Tim Burners-Lee

(snerk)

From elsewhere in that thread:

The physics of the 1800s had a lot of low hanging fruit. Most undergrads in physics can show you a derivation of Maxwell’s equations from first principles, and I think a fair few of them could have come up with it themselves if they were in Maxwell’s shoes.

Lol no

central preference vector […] central good-evil discriminator

bro is this close to reinventing g but for morality

Declaring that an AI is malevolent because you asked it for a string of numbers and it returned 420

For those who missed the news, yes, tickets are on sale.

an oppositional culture

[enraged goose meme] “Oppositional to what, motherfucker? Oppositional to what?!”

Ian Millhiser’s reports on Supreme Court cases have been consistently good (unlike the Supreme Court itself). But Vox reporting on anything touching TESCREAL seems pretty much captured.

AOC:

They need him to be a genius because they cannot handle what it means for them to be tricked by a fool.

The MIRI, CFAR, EA triumvirate promised not just that you could be the hero of your own story but that your heroism could be deployed in the service of saving humanity itself from certain destruction. Is it so surprising that this promise attracted people who were not prepared to be bit players in group housing dramas and abstract technical papers?

Good point.

Logic. Rationality. Intelligence. Somewhere in all these attempts to harness them for our shared humanity, they’d been warped and twisted to destroy it.

Oh, the warping and twisting started long before Ziz. (The Sequences are cult shit.)

LaSota and those in her orbit alleged that CFAR and its leadership were laced with anti-trans beliefs and practices. (“That’s preposterous,” one member of the rationalist community, who is also trans, told me. “Rationalists have the most trans people of any group I’ve seen that isn’t explicitly about being trans. You’d just show up at a math event or house party, and it would be 20 percent trans.”)

The leadership can’t be transphobic because 20% of the membership is trans. In related news, the United States government cannot be sexist because [breaks down into bleak and bitter laughter]

Don’t think in detail about the future superintelligence that can hug you and turn you into TANG!

I was tempted to give them their free ticket to the egress for saying “paint their discourse with the purples”.

It’s conceivable that there was some amazing math lurking in one or more of the non-string-theory ideas, and nobody was lucky enough to find it.

Occasional sneerclub character Nate Silver is bluechecking again.

All Person Of Interest fanfiction must by Internet law be extremely gay to spite Caviezel.

• The Fifth Element as a Root/Shaw story
• Pacific Rim as a Finch/Reese story

The New York Times Pitchbot enters our territory:

We wanted to understand the future of AI. So we talked to three Hawk Tuah cryptocurrency investors at a White Castle in Toms River.

Working in the field of genetics is a bizarre experience. No one seems to be interested in the most interesting applications of their research. […] The scientific establishment, however, seems to not have gotten the memo. […] I remember sitting through three days of talks at a hotel in Boston, watching prominent tenured professors in the field of genetics take turns misrepresenting their own data […] It is difficult to convey the actual level of insanity if you haven’t seen it yourself.

Like Yudkowsky writing about quantum mechanics, this is cult shit. “The scientists refuse to see the conclusion in front of their faces! We and we alone are sufficiently Rational to embrace the truth! Listen to us, not to scientists!”

Gene editing scales much, much better than embryo selection.

“… Mister Bond.”

The graphs look like they were made in Matplotlib, but on another level, they’re giving big crayon energy.

But could even a generation of Johns von Neumann outsmart the love child of Skynet and Samaritan from Person Of Interest?

All attempts to make a theory of quantum gravity are unfalsifiable, because the relevant experiments are far beyond our means, much further so than building a practical quantum computer. String theory benefited from multiple rounds of unexpectedly interesting mathematical discoveries, which fired up people’s hopes and kept the fires burning. None of the other assorted proposals (loop quantum gravity, asymptotic safety, …) got lucky like that. Moreover, there’s a case to be made that if you’re an orthodox quantum field theory researcher, any attempt you make to quantize gravity will end up a string theory. Roughly speaking, there’s no regime in which gravity is the only force that you need to consider, so to make any predictive statements about some quantum gravity effect, you need to understand all the physics that happens at energy levels in between “warm summer day” and “immediate aftermath of the Big Bang”. String theory was the only possibility that suggested there could be a way out.

You could say that this just goes to show that orthodox QFT specialists lack imagination. The pioneers of quantum theory devised it in order to explain hot gases in glass tubes. Why should their same notions about what it means to “quantize” also apply to space and time themselves? And maybe they don’t! But proposing an alternative to quantum mechanics, or a modification of quantum mechanics that works in all the circumstances where we have already confirmed quantum mechanics, is no easy task.

“Fundamental” physics had a period of great advances, from the 1890s with the discovery of X-rays and radioactivity through the early 1970s with the establishment of the Standard Model. From then, we’ve been in “the stall”, as barbecue folks say. The big accelerators have filled in the edges of the picture and confirmed some predictions from that era, like finding the top quark and the Higgs. But they have yet to deliver a sign of beyond-Standard-Model physics that holds up under scrutiny.

“The AI is attuned to every molecular vibration and can reconstruct you by extrapolation from a piece of fairy cake” is a necessary premise of the Basilisk that they’ve spent all that time saying they don’t believe in.