I can’t think of any catastrophic global upheavals in or shortly after that era that might have given people reason to rethink the ideas that were in vogue at the time.

Nope.

I’m sorry you had to find out this way

Counterpoint, why are these LLM bros still on human social media rather than just asking their chatbots to simulate a forum full of people who disagree with them just enough to be interesting but not so much that they actually risk changing their mind.

I have so many questions about this man and while I don’t actually want answers I would rather get them by choice than wait until his corner of the cultic milieu comes bursting into general relevancy like the Kool-Aid Man.

I doubt that this is how it was originally intended but think about all the boosters pointing at an empty suit while saying shit like “you’re being laid off and this is your replacement,” or “I know you’ve been lonely so I set you up on a blind date with this guy,” or even “this is what’s going to solve climate change.” And then imagine looking around and seeing friends, family, the broader media, and government and business leaders listening to them while smiling and nodding.

I for one would find breaking all of Bitcoin to be quite useful. Once again the conservative comedy-heavy portfolio pays off for the laughing investor!

For anyone else who was curious about the religious context, Luke 15 is about how much God loves repentance, featuring most famously the parable of the Prodigal Son.

On one hand, Anthropic sourcing suggests that this is probably at least partially nonsense. On the other hand, though, if there’s any accuracy at all I’m going to spend the rest of my life infuriated that I went down the technical degree route and actively avoided a liberal arts education in order to improve my career outlook and then this happened.

Like, I don’t think they were trying to mislead but I feel like every guidance counselor for kids ought to have a plaque in their office saying “please note that the world is complicated, ever-changing, and scary and I might actually have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about”.

It’s both less sad because he’s probably not completely LARPing as his entire family on twitter, but also more sad because that’s his actual mother who couldn’t be arsed to actually be present and decided to slop it up for social media clout instead.

If it is a firm I hope they’re getting some good word of mouth on the back-end because they’re on point.

…almost two years to the day after getting laid off I have received and accepted an offer for a new IT job making more than I ever have and working with a client that I’m actually excited to help support.

I’m somewhat in shock since the last two years have been so incredibly hard. Like, I might have to indulge in some public therapy and put together a more in-depth reflection on this experience for MoreWrite at some point to give me a chance to organize my thoughts and feelings properly. But for now: holy fucking shit we got there.

I want to piggyback off this to talk about the inevitable Uber comparisons, because not only is the mismatch between investment and returns several orders of magnitude greater, but there’s also a difference in kind. Uber’s model was to undercut the taxi industry and establish a dependence within their niche before increasing revenues. It’s the classic enshitttification cycle. But the AI plan, at least as advertised, isn’t to undercut a specific industry as much as it is to undercut literally the entire white-collar labor force. There are several problems with this, starting with the fact that the technology isn’t actually able to replace the target in the way it would need to. More significantly, however, is that labor doesn’t work like taxis. If labor can’t get work it shuts down the entire economy because they lose their income and can’t actually consume any of the things the market offers. Also labor tends to get mad and break out the pitchforks and molotovs if things get too bad, and “restructuring the economy to no longer provide you the means to sustain your family” seems like the kind of situation that definitionally makes things too bad. In either event the point is that even if this tech is somehow as revolutionary as advertised then there’s not really any winning for the company.

Glad to see that “regulatory uncertainty” continues to mean “we figured out that the government might actually care if we do something illegal”

Harari’s framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that it’s the suit itself — and the person wearing it has already left the building.

I don’t necessarily hate this, because you can easily read it as highlighting the AI systems’ lack of agency. Rather than posing it as a threat for what it’s going to do, it poses a threat for what it doesn’t do that believers expect it to: actually exercise judgement and thought.

Ed: hadn’t realized that the guy we were taking seriously was the author of Sapiens. Gonna have to assume I was extending entirely too much charity in my assessment.

Look, if our founder was abusing his power and influence over the organization to manipulate his underlings into sexual relationships and/or reward those who agreed to such, would he really have done it three times?

Thank you for your service in writing up this sneer-a-long and in unearthing this maddening artifact from the unseen cyclopean depths of substack. Zoe Cursi’s account seems like a far more sober examination of the dynamic and at least has the decency to treat the extreme distress that this whole thing caused as a problem rather than a sign that there was something powerful at work (that something obviously being the cult dynamic itself). But it’s rare to be able to see the inside of a cult from the perspective of a believer like this, and the way that manifests here is fascinating.

Honestly that part alone reminds me of the pastebin debacle where people just failed to consider that these things are in fact publicly accessible.

I keep bouncing back to this one and I think that the core objection is that the method of discourse that they’re trying to advance here is fundamentally incapable of handling people actually disagreeing. Like, the whole concept of “identifying a crux” basically requires that there’s a central point of agreement somewhere. In my experience a lot of these issues are better understood as tradeoffs and compromises. It is simultaneously true that some people will do terrible things left to their own devices and locking them up seems to be one of the only things society can collectively agree to do about it and also that locking people up is fundamentally cruel and it’s bad that we do it. The challenge isn’t in identifying the central point of agreement between those two but in managing their fundamental incompatibility.

Actually, taking a closer look at this line:

Connection Theory, which he describes as “a theory of belief and behavior that postulates that people have basic goals, and act for the sake of achieving those basic goals.” What follows, then, is that any person’s problematic behavior can be changed, because “if you actually get the logic of what’s producing the problematic set of beliefs or actions,” then you can intervene in that logic.

So unless we’re already getting into some very culty language where words like “Basic Goals” or “logic” are cult jargon that only loosely resemble their more general use this sounds less like an overview of a theory and more like an incredibly obvious statement that would have to fit into basically any psychological paradigm other than maybe hard behaviorism.

It’s weird to see the Great Founder Theory laid out so clearly because it’s basically explicitly declaring allegiance to what I was starting to call the Great Man Theory of Everything - the belief that rather than being historically contingent and reliant on circumstances as much as any personal characteristics some people are just innately “agentic” in a way that others aren’t and the key to success isn’t in finding a way to navigate the world but in unlocking this “agentic” quality in yourself. Notably the corollary of doing this (or of being one of those special innately “agentic” people) is that you have the right and duty to impose your will on the malleable clay of the world and people around you. I maintain that this is the rotten kernel at the heart of so many of the batshit weird things that the rats believe and do, and the fact that it simply isn’t true is why their broader schemes keep sputtering out or failing, though with enough money and power behind them that they continue to leave a frankly impressive amount of human suffering in their wake.