures to an audience of adoring slaves” he realized he could use it as an opportunity to squeeze out all the Sequence content he hadn’t bothered writing up in the past decade^ . And that’s why his next attempt at a HPMOR-level masterpiece is an awkward to read rp featuring tons of adult content in a DnD spinoff, and not more fanfiction suitable for optimal reception to the masses.

    ^(I think Eliezer’s writing output dropped a lot in the 2010s compared to when he was writing the sequences and the stuff he has written over the past decade is a lot worse. Like the sequences are all in bite-size chunks, and readable in chunks in sequence, and often rephrase legitimate science in a popular way, and have a transhumanist optimism to them. Whereas his recent writings are tiny little hot takes on twitter and long, winding, rants about why we are all doomed on lesswrong.)


  • Weird rp wouldn’t be sneer worthy on it’s own (although it would still be at least a little cringe), it’s contributing factors like…

    • the constant IQ fetishism (Int is superior to Charisma but tied with Wis and obviously a true IQ score would be both Int and Wis)

    • the fact that Eliezer cites it like serious academic writing (he’s literally mentioned it to Yann LeCunn in twitter arguments)

    • the fact that in-character lectures are the only place Eliezer has written up many of his decision theory takes he developed after the sequences (afaik, maybe he has some obscure content that never made it to lesswrong)

    • the fact that Eliezer think it’s another HPMOR-level masterpiece (despite how wordy it is, HPMOR is much more readable, even authors and fans of glowfic usually acknowledge the format can be awkward to read and most glowfics require huge amounts of context to follow)

    • the fact that the story doubles down on the HPMOR flaw of confusion of which characters are supposed to be author mouthpieces (putting your polemics into the mouths of character’s working for literal Hell… is certainly an authorial choice)

    • and the continued worldbuilding development of dath ilan, the rationalist utopia built on eugenics and censorship of all history (even the Hell state was impressed!)

    …At least lintamande has the commonsense understanding of why you avoid actively linking your bdsm dnd roleplay to your irl name and work.

    And it shouldn’t be news to people that KP supports eugenics given her defense of Scott Alexander or comments about super babies, but possibly it is and headliner of weird roleplay will draw attention to it.