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Rationalist Civil War was my least favorite Marvel movie.
Suppose there are five true heresies, but anyone who’s on the record as believing more than one gets burned as a witch.
Two heresies leave Chicago traveling at 90 km/h and 100 km/h
Jessica asked if Yudkowsky denouncing neoreaction and the alt-right would still seem harmful, if he were to also to acknowledge, e.g., racial IQ differences?
uh
I agreed that that would be better, but realistically, I didn’t see why Yudkowsky should want to poke that hornet’s nest.
uhhhhhhhhh
a perfectly spherical heresy in a vacuum at absolute zero, and also it’s racist
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so Zack got to the right answer completely by accident?
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what Eliezer means is that you should treat Eliezer’s concepts as carving reality at the joints and also any other concepts you want to bias-launder
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Newspeak
It should be noted here that he is using Newspeak wrong. Newspeak was a simplified language in which everything was reduced to simple dichotomies. The whole pronouns thing (and the whole hidden iceberg of NB/transphobia/etc related to that) is something which newspeak would to enforce. The inability to differentiate between sex/gender/gender assigned at birth/seeing gender as a spectrum and reducing it all to man vs female is newspeak.
He didn’t understand the book, read the additional material about newspeak, or even glance at the wikipedia page about newspeak.
Wonder if anybody on LW even noticed. (Yes, im implicitly calling them bad nerds here). (A ctrl-f later, doesn’t seem anybody noticed. Seems nobody also noticed that we have moved to awful.systems).
Using Nineteen Eighty-Four references incorrectly is a right-wing trope.
@gerikson Not just right wing. Orwell abuse is pretty much universal - I have a rule of thumb that anyone who describes something as “Orwellian” has either never read any Orwell or read 1984 once many years ago and remembers that it had cameras in it or something. It’s popular because it’s seen as an argument-stopping intervention - a more intellectual version of making Hitler comparisons. Reductio ad Orwellium?
puts on vr headset to play ‘a plagues tale’ this is so Orwellian.
obviously the correct term is “Blairite”
@dgerard Eric the Arthur B.?
@Soyweiser Must be the earlier discarded version of Newspeak where instead of compressing the vocabulary to make nuance impossible to convey they did the opposite. It worked okay until a Party member was heard by a 10 year old Junior Spy describing Big Brother as “a doubleshit maxipompous arsetalker” and was last seen being beaten senseless by the Thought Police.
Well he’s a rationalist. It’s not like he’s going to get to the right answer empirically
This is not healthy.
ya dont fucken say
jesus christ
God it feels so fucking good not knowing who any of these idiots are, time to ruin that feeling forever
Going through random pages of Zack’s blog, which I don’t recommend unless you really like to look at self-harm, which you shouldn’t, … sometimes you find passages that make you remember the important things and you feel a little less bad about all the mess.
(The really hard part is overcoming the improbability of finding a wife who I could love and who could love me, and who is enthusiastic about starting a family qua eugenics project rather than merely qua family. Any single (cis) women reading this who like my writing: please, don’t hesitate to write me!)
Also this one’s really just kind of cute.
I continue to maintain that fandom conventions are boring. I enjoy consuming fiction. I even enjoy discussing fiction with friends—the work facilitating a connection with someone else present, rather than just between me and the distant author, or me and the universe of stories. But for the most part, these big, bustling conventions just don’t seem to facilitate that kind of intimacy. […]
But that’s okay. Ultimately, I did not come to Fan Expo San Francisco 2022 for the intimacy of analyzing fiction with friends who know me.
I came because of the loophole. As reactionary as it might seem in the current year, I am spiritually a child of the 20th century, and I do not crossdress in public. That would be weird. (Not harmlessly weird as an adjective of unserious self-deprecation, but weird in the proper sense, out-of-distribution weird.)
But to cosplay as a fictional character who happens to be female? That’s fine! Lots of people are dressed up as fictional characters at the convention, including characters who belong to categories that the cosplayer themself does not. That guy dressed up as a vampire isn’t actually a vampire, either.
well, cute for someone who would transition to a trans neoreactionary
I admit my standards might have been lowered due to consuming too much of the brain sludge.
@Amoeba_Girl @dgerard Sometimes I think there’s a goldmine of comedy to be had laughing at these eugenics types having kids and slowly realizing they aren’t rich like Musk and Grimes and have to care for these humans. Then I remember that isn’t funny at all, it’s extremely upsetting.
like looking at an ai blending two photos: a generic terf and a generic rationalist. it’s IDENTICAL to typical terf whining (even down to the ‘civil war within the movement’ framing) except because its rationalist it’s expanded out into a wall of word salad
Is this stuff deliberately written to be word salad?
all the evidence is that Zack cannot not write like this
As somebody who has read terf shit to self harm in the past I want to thank this poor soul for writing something too impenetrable to even be readable let alone effective
Someone asked in the comments that Zack clarify wtf the claim is, and Zack posted this abstract:
Does this help? (159 words and one hyperlink to a 16-page paper)
Empirical Claim: late-onset gender dysphoria in males is not an intersex condition.
Summary of Evidence for the Empirical Claim: see “Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies” by Anne Lawrence, published in European Psychologist. (Not by me!)
Philosophical Claim: categories are useful insofar as they compress information by “carving reality at the joints”; in particular, whether a categorization makes someone happy or sad is not relevant.
Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community’s collective sanity.
Caveat to the Sociological Claim: the Sociological Claim about a prominence-weighted sample of an amorphous collective doesn’t reflect poorly on individual readers of lesswrong.com who weren’t involved in the discussions in question and don’t even live in America, let alone Berkeley.
so this is a two-hour post about Zack’s arguments with unnamed Bay Area rationalists. Today, in posts that should have been a Discord chat.
(the paper he names is a Blancharding ramble)
Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community’s collective sanity.
Zack my guy you are so fucking close. Also just fucking leave.
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I hesitate to ask, but information hazards be damned.
In that worldview, what are cis gay persons? Also intersex or something else?
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I feel it’s appropriate at this point to mention that Blanchard’s theory mostly hinges on putting little rings around queer people’s penises, a method invented by his mentor Kurt Freund.
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it’s clear we’d be beating our heads with hammers anyway, the internet points are a small consolation prize
There’s also this handy introduction (cw: sad)
Yeah it’s sad gosh. Looks like a lot of relatable fears taken to the extreme instead of dealt with properly.
Aside: Zach keeps saying trans people impose on others so I want to shout this into the void at no one in particular: dear cis people all you have to do is mind your own business!
But also holy smokes that “anon” comment is wild.
HSTS with enough IQ points
Enough IQ points? HTTP Strict Transport Security? … enough IQ points?!
Our values are different. I dislike females, where I see female I see potential for competition, mutual poisoning and anxiety-driven treason, and I see zero value, sexual or otherwise.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah ironically that comment is even more poisoned by 4chan blanchardian culture than Zack is poisoned by rationalism.
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my god, it’s Zack explaining precisely how fucked up one would have to be to write that blog, in under four hundred words. Amazing.
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One day, when Zack is a little older, I hope he learns it’s okay to sometimes talk -to someone- instead of airing one’s identity confusion like an arxiv prepublish paper.
Like, it’s okay to be confused in a weird world, or even have controversial opinions. Make some friends you can actually trust, aren’t demanding bayesian defenses of feelings, and chat this shit out buddy.
And the arguments seem to boil down to them saying “if you wanna transition, just do it”, and Zack is all like “nooooooo you must convince me not to via Rationality!!!”
(sorry if I’m being flippant, this person seems to be in a lot of mental distress, but they’re also kinda big deal in the community? Like fucking gwern weighed in a bit sarcastically?)
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Who knows? They seem to know all these people personally, so I guess they attend rationalist cuddle puddles in SV or something.
I ran into them online a year ago when a Twitter follow shared their last essay with some acerbic comments about the lengths (both in the mental & absurd word count senses) they were going to do deny their desire to transition & they appeared in the comments after I made a snarky remark along the lines of “methinks the lady doth protest too much”. Still quite proud of that one.
yeah i noticed yesterday there’s a link to (one of) Zack’s blog(s) in SSC’s sidebar.
so what precisely is Zack supposed to be good at in Rationality other than Blancharding?
Word count.
when you need to add an exponential notation option to wc
wc --tldrhttps://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/src/wc.c#n507
The word count variable is an
intmax_t, so assuming ISO C (it’s GNU so probably not but whatever) it has to be at least C99 and thus support at least 64 bitlong long.Looking forward to the nine quintillion word LW posts. Wonder if I should submit a patch to make
wc(1)use GMP for future proofing purposes…
^F David Gerard
Imagine one day David Gerard of /r/SneerClub said, “Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist!” And you replied: “No, I’m not! That’s a lie.” And imagine E.T. Jaynes was still alive…
I‘m impressed at the way you still manage to live rent free in these chud’s heads. The bogeyman is real if you’re a rationalist apparently & his name is D.Gerard.
/r/SneerClub
these people are so terrified of Satan Church that they haven’t read the change of address we stabbed into the front door with a ceremonial dagger like 5 months ago
Imagine one day Dan Gackle of Hacker News fame banned the Linus Tech Tips guy for sockpuppeting but actually you were the sockpuppet. Also suppose Terry A. Davis were still alive so you went to ask him how to sockpuppet like a veteran, but instead you run into Timnit Gebru, who is also a terrorist. She calls you pronouns and slurs like TESCREAL and your pants drop to your ankles and everyone is laughing at you and also Terry calls you the N word because you don’t know how to write a compiler. Then you turn around and see Scott Siskind and Joanne Rowling and they’re also laughing at you and you start to cry.
Anyway you’d be really upset.
Picture a scene: the New York Times is releasing an article on Effective Altruism (EA) with an express goal to dig up every piece of negative information they can find. They contact Émile Torres, David Gerard, and Timnit Gebru, collect evidence about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board blowup, and Pasek’s Doom, start calling Astral Codex Ten (ACX) readers to ask them about rumors they’d heard about affinity between Effective Altruists, neoreactionaries, and something called TESCREAL. They spend hundreds of hours over six months on interviews and evidence collection, paying Émile and Timnit for their time and effort. The phrase “HBD” is muttered, but it’s nobody’s birthday.
From here.
A thing that is sort of amazing about that article (by Woodgrains, who is supposed to be part of the leftwing people of themotte) is that their complaints about journalism being unfair to them is said by everybody all the time in every subculture when there is a non 100% puff piece on their subculture.
The problem with journalists is that they tend to shine a light on the parts of your subculture that you pretend isn’t there, but a part that you should really check out and do something about (a bit like that mole, ow god I’m projecting and need to call my doctor). How can you be a grown person and not have seen this happen to several groups over and over again already? How sheltered and only inside LW spheres are these people? (Rhetorical)
And this is without talking about how journalist are pressured for time, underpaid, etc etc. Seeing how six months of work isn’t enough to uncover the truth in their own paid sex slaves (yes, this is the intentionally worst way to describe that situation) and more work keeps piling up on up on just that case with claims, counterclaims, miss attributions etc should
tell them somethingupdate their priors about just how much work and how difficult journalism is, but it will not.(I know Woodgrains is praising the ability of LW to criticize themselves, but crucially he doesn’t really seem to notice that nothing changes, the various racists/sexists etc are still there and talking about happy birthdays (urgh). But hey at least it got Gwern mad)
leftwing people of themotte
lol the empty fucking set
Yeah remember how themotte had a “quality contributions of last month” post every month? The schism (for people not in the know: the less ‘far right culture war, more good faith discussions’ spinoff of themotte (how many layers deep are we now? Damn you Hanson!), what a failed project from the start, the culture war anger is the point and the draw of themotte) has a ‘Quality Contributions for the first half of 2023’ post. Guess there were no quality contributions the 6 months after that.
the fuck. apparently I secretly do run rationality.
scratching his itch to be productive by traveling the world and doing charity via talking with cool, smart people about meaningful ideas.
i’d want some pretty convincing evidence that the bit after “and” goes with the word “productive”.
@Geoffrey Miller, with his own long history of serious, sincere engagement within the rationalist community,
uh yeah lol ok
I follow drama and blow-ups in a lot of different subcultures. It’s my job.
Wait, you can get paid for this???
The EA/LW community loves to think from first principles, and that is usually one of its finest traits. I notice and respect the times their first-principles thinking leads them to be correct about things broader society is incorrect about—a regular occurrence.
[citation fucking needed]
(Follows link to authors blog, reads blogroll)
JFC. Kathleen Stock. They have the entire universe of gender studies to choose from & Kathleen Stock is their philosopher of choice.
The thing that gets me the most about this is they can’t imagine that Eliezer might genuinely be in favor of inclusive language, and thus his use of people’s preferred pronouns must be a deliberate calculated political correctness move and thus in violation of the norms espoused by the sequences (which the author takes as a given the Eliezer has never broken before, and thus violating his own sequences is some sort of massive and unique problem).
To save you all having to read the rant…
—which would have been the end of the story, except that, as I explained in a subsequent–subsequent post, “A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning”, in late 2018, Eliezer Yudkowsky prevaricated about his own philosophy of language in a way that suggested that people were philosophically confused if they disputed that men could be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
Also, bonus sneer points, developing weird terminology for everything, referring to Eliezer and Scott as the Caliphs of rationality.
Caliphate officials (Eliezer, Scott, Anna) and loyalists (Steven) were patronizingly consoling me
One of the top replies does call this like it is…
A meaningful meta-level reply, such as “dude, relax, and get some psychological help” will probably get me classified as an enemy, and will be interpreted as further evidence about how sick and corrupt is the mainstream-rationalist society.
Also, bonus sneer points, developing weird terminology for everything, referring to Eliezer and Scott as the Caliphs of rationality.
ahaha, this was a joke inside the subculture, which Scott A even posted about - because Scott was posting a lot on Slate Star Codex and Eliezer wasn’t really posting much at that time.
Right, its a joke, in the sense that the phrase “Caliph” started its usage in a non-serious fashion that got a chuckle, but the way Zack uses it, it really doesn’t feel like a joke. It feels like the author genuinely wants Eliezer to act as the central source of authority and truth among the rationalists and thus Eliezer must not endorse the heresy of inclusive language or else it will mean their holy prophet has contradicted the holy scripture causing a paradox.
oh absolutely
“Kidding on the square” as they used to say.
a phrase for jokes that only work insofar as they’re true?
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My “I am not a prophet, do not follow me, this is not a religion” shirt sure does get a lot of questions.
I am late to sneer culture. I read HPMOR back in the day and even visited LW and then forgot about it. EA (mosquito) was on my radar but since philanthropy is anyway a bandaid on societal problems I hadn’t bothered. Until FTX crashed. I already knew crypto was a scam, but a scam that wraps itself in bad philosophy is more interesting.
After a lot of old Twitter threads and Tumblr posts it finally clicked: They made the Harry Potter fanfic guy their prophet!
Which is so stupid that it fits perfectly into our timeline.
The false dichotomy between “material/biology/physics-based” and “metaphysical i.e. fake” is everywhere in everything lesswrong outputs yet it never fails to annoy me. Sometimes I wish I could take these people aside and bully some sense into them, but due to their nazi leanings maybe being selfdestructively wrong and stupid is a fitting punishment.
you would almost think these people were doing philosophy while deliberately learning fuck all about it
ties big yud and scott up in her basement, forces them to go through the critique of pure reason giving them a werther’s every time they manage to genuinely engage with the ideas
scott’s undergrad degree, he FUCKING MAJORED IN PHILOSOPHY
D:
They skim read some utilitarianism, which is a limited school of thought (if it has any value at all), and jumped straight to “fuck yes! This is everything!”
“at last! I can do some really telling thought experiments!”
This is very undergraduate.
My dayjob performance had been suffering for months. The psychology of the workplace is … subtle. There’s a phenomenon where some people are vastly more productive than others and everyone knows it, but no one is cruel enough to make it common knowledge. This is awkward for people who simultaneously benefit from the culture of common-knowledge-prevention allowing them to collect the status and money rents of being a $150K/year software engineer without actually performing at that level, who also read enough Ayn Rand as a teenager to be ideologically opposed to subsisting on unjustly-acquired rents rather than value creation. I didn’t think the company would fire me, but I was worried that they should.
My goodness is there anything about this person’s outlook that isn’t profoundly sad.
They’re up to their armpits in a pit of self-loathing of their own making & unable to take any of the proffered help because their self-imposed ethical system doesn’t permit it.
Profoundly sad is exactly what it is.
Crucially, a misanthropic and underbaked ethical system based on principles that are either completely removed from reality or demonstrably wrong. And which in the end really amounts to a great deal of … rationalisation :o
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104 minute read at LWer speed (uncritical, taking everything at face value, and you already understand their dialect of english)
Actual read time: depends on how often you snark tbh.
Could use GDQ any%/all% categories
I read a bit, and I’m very sorry it happened (the text being written)
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I’ve just dipped in and out of it all day - I can’t look away! It’s better than a car crash: you can slow down multiple times
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The only thing any of us can do is choose how we are going to get dumber every day
