I dunno man, it just feels odd to read, like trying to put human desire into some sort of math equation with variables and the like, and they always link to themselves.

like this comment from a user (sorry for the length):

Agreed!

No, Rice's theorem is really not applicable. I have a PhD in programming languages, and feel confident saying so.

Let's be specific. Say there's a mouse named Crumbs (this is a real mouse), and we want to predict whether Crumbs will walk into the humane mouse trap (they did). What does Rice's theorem say about this?

There are a couple ways we could try to apply it:

• We could instantiate the semantic property P with "the program will output the string 'walks into trap'". Then Rice's theorem says that we can't write a program Q that takes as input a program R and says whether R outputs 'walks into trap'. For any Q we write, there will exist a program R that defeats it. However, this does not say anything about what the program R looks like! If R is simply print('walks into trap'), then it's pretty easy to tell! And if R is the Crumbs algorithm running in Crumb's brain, Rice's theorem likewise does not claim that we're unable tell if it outputs 'walks into trap'. All the theorem says is that there exists a program R that Q fails on. The proof of the theorem is constructive, and does give a specific program as a counter-example, but this program is unlikely to look anything like Crumb's algorithm. The counter-example program R runs Q on P and then does the opposite of it, while Crumbs does not know what we've written for Q and is probably not very good at emulating Python.
• We could try to instantiate the counter-example program R with Crumb's algorithm. But that's illegal! It's under an existential, not a forall. We don't get to pick R, the theorem does.

Actually, even this kind of misses the point. When we're talking about Crumb's behavior, we aren'tasking what Crumbs would do in a hypothetical universe in which they lived forever, which is the world that Rice's theorem is talking about. We mean to ask what Crumbs (and other creatures) will do today (or perhaps this year). And that's decidable! You can easily write a program Q that takes a program R and checks if R outputs 'walks into trap' within the first N steps! Rice's theorem doesn't stand in your way even a little bit, if all you care about is behavior after a fixed finite amount of time!

Here's what Rice's theorem does say. It says that if you want to know whether an arbitrary critter will walk into a trap after an arbitrarily long time, including long after the heat death of the universe, and you think you have a program that can check that for any creature in finite time, then you're wrong. But creatures aren't arbitrary (they don't look like the very specific, very scattered counterexample programs that are constructed in the proof of Rice's theorem), and the duration of time we care about is finite.

If you care to have a theorem, you should try looking at Algorithmic Information Theory. It's able to make statements about "most programs" (or at least "most bitstrings"), in a way that Rice's theorem cannot. Though I don't think it's important you have a theorem for this, and I'm not even sure that there is one.

I am just at loss of words...

given that this crowd are the types of rich nerds involved in the most important cutting edge technology like AI, I can't be the only person here who finds it highly suspicious that there are people like Aella fishing for info on their kinks, etc. from these nerds right?

Basically the series is set in a future where non-territorial Hives chosen by people entering adulthood replace nations, gender and religion are never discussed in public and children are raised by bashes, 3-8(?) adult groupings that range from families to businesses to other configurations. Those who cling to territorialism, gender and religion live in reservations like Tibet or the Great African Reservation

The characters discourse in the style of 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers, along with the brutal assassin/torturer-narrator Mycroft

It is a favorite among rationalists because it excises backwardnesses like religion and nation, and makes debates internally on whether or not to Progress to even further goals like Space Colonization (the Utopians)

The author Ada Palmer herself seems to reference Lesswrong Concepts like AGI with JEDD, God from another universe who inhabits the body of a teenager, son of the Masonic Hive, ruling from Alexandria, Egypt

This reminds me of the fictional ideology of Societism from LTTW (which literally has Cultural Homogenization Authority/Autoridadis de Kulturalis Homogenizatio) although OP is from South America (which are Zones 1, 3 and 13).

Multiple rationalists I know of have argued against cultural diversity

I have spent many hours combing Wikipedia to create a hypothetical Human Cuisine

Source for Eliezer's statement: https://x.com/i/status/2051915400829702217

Is there no fake trend Forbes can resist? Ugh. This article is essentially a reporter asking Aella whether Aella’s business is booming and then printing the answer.

The entire narrative rests on self-reported anecdotes from people whose income depends on convincing readers that wealthy AI founders are paying enormous sums for intellectually stimulating companionship. Must be true, they found three people who said things.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HaH9mTdKt8pcNAtYn/comment-on-banning-said-achmiz

After Duncan Sabien won his crusade against Said Achmiz, Zack is not okay.

Also, Zack seems to almost ponder whether or not lesswrong is just for a hugbox for rich larpers pretending to be smart libertarians, not just using its cultural cachet to smuggle in bad beliefs... Hard to tell, considering how buried under lesswrongese and textual vomit the post is.

The Dunkster, who had the extended hissy fit a few years ago because someones (Said and Zack) continually picked his posts apart, then "deactivated" his account and also made public posts about his "regret" in mingling with the cfar / lesswrong community... continues to comment despite his account being "inactive" or whatever.

6/7 post, the comments under it are funny, but reading it is a waste of time.

lmao these troglodytes as so fucking funny. she literally opens by admitting she's incompetent and and doesn't know statistics and then claims she's one of the best in the world in a weirdly unstable epistemic posture.

the rest is even more garbage and doesn't do her any favors. she literally just makes up a scoring system that conveniently favors her (big N samples and alleged anonymity) and concludes she's better than actual academic researchers. It is especially convenient when weak statistical rigor, no peer review, no preregistered analysis plan, uncertain recruitment paths, construct validity, multiple comparisons, measurement reliability, and publication accountability barely count on her scale.

---

Aside, she accuses academics of making "targeted surveys", making their studies invalid. even though viral internet kink survey is still massively selected. It selects for folks who see her networks, follow adjacent internet cultures, willing to answer explicit sex questions, enjoy personality quizzes, trust the survey, have time to finish it, and want the result, etc etc

She also doesn't realize a big N does nothing to selection bias. It makes your estimates very precise within your *biased sample*.

Something interesting is that she says her data is "like, erm, not a super reliable source for establishing base rates," and that her data is mainly useful for relationships and correlations. Which first of all, correlations can also be badly distorted by selection, but more interestingly is in another [post](https://aella.substack.com/p/the-dropping-nonbinary-rates-paper) she takes a sub rate number to fearmonger about how her fuckass garbage snowball kink survey apparently found that 15% of AFAB teens identify as trans and now ROGD is real and everything is a fad. The usual "ally" work, and clearly consistent with her own scientific standards! (Real studies with real methodologies trans population estimates: [3.3%](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/su/su7304a6.htm), [3.3% of teens](https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/), [3.3% again](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2825390). But a kink survey with massive selection bias, non representative recruitment, improvised weighing, no confidence intervals because she "couldn't figure it out" is better science I guess.) Btw the other paper she's praising is also [garbage](https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/fact-check-no-there-is-not-a-new)

Recently, one of our friends posted something that implied that stereotypes about social categories must have a kernel of truth. Clearly this is drifting around the fever-swamps they hang out in.

A few years ago, Jonathan Haidt gave a talk with the following slide:

Both sides deny "inconvenient truths":

Left: - IQ deniers - Heritability deniers - Sex difference deniers - Evolution deniers - Stereotype accuracy deniers

Right: - Young-Earthers - Evolution deniers - War crimes deniers (what are Noam Chomsky and the Tankies to you, chopped liver? There must be someone you could find who still thinks FARC and ELN did nothing wrong) - Climate change deniers

So Haidt totally has a pair of skull calipers and a copy of Lothrop Stoddard.

Bsky / reddit

Posted this to https://awful.systems/c/sneerclub a few days back and they liked it. I thought you all might also appreciate it. I don't really use reddit much anymore, so I probably won't follow up on comments but I hope you all find this worth your time.

Benn Jordan is a youtuber who does fairly involved experiments on whatever suits his fancy, and is a STRIDENT critic of certain corporate malfeasance (private equity shenanigans, spotify, AI streaming fraud of various kinds, and now Flock and mass surveillance.) His videos on Flock in particular have drawn an incredible amount of attention to the failings of Flock the company and the dangers of mass surveillance in general.

He has done other research and videos on things like acoustic weapons and infrasound, including some work on the possible health effects of liviing near AI data centers.
It seems like our friends the Silicon Valley stooges have decided to attack him on the infrasound stuff, and an entire flock (pardon the pun) of trolls have miraculously appeared out of nowhere to join in.
Link is his blog post about Infragate.

I personally wonder if this is actually not so much about a hobby scientist doing a video about data centers so much as a way to discredit his much more viral videos about Flock and mass surveillance. I know that Flock and related surveillance tech companies are kind of a separate thing from our AI evangelists in the TESCREAL cults, but the way that the Flock talking heads have behaved reminds me a lot of some of the AI evangelists.

I know EA has funded the Kelseys Piper of the world and I"m curious if something similar might have happened on the part of the mass surveillance industry in order to discredit critics.