Molly White is best known for shining a light on the silliness and fraud that are cryptocurrency, blockchain and Web3. This essay may be a sign that she’s shifting her focus to our sneerworthy friends in the extended rationalism universe. If so, that’s an excellent development. Molly’s great.
Crypto is going to dry up as a beat eventually, so I’m glad she’s laying the groundwork for a next move.
i assure you that it has. The AI people are awful though.
For example, the inaugural Substack post defining effective accelerationisms’s “principles and tenets” name-drops the “Jarzynski-Crooks fluctuation dissipation theorem”
To echo a comment from old!SneerClub: That’s not a thing. There are three separate but related ideas (the Crooks fluctuation theorem, the Jarzynski equality and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem) which the author doesn’t know are separate, because he hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about.
got a link to it btw?
A link to what?
(The link in the Substack post is to the Wikipedia page for the Crooks result, disguising — intentionally or not — the fact that the writer is just smashing together science words.)
the apparently original e/acc post, i think i’ve seen it but can’t find it
Seems like it’s this: https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets
I think that’s it — it’s the one Timnit Gebru linked to back in February which prompted the old!SneerClub discussion I mentioned, and Molly White’s newsletter links to the same place.
I found this earlier one, which it cites as its source:
All that’s before that is these few guys throwing the term around on Twitter
There is a fractal optimization algorithm that created life, intelligence, and every meta-organism we know.
I’m wanking at the speed of light / wanna make a meta-fractal brain out of you
@earthquake @dgerard I just read some of this and it made me substantially stupider
It’s important to stretch before reading their stuff. A good stretch is to find the latest fad and argue how it’s an addiction.
Then, afterwards, you need to cool off and detox. I recommend some Quake, but finding a new favorite album also works.
quake is still fucking awesome and the remasters of 1 and 2 are great for an impromptu steam deck lan party
This arrived just in time for me to use it in an online argument. Thanks.
Thank you for sharing this! An excellent read with really good insight.
Must be another one of those hundred hostile bloggers who inexplicably have it in for EA, according to siskind.
i am reasonably sure that Molly knows precisely who these fucks are and is not a fan
The link is dead, now hosted at [citation needed]
