posted on January 31, 2023 08:21 PM by
u/DigitalEskarina
100
u/Apocalyte68 pointsat 1675202468.000000
I love how people like this phrase really basic statements in a MORE
convoluted metaphorical framework (usually computer-related because
their worldview only works if consciousness is inherently computerlike),
like that suddenly makes it make more sense.
It’s not “Organized religion has fallen out of favor with younger
generations, and I personally correlate that with the rising prominence
of social justice issues in the political climate because i view it and
religion as the same thing.” because then you could respond to that
claim with sociological arguments that challenge the notion. In order to
safeguard their talking points from a normal discourse, they
pose it in an abnormal way.
“Woke is a virus that was installed
in the programmable ape after religion was
uninstalled!”
It a feature of the transhumanist gothic discourse. Basically, take a regular idea and turn it into a science-fiction gothic horror trope-- mind virus, installing software on your brain, etc.
Like that Yudkowsky tweet from a few days ago, take a simple idea that "predictors know the process they are predicting" and turn it into a story about AI conquering humanity.
I think his point is not that Wokeness is a new religion, but that it's an opportunistic infection that Religion protects us against. So secularism is, like, Mind AIDS or something.
Yes that’s how viruses work. You open Control Panel and select “Uninstall AIDS” and then another disease immediately receives an icon on the desktop of your monkey.
Yeah. BAP pushes it as do others. Often goes hand in hand with The Gay Germ (tm) and arguments that only gay pedophilia is bad.
I’ve seen a lot of this over the past (too many) years.
Says a lot that religion is seen as protecting the status quo of systematic racial discrimination and other social injustices. Almost a full-throated endorsement of the view that religion is the opiate of the people.
I don't know whether they think they're more persuasive when they speak in jargon, are trying to signal to an in-group, or something else. Not that it bother me that much, they sound like pretentious losers either way.
I just wish these guys would write science fiction (and have it edited by someone competent, HPMOR doesn't count). When Stephenson had some weird thoughts about language, viruses, and religion we got *Snow Crash* out of it.
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this:
>Since nobody seems willing to state the obvious due to cultural sensitivity... I’ll say it: rap isn’t music
*****
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He would have never damned himself (and many other people) to Simulated Future AI Hell if the Catholic church and suppressed all the ideas that led to it and banned him from thinking.
I think my favorite thing about these guys is how they continually
rediscover crazy shit from forty years ago, brush the dust off, and
pretend it’s new. The “programmable apes” shit is an old Cali Dreaming
concept known as neurolinguistic programming, and while Dawkins short
section at the end of the Selfish Gene does seem to be a genuinely novel
permutation on the idea of the “fitness” of ideas as integral to their
frequency in the “mindpool,” only a fucking idiot would claim that was
the invention of memetics after 50 fucking years of propaganda.
It’s like they can’t see anything outside of immediate intellectual
proximity and are completely without the kind of intellectual immunities
a less blinkered thinker would develop, so old and discredited ideas are
new, fresh and without several decades of counter arguments, just
because they use a new word for them.
> high decoupling
Holy shit this wasn't a joke they actually have a whole thing about this. I google it and here's what I find, by Scott effin' Alexander (bold added):
>I like the concept, but I feel like you're being too generous in applying it to the Klein vs. Harris race-science debate.
My impression is that a Martian would consider **"we shouldn't study the genetics of race just in case it promotes racism, which can cause genocide"** equally plausible to **"we shouldn't study the economics of inequality just in case it promotes communism, which can cause genocide"** or "**we shouldn't study psychiatry, because we might learn some things that stigmatize people with psychiatric diseases, which can cause genocide"**, or **"we shouldn't study evolution, because that could cast doubt on the Bible and destroy the moral foundations of our society, which could cause genocide",** or two hundred other possibilities along the same lines.
Since worrying about any of the others isn't correlated with worrying about the race-science issue, I don't think it's a question of fixed cognitive styles. I think it's just politics, pure and simple.
Jesus, he decoupled himself from a point. It's not the study of human biodiversity that's the issue, it's coming to the (unsupported) conclusions people are with this.
I legit kind of wonder if this is part of it.
I also wonder if high decoupling is just being a sociopath.
Or I also wonder if my difficulty decoupling is just a symptom of my adhd.
They just keep making the exact mistakes autodidacts always make and never ever reconsidering their approach to problems. It's like a kid who is told the stove is hot, burned his hand in the hot fire last week, and touches the stove anyway so he can "do his own research".
I mean, I've got all those autodidact tendencies, and (hopefully) am keeping them in check, it can't be that hard especially when you're literally named after biases and incremental knowledge improvement.
Many people are like that, I'm also like that too. That's where the cult side of it comes in, a self reinforcing socio-economic institution that encourages not keeping yourself in check in that way as one of it's founding principles.
Sorry, Cali Dreaming was a one off name for the California style techno progressive/hyper individualist belief complex starting with the pre hippie psychedelic enthusiasts and continuing on through to modern day silicon valley ideas. Someone else had a pithy name for it but I can't remember it.
I totally agree. That was the name of the paper in the 90s that first identified the mindset, but I think we could just call it: dummies being dummies. Then again, I have never been good at insults.
It sucks a lot because I think there was some good in there and some of the thinkers in that sphere have been influential in a lot of my thinking, but holy shit that memeplex is corrupted as shit.
Exactly. I have learned to be on guard in every space I enter because the one off from a lot of people/ideas I respect is straight up techno-fascism and mask off racism.
**[California Dreamin'](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Dreamin')**
>"California Dreamin'" is a song written by John Phillips and Michelle Phillips and first recorded by Barry McGuire. The best-known version is by the Mamas & the Papas, who sang backup on the original version and released it as a single in 1965. The lyrics express the narrator's longing for the warmth of Los Angeles during a cold winter in New York City. It is recorded in the key of C-sharp minor".
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I mean, I'm sure you could dissect it and create a nuanced take noting their differences- but I think the similarities and overlap is pretty significant, and there's a reason everyone accuses their political rivals of "being in a cult": they kind of are.
As an actual Christian (in the vein of Tolstoy and tillich) I hate
how these right wingers are making a mockery of my faith. They come back
towards it because they’re so anti woke and yet what we find is just
their decrepit parody of religion. They don’t have an authenicately
spiritual bone in their bodies. Carl Sagan was so much more a true man
of faith than these charlatans.
He could also communicate outside his closed group of ideological circlejerkers. These people don’t strike me as enthusiastic to talk to the plebes/proles/peons.
Honestly, they’d struggle to communicate with a sizable percentage of the catholic clergy in South America, including the current pope. Liberation theology is a thing.
To be fair I think Roko is far from representative of most LWers and EAs. Maybe you meant something different by “these people” in which case sorry for misunderstanding.
No you’re right. For me, Roko, Rationalists, and those into EA remind me of how online conservatives (you know the ones) have morphed over the years. Once, they tried to appeal to those out of their group; now, they speak in weird jargon and references that require knowledge to understand. Kind of like how you’ll be totally lost looking at the latest Marvel movie if you haven’t consumed hours of previous installments.
Idk if this is all really a thing or I’m just imagining it.
I wish people would stop calling every idea with a lot of people
behind it a religion or something like a religion. He also uses woke so
loosely that wanting immigrant to be allowed into your country or trans
kids to be able to use their preferred pronouns or people with Down
syndrome to be allowed to have kids are all things he called “woke”
(& idk to what extent ppl who are less religious are more likely to
actually have those views?). Idk it is very nit picky of me though.
I’ve had a run-in with this guy on twitter. He’s categorically dumb,
in that way that people who are Very Smart always are. Always double
down, and the highest value is being right no matter what.
Isn’t this the fucking basilisk guy? The one who thinks an omnipotent
being will exist in the near future who will torture everyone who didn’t
dedicate all their energies to bringing about the very same omnipotent
AI? How is he getting upset about a lack of religion when he believes
that?
I'm curious about what's worse than reinventing Pascal's Wager clothed in singularity bullshit. Should I be worried about the answer? Because I am in a "witnessing an auto accident" kind of way.
Yes. As I said elsewhere, this is actually consistent with the basilisk thing; if he believes that there are ideas like the Basilisk that can harm you just from you knowing of them, it is kind of reasonable to have a powerful institution suppress novel ideas in case they're harmful, I guess.
I used to think Memetics was just a shitty metaphor and a terrible
model for the history of culture and ideas, but reflecting on it I
actually think it is more sinister. By viewing actual human beings as
passive carriers of ideas you can act as though they have no choice in
chosing or shaping what they think and so it makes sense to set yourself
up as the arbiter of what thoughts are good and which are bad. It is not
just a crappy model for human beings interact with thought and culture
and belief, but it is a blueprint and an excuse fo authoritarianism.
I love how people like this phrase really basic statements in a MORE convoluted metaphorical framework (usually computer-related because their worldview only works if consciousness is inherently computerlike), like that suddenly makes it make more sense.
It’s not “Organized religion has fallen out of favor with younger generations, and I personally correlate that with the rising prominence of social justice issues in the political climate because i view it and religion as the same thing.” because then you could respond to that claim with sociological arguments that challenge the notion. In order to safeguard their talking points from a normal discourse, they pose it in an abnormal way.
“Woke is a virus that was installed in the programmable ape after religion was uninstalled!”
says the man who discovered the Basilisk
I think my favorite thing about these guys is how they continually rediscover crazy shit from forty years ago, brush the dust off, and pretend it’s new. The “programmable apes” shit is an old Cali Dreaming concept known as neurolinguistic programming, and while Dawkins short section at the end of the Selfish Gene does seem to be a genuinely novel permutation on the idea of the “fitness” of ideas as integral to their frequency in the “mindpool,” only a fucking idiot would claim that was the invention of memetics after 50 fucking years of propaganda.
It’s like they can’t see anything outside of immediate intellectual proximity and are completely without the kind of intellectual immunities a less blinkered thinker would develop, so old and discredited ideas are new, fresh and without several decades of counter arguments, just because they use a new word for them.
Oh they are so close to realizing that they have replaced religion with rationalism!
Dawkins also thought it was a great idea to do the “Muslima” post, so… there we are.
We’re reaching meaningless graph levels that shouldn’t be possible
As an actual Christian (in the vein of Tolstoy and tillich) I hate how these right wingers are making a mockery of my faith. They come back towards it because they’re so anti woke and yet what we find is just their decrepit parody of religion. They don’t have an authenicately spiritual bone in their bodies. Carl Sagan was so much more a true man of faith than these charlatans.
I wish people would stop calling every idea with a lot of people behind it a religion or something like a religion. He also uses woke so loosely that wanting immigrant to be allowed into your country or trans kids to be able to use their preferred pronouns or people with Down syndrome to be allowed to have kids are all things he called “woke” (& idk to what extent ppl who are less religious are more likely to actually have those views?). Idk it is very nit picky of me though.
crypto bro with the usual “pRogrAmMiNg” “vEcToRs” word salad.
I’ve had a run-in with this guy on twitter. He’s categorically dumb, in that way that people who are Very Smart always are. Always double down, and the highest value is being right no matter what.
Holy mixed metaphors, Batman!
Isn’t this the fucking basilisk guy? The one who thinks an omnipotent being will exist in the near future who will torture everyone who didn’t dedicate all their energies to bringing about the very same omnipotent AI? How is he getting upset about a lack of religion when he believes that?
claims the individual who found the basilisk.
I used to think Memetics was just a shitty metaphor and a terrible model for the history of culture and ideas, but reflecting on it I actually think it is more sinister. By viewing actual human beings as passive carriers of ideas you can act as though they have no choice in chosing or shaping what they think and so it makes sense to set yourself up as the arbiter of what thoughts are good and which are bad. It is not just a crappy model for human beings interact with thought and culture and belief, but it is a blueprint and an excuse fo authoritarianism.
I always did wonder what schizophasia looked like