How did Sam and Caroline get into taking high doses of ADHD medication? We think it was via Scott Alexander Siskind, the psychiatrist behind the rationalist blog Slate Star Codex.
Siskind occasionally writes up particular psychiatric drugs as public education. One popular piece was “Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know” from December 28, 2017.
Not to cast further aspersions or anything, but siskind did write a sort of follow up (titled psychopharmacology of ftx or something like that if you feel like googling it) where he explicitly denies ever having met the FTX psychiatrist/dealer, even though a) he admits they actually worked in the same hospital for a time and, perhaps more tellingly, b) no one asked.
Also according to the birdsite the ftx psychiatrist may have in fact been a huge creep.
A sleazy, woman-harassing psychiatrist who gives out dodgy prescriptions is the real face of EA. Just all the negative stereotypes associated with the 60s counterculture/New Left, with none of the redeeming features.
The little paranoid devil on Siskind’s shoulder screaming horrible compulsive thoughts in his ear is my favourite character in this whole decades long saga
At this point, if a rationalist says SBF is “smart” it’s probably out of shame/denial that they got duped by a junkie
My own self doubt asks: do rationalists feel shame, though?
Some of them yes, or well most of them I gather. They are just people after all.
My impression is that, as a group, on average, rationalists tend to both feel and repress more intense feelings of shame and guilt than the rest of society can be bothered dealing with, and I say that as somebody who has spent nearly two years doing addiction recovery
LessWrong and EA can help people to understand logical fallacies, but they can’t help people to actually understand their emotions. In fact, the culture around them encourages adherents to feel contempt for their “irrational” emotions and for people who are led by emotion.
Of course it is extremely unpleasant to repress all your emotions, and it is ultimately impossible to do so all the time. How did the LessWrong community solve this problem? Its users limited their emotional expression to acceptable forms and acceptable targets, and expressed their emotions through cult accepted techniques like taking drugs, having sex, cyberbullying leftists and writing really long blogposts.
Like most subcultures, it’s the powerful and respected people in EA who determine the dominant norms. With pretty much every leading EAist a middle-class dominant-culture American man who works in tech and wishes feminists would quit whining, it should be no surprise that the norms they created are stereotypically, nay, toxically white and masculine.
Apparently, pace my own username, you don’t know who the fuck I am.
I don’t think any of that first paragraph is true. LessWrong and EA very blatantly do not teach people how to spot fallacious reasoning. Nor does the culture of either encourage the adherents of their one movement to repress their “irrational” emotions. Fallacious reasoning, emotional reasoning, irrational thinking - all three of these self-evidently ran rampant in the culture, so there has to be something else going on here which would explain both what the culture is like and why you have an impression that seems to line up so squarely with their self-presentation.
Rather, it seems that what happens at LessWrong and EA is roughly that a charismatic self-presentation of “rational thinking” (with attendant ideas along the lines of repressing one’s emotions and so on) hooks in impressionable people, who - like victims of any multi-level marketing scheme - quickly replace their own styles and habits of thought with those propounded and taught by the movement. So those people do do something like “repress” their emotions, but only in the sense that they repress those styles of thought and emotional presentation which had previously come naturally to them. But of course the movement also teaches that it is right and proper or that there is even a sort of duty to make impassioned (whiny) emotional appeals to this or that privileged source of the right kind of emotions to feel (such as feeling indignant about normie reasoning, or feminism, or whatever), which are (some would say fallaciously) considered above rational criticism themselves.
You can see that sort of thing play out in basically any rationalist discussion or article at Vox’s “Future Perfect”!
So what you describe with respect to drugs and so on is true enough but misses the point. It’s rather that throughout the movement there’s a strong current of precisely the things that in its self-presentation the movement is supposed to ward off. The drug scene isn’t an outlet for repressed feelings, it’s just a particular place (of many) towards which the movement’s leaders have directed the energies (which they don’t repress but encourage) of their followers.
The shame and guilt thing is a separate issue, it has nothing to do with the conscious or directed repression of emotions under the auspices of the movement.
Indeed. They teach you to memorize a list of fallacies and biases (with their own weird names and jargon), and then proceed to just do whatever motivated reasoning you want using them as weapons against wrongthink that disagrees with The Rationalist Viewpoint.
obviously they need to read the sequences more
Obviously everybody does, even this Yud guy, clearly not as smart as the genius who wrote the sequences.
Paradoxically, I think they literally are swimming in self shame. A lack of processing that shame is why dumping five more pounds of it into their psyche doesn’t effectively alter any part of their behavior.
Though SBF was correct that if you wrote a book, you fucked up.
Please explain (I am not well steeped in the SBF lore/tea)
iirc he said something like ‘I have no time for books I dont read them only idiots write and read books nowadays’ (actual quote here) and he wrote a book, or at least had somebody write a book for him explaining himself re the lawsuit, Id assume while his lawyers were outside screaming at him to stop.
Oh lol I googled it and Michael Lewis, the guy who wrote moneyball and the big short (book ver.), wrote “going infinite”, which required following SBF for “the better part of a year.” Apparently people think it is too sympathetic to SBF. Shame if so, I liked moneyball and the big short (movie ver.)
Well it is the season for previously reliable writers to write fluffbooks (see also Musk) so I would not be surprised if they cash out on their reputation by writing bad books, after all you can’t give good reputation to your kids and grandkids, money otoh.
@Soyweiser OK, but Isaacson *specializes* in literary fellatio. See his Jobs book.
literary fellatio
this is new to me and I like it.
Ugh, I’m seeing that book (and face) everywhere, especially at the two bookstores I like the most (that is, the ones closest to me).
Nobody needs a book on how the author spent a year huffing his current billionaire crush’s farts.
SBF is an idiot. He can’t be correct.
I doubted whether it would be a good use of time to read Michael Lewis’s new book Going Infinite about Sam Bankman-Fried (hereafter SBF or Sam). What would I learn that I did not already know? Was Michael Lewis so far in the tank of SBF that the book was filled with nonsense and not to be trusted?
I set up a prediction market,
10/10 perfect LessWrong, no notes
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The resulting book review is 28,776 words. It’s 71 pages long in 12 point Calibri with normal spacing.
lol, guess I made a good choice to go ‘nah, not gonna read that’ and closing the tab. That is like 3 SSCs.
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It seems that SBF is a counterexample to the ideal that an intelligent person can master every domain. Maybe that’s why they are so mad.
@gerikson RPGs have been putting intelligence on a different axis to wisdom since forever for a very good reason, but the SBFs of the world clearly never wondered why that is.
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I’m reading the Zvi piece (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/book-review-going-infinite), which is quite entertaining , but once in a while you stub your toe over the fact that the author is a True Believer
Putting the $500 million into Anthropic was arguably the most important decision Sam ever made. I do not know if investing in Anthropic was a good or bad move for the chances of everyone not dying, but chances are this was either a massively good or massively bad investment. It dwarfs in impact the rest of his EA activities combined.
And the fact that SBF’s observation that only $6.5B was spent on political campaigns was ludicrously low is blithely accepted as reasonable, not as an observation that campaign finance is broken.
ow fuck! my toe!
What happened with SBF will happen with an AI given a similar target, in terms of having misalignments that start out tolerable but steadily grow worse as capabilities increase and you face situations outside of the distribution, and things start to spiral to places very far than anything you ever would have intended.
Ah yes, one day someone will accidentally install the “I’m sorry, I can’t let you do that Hal” plugin. Oops, I let the nuke launch AI override all of our control mechanisms, silly me!
I fucking hate x-risk people so much.
Tangent to your point- what would happen if we started misusing tescreal terms to dilute their meaning? Some ideas:
“I don’t want to go to that party. It’s an x-risk.”
“No, I didn’t really like those sequel films. They were inscrutable Matrices.”
“You know, holding down the A button and never letting up is a viable strategy as long as you know how to brake and mini-turbo in Mario Kart. Look up ‘effective accelerationism’.”
Anyway I doubt it would do anything other than give us a headache from observing/using rat terms. Just wanted to have a lil fun.
i’ll definitely start using “existential risk” for any minor inconvenience, thank you
there’s significant x-risk in my need to clean my espresso machine conflicting with my extreme laziness preventing me from doing so
If you think you are the only real human alive, all risks are existential. If you die they shut down the simulation. This is why Musk will never fly in one of his own rockets. And my bytes thank him for it.
@Soyweiser @Amoeba_Girl Any sim-solipsist worth their processing time would know that even if one instance dies, certain calculations might be memoized and reused in other instances. If the rocket blows up, they can just reuse that sequence on another Musk sim if his rocket blows up, too. If you’re important enough to be the sole protagonist, why not be important enough to have a billion instances of yourself running concurrently in variant simulations?
But are those copies really you? They are copies after all, and eventually your instance might hit a dead branch in which all the actions lead to death and the only non-dead branch of you might be so diverse in different choices it made it can no longer be considered you. That is simply not a risk I can take.
“This message was send from my padded cell”
@Soyweiser As long as they are enough like me to still be better than everyone else, they pass the narcissism filter. All those billions will eventually have to fail somehow anyway, to determine the grand champion best possible me that will be copied the most for the next round.
By my calculations, the red light prolonged my commute by 3 minutes, thus costing approximately 54 billion lives.
Mowshowitz believes that Bankman-Fried says whatever the person he’s talking to wants to hear. He doesn’t care whether any statements he makes are true or false. Sam only cared about making the number go up — to win at EA as if it were a winnable game.
Mowshowitz is wrong, and Sam is right here. Remember: rationality is systematized winning
“Rationalists should win!” Not whine, win.
(Wonka voice) Strike that, reverse it
OMG he’s gonna testify?! This is best thing that could happen, comedy-wise.
Apparently it did happen, and it was hilarious, but it was not in front of the jury (dunno why)
Thread starts here:
https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1717601265914409209?s=20
Update: the testimony was in front of the judge only, because there’s disagreement on whether all of it should be presented to the jury. The judge will decide, and then there’s a chance part of the testimony can be repeated in front of the jury, should SBF choose to do so.
and Sam got out there and shot his mouth off at the jury today, and will do so even more on Monday
Seldom have I seen anyone who has drunk their own kool-aid deeper than SBF.
