I will never stop being amazed that Ashkenazi supremacy is now a thing openly promoted by a surprisingly large number of intellectuals without a hint of irony. Like, Jesus, you'd think if there were one community on Earth that really, *really* ought to understand why a belief in racial superiority leads to bad shit...
For the non-Jews who do it, from examples I've seen, I think it's partly a variation of the model minority myth, especially in the context of Black Americans. Like, "if IQ isn't genetic, why is this subgroup so smart!" and/or "Jews went through the Holocaust and centuries of persecution, how could slavery explain anything?!" (These arguments are bullshit!!) Plus some weird fetishization and basic stereotyping. Coming from Jews, I think they're mostly being pompous and racist.
Do you got a source on that one?
I have only ever heard the words “ashkenazi supremacy” used by 1. nazis and 2. people who *wildly* misunderstand jewish ethnicity and relationships between the diasporic populations, almost exclusively non-jews themselves.
Typically, it’s some weird antisemitic shit used to reframe white-passing jews as white supremacists. As in: “read what (((they))) write in the Talmud, the Zio ashkenazi supremacists are slavers coming for the goys!” If you’re using it to mean something else, that meaning is lost on me.
People actually talking about intracultural prejudice among jews refer to things like “ashkenazi normativity” to refer to the marginalization (or sometimes discrimination, as in early 20th Century Israel) of non-ashki jews.
Some of the biggest names for this subreddit (Yudkowsky, Scott Siskind, Stephen Pinker, and arguably Scott Aaronson) subscribe to some version of the Ashkenazi heritage IQ stuff, though I don't think any of them would ever use the phrase "supremacy" to describe it (too obvious). There are definitely right wing gentiles who promulgate it too (Charles Murray and Jordan Peterson come to mind), and it's even been the subject of [NYT op-eds](https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1210742829095374853).
> I don't think any of them would ever use the phrase "supremacy" to describe it (too obvious)
they just talk about the 5- to 10-point advantage it gives people of the group that Yudkowsky, Siskind and Aaronson happen to be in
> Do you got a source on that one?
I mean...it's literally in this post. ("I come by my abilities by way of my ethnically Ashkenazic Jewish heritage", specifically - Yud is not talking about pro-education cultural norms here.)
Rationalist circles tend to believe in a "race realist" hierarchy of intelligence that goes Ashkenazim > Asian > white > hispanic = arab > black, more or less.
Yudkowsky and Siskind are both Ashkenazi and never shut up about this stuff. Yudkowsky even put it into his Harry Potter fanfic.
A variant of white supremacism that included Ashkenazi Jews with the white Europeans was surprisingly common before Hitler, in fact. These guys seem to have come to it from liking racism and deciding they're included.
I would really, really, really like to see a citation for that claim. Because I’m pretty well versed in European Jewish history from the early modern period to the Holocaust and that’s just not true AFAIK?
There were wealthy Sefardi and German Jews in Western Europe, Germany and even the United States who saw themselves as superior and more integrated than the poorer Ashkenazi Jews from out East, who spoke Yiddish and had different, weirder customs. But it wasn’t based in race science until fairly late in the game and Ashkenazi Jews were never at the top of that particular hierarchy.
There were also some Jews, particularly in places like Germany and France, who thought if they got integrated enough, they’d be accepted as equal citizens. The last iterations of this particular thought process involved Jews who actually supported the Nazis, like the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden. The most “I never thought leopards would eat My face” stuff you can possibly imagine.
I have seen a few people, primarily in the rat sphere, with bleed over into idw spheres, touting the genetic superiority of Ashkenazi Jews wrt intelligence. I haven't seen it phrased as Askenazi supremacy, I suppose that would be a bit too on the nose.
Wait, what abilities does an “ethnically Ashkenazic Jewish heritage”
give you? Can he cast Celestial Healing a number of times per day equal
to a quarter of his class levels? Does he have access to Auspex •? Is he
able to fire some sort of energy beam?
He’s really making me feel like I haven’t minmaxed my race enough.
Sheesh.
If it makes you feel better, which it probably shouldn't, to these people it seems like (a stereotype of) autism is actually aspirational, just like Yud's antisemitic trope. They're neurotypical people trying to consciously act more stereotype-autistic. The same way their friends in the nihilistic alt-right admire sociopathic strongmen, and similarly use the internet to overcome their troublesome instinct and social conditioning toward empathy.
On the other hand it is a spectrum disorder. I suspect that a lot of rationalists are further down the spectrum than the average person, but perhaps not far enough to merit a formal diagnosis?
I think you're right about it being aspirational though, it's like they've noticed what sets them apart from the average person and then make even more extreme version of that their ideal.
The fact that anyone can read exchanges like this and come away from
them still believing Yud is an esteemed intellectual, let alone a
scientist or researcher, blows my mind.
“malphemism” is a perfect little example of these folks making up a
term that didn’t need to exist because there’s already one they could
have looked up: “dysphemism” is right there, in the dictionary, as the
opposite of “euphemism”, logically replacing the Ancient Greek prefix
“eu-” with its opposite “dys-”. “mal-” is Latin.
Or they could have just said “slur”, which is what they really meant.
But then they’d sound like a woke SJW low-decoupler who goes
around objecting to the disparagement of minorities other than Ashkenazi
Jews.
yes, but/and as I wrote above, in what world is "Aspbergers syndrome" a slur that "Jew" isn't? pretty sure it's the other way around. wonder if he means that "Aspbergers Syndrome" is a *euphemism* for Jew, which while an incredibly awful thing to say (and is wrong to boot), is at least a coherent thought?
Imagine if L. Ron Hubbard only had an 8th grade education and built his cult around AI doomerism, Harry Potter fanfic, and Silicon Valley tech startup culture instead of alien space operas and Hollywood celebrity culture, and you'll start to have a sense of what Eliezer "Big Yud" Yudkowsky is all about.
I've always thought Yud was more Ayn Rand than L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard was a bullshitter who probably didn't believe half of what he wrote, if not more whereas I think Yud believes the vast majority of things he's written. I think the same of Ayn Rand who like Yud was a largely self-educated autodidact who didn't know what she didn't know and had a contempt for traditional educational structures because of bad experiences.
I think there's overlaps with both, but the grandiose sci-fi narrative aspect and association with a prestigious and influential industry (entertainment in Hubbard's case, tech in Yudkowsky's) tipped the scales for Hubbard for me.
I think you're probably right about Yudkowsky believing his own bullshit though. Calling the movement "rationalism" seems pretty similar to what Rand did too.
Also I think it's notable that all three of them became famous for their fiction writing.
At any rate: Hubbard has [his rock opera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Earth_(album), and Rand has [hers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2112_(album)
Grimes, you know what you need to do
>One of the characters from the music video for "Flesh Without Blood" is named Rococo Basilisk, a reference to the thought experiment Roko's basilisk and the Rococo art movement.[6] Grimes said that the character was "doomed to be eternally tortured by an artificial intelligence, but she's also kind of like Marie Antoinette."
> for both characters their writing is incapable of reaching past the verbose dime store science fiction that was their starting point.
good lord, nail on head
L. Ron Hubbard was probably off his tits to be fair when he came up with Xenu etc, the man was such a devoted pill enthusiast he probably didn’t know half the shit he was coming out with anyway.
My interpretation - at least in Yudkowsky's case - is that he doesn't reject the concept of knowing things, he just doesn't understand what knowing things consists of and he incorrectly assumes that other people experience the world the same way that he does.
Sure, he doesn't actually know math, but in his mind he thinks he knows it *just as well as everyone else does*. He might even think that he is morally and intellectually superior, in the sense that he writes about math using plain, comprehensible english, rather than the bullshit arcane hieroglyphics of professional mathematicians, which obviously mean nothing and are only an absurd game that the elites use to mock and exclude the outgroup.
It's similar but not the same. We know that Yudkowsky doesn't understand math and that, given the way he operates, he never can, but Yudkowsky thinks that he does. He doesn't dispute the possibility of knowing things, he just incorrectly thinks that he's an expert in it.
I'm agnostic about the issue of Yudkowsky's responsibility for his state of being. Responsibility implies the existence of choice; could Yudkowsky have chosen differently at some point in the past? Can he do so now? I don't know. I personally don't believe that all people are innately capable of understanding or believing all things, and this may be something that is beyond him.
I try to treat everyone this way: I prefer to be most critical of other people for the things that are within their power to change, but which they choose not to change anyway.
Sometimes the things that people can't change are inside their own head. I know that I'd react differently to Yudkowsky's circumstances than he does, and that makes me think that maybe he's constrained by the limitations of how his mind can work.
It's really hard for most people to be contradicted and sneered at by almost all world experts on a given subject matter and to then conclude that e*veryone else is the problem*. Like that's actually not an easy thing to do, for most people. The fact that Yudkowsky can do it consistently is notable, and it's possible that it isn't a choice on his part.
> rationalists hate and resent science in general, to the point of rejecting outright the very concept of knowing things
there's that HPMOR quote where Yudkowsky inadvertently lets slip:
> "Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn't exist and there's no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn't just mistaken, it's anti-epistemology, it's systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there's someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there's a lot of people out there telling lies -"
remember that they hate art just as much. they love signifiers, they are confused and repulsed by any deeper understanding than signifiers.
>Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs.
Uh...
Anyone know if Yudkowsky wrote this before or after his Sequences post on "breaking your allegiance to science?"
Actually, digging that post up:
>Sure I can explain all that away, and I still think you're right, I'm just suspicious of myself for believing the first believable explanation I met."
>
>—Recovering irrationalist
Yud's response:
>RI, you've got no idea how glad I was to see you post that comment. Of course I had more than just one reason for spending all that time posting about quantum physics. I like having lots of hidden motives, it's the closest I can ethically get to being a supervillain.
>
>If you got as far as RI—so that many-worlds now seems perfectly logical, obvious and normal—and you also started out as a Traditional Rationalist, then you should be able to switch back and forth between the Scientific view and the Bayesian view.
>
>\[...\]
>
>Are you going to make a major modification to a scientific model, and believe in zillions of other worlds you can't see, without a defining moment of experimental triumph over the old model?
>
>Or are you going to reject probability theory?
>
>Will you give your allegiance to Science, or to Bayes?
>
>I wanted to present you with a nice, sharp dilemma between rejecting the scientific method, or embracing insanity.
>
>PS: If you try to come up with clever ways to wriggle out of the dilemma, you're just going to get shot down in future posts. You have been warned.
Holy shit this dude is an actual cult leader.
> Anyone know if Yudkowsky wrote this before or after his Sequences post on "breaking your allegiance to science?"
After!
> Holy shit this dude is an actual cult leader.
he worked hard on this
I think it makes sense when you consider that a lot of Rationalists suffer from insecurity, and having a magic formula for knowing everything feels empowering.
Bayes' theorem is not, in fact, a magic formula for knowing everything, but intuitionistic spiritual reasoning doesn't operate through strict logical deduction anyway so that's really not an obstacle.
you can tell these fuckers never tried actually using it for a real thing, because the Bayes numbers work just as advertised, but they're *fucking hard*
When I saw the title, I was like, oh acausal robot god, am I going to
have to get out the ban hammer, but then read the contents and was not
exactly relieved, but things merely shifted to the usual horror of
encountering Rationalism.
Oh, certainly, that's how I read it -- I saw the headline and cringed until I realized it was an accurate summary of The Discourse and then cringed for a different reason.
I read the title, rose an eyebrow and went “that’s not cool” - the
content made me breathe a sigh of relief. Briefly. Then go straight back
to “that’s not cool” lol.
eliezer yudkowsky numerical thinking is so fast if we could hear it it would sound like "1,2,3,4,5,6,7,wezowezowezowezo A million, wezowezowezowezowezowezo 23 billions !"
that's how he does that bayesian epistemology, every time he sees or hears something his brain^2 does P(A|B)=P(B|A).P(B)/P(A) where each P term is a vector of the probability distribution and all the arithmetic operators are matrix multiplications, and he does this multiple times a second. that's how he's right about everything.
“malphemism”:
A dysphemism is an expression with connotations that are derogatory
either about the subject matter or to the audience. Related terms:
malphemism.
history
of Aspberger syndrome: “An English psychiatrist, Lorna Wing,
popularized the term”Asperger’s syndrome” in a 1981 publication; the
first book in English on Asperger syndrome was written by Uta Frith in
1991 and the condition was subsequently recognized in formal diagnostic
manuals later in the 1990s.” Aspberger himself lived during WWII, but
the syndrome wasn’t attached to the name until much later.
so the argument is that “Jew” is a neutral term, but Aspberger is a
disparaging term, meant to… what, extra disparage actual Jews by
alleging they have a disability? talk about Jews in a negative way while
pretending to talk about a medical diagnosis because they can’t just
slur Jews the way they want to? what?
From where I sit, I am pretty sure that “Jew” serves as about as
“mal” a word as one could imagine (when uttered by people on the
rationalist spectrum, among many others, though not by ordinary people
of good faith who don’t hate) & that Aspbergers, when it was in
vogue, was a relatively neutral term of medical art.
the layers under which these asshats bury their hatred can be
extraordinary.
As far as I can tell, saying Ashkenazi Jews and Asians have the
highest IQ is mostly just a way to claim race science isn’t actually
really racist. It’s totally different this time, you guys! The leopards
definitely won’t eat our faces this time.
On the real, is anyone here at all skeptical about the whole
underlying infrastructure of determining and assigning “neurotypicality”
and atypicality? I’ve been curious about this topic but have not seen it
discussed by anyone anywhere (I’ve been). Seems like a fruitful
conversation
You’d think for such an historically remarkable intelligence he’d be
able to realize that, yes, he is indeed autistic.
I mean, deciding to dedicate his life to saving the world from the
enemy in a science fiction novel and actually focusing on that goal for
a decade requires a focus that neurotypicals don’t have.
(I am autistic myself, so I don’t mean the terms as a negative)
[deleted]
Wow, it’s like this just kept getting worse with every word I read.
Wait, what abilities does an “ethnically Ashkenazic Jewish heritage” give you? Can he cast Celestial Healing a number of times per day equal to a quarter of his class levels? Does he have access to Auspex •? Is he able to fire some sort of energy beam?
He’s really making me feel like I haven’t minmaxed my race enough. Sheesh.
Now I can cross off ableism on my bigotry bingo card
The fact that anyone can read exchanges like this and come away from them still believing Yud is an esteemed intellectual, let alone a scientist or researcher, blows my mind.
“malphemism” is a perfect little example of these folks making up a term that didn’t need to exist because there’s already one they could have looked up: “dysphemism” is right there, in the dictionary, as the opposite of “euphemism”, logically replacing the Ancient Greek prefix “eu-” with its opposite “dys-”. “mal-” is Latin.
Or they could have just said “slur”, which is what they really meant. But then they’d sound like a
woke SJWlow-decoupler who goes around objecting to the disparagement of minorities other than Ashkenazi Jews.*cringes in autistic jew*
i’m only on this sub because i don’t know what it’s for and it confuses me; honestly this post does not disappoint.
[deleted]
When I saw the title, I was like, oh acausal robot god, am I going to have to get out the ban hammer, but then read the contents and was not exactly relieved, but things merely shifted to the usual horror of encountering Rationalism.
What in the goddamn
Like, people actually think this
That thread just gets worse and worse: https://mobile.twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1633405159442370560
I read the title, rose an eyebrow and went “that’s not cool” - the content made me breathe a sigh of relief. Briefly. Then go straight back to “that’s not cool” lol.
he is one of the few people out there who can use numbers in his thinking. his database= his ass.
This entire thread is cursed and needs to be purged with fire.
“malphemism”: A dysphemism is an expression with connotations that are derogatory either about the subject matter or to the audience. Related terms: malphemism.
history of Aspberger syndrome: “An English psychiatrist, Lorna Wing, popularized the term”Asperger’s syndrome” in a 1981 publication; the first book in English on Asperger syndrome was written by Uta Frith in 1991 and the condition was subsequently recognized in formal diagnostic manuals later in the 1990s.” Aspberger himself lived during WWII, but the syndrome wasn’t attached to the name until much later.
so the argument is that “Jew” is a neutral term, but Aspberger is a disparaging term, meant to… what, extra disparage actual Jews by alleging they have a disability? talk about Jews in a negative way while pretending to talk about a medical diagnosis because they can’t just slur Jews the way they want to? what?
From where I sit, I am pretty sure that “Jew” serves as about as “mal” a word as one could imagine (when uttered by people on the rationalist spectrum, among many others, though not by ordinary people of good faith who don’t hate) & that Aspbergers, when it was in vogue, was a relatively neutral term of medical art.
the layers under which these asshats bury their hatred can be extraordinary.
[sees title]
[sees content]
I… ah… um… er. Uh.
I have a friend who calls Rationalism “the new aspie supremacy” and he’s not wrong.
As far as I can tell, saying Ashkenazi Jews and Asians have the highest IQ is mostly just a way to claim race science isn’t actually really racist. It’s totally different this time, you guys! The leopards definitely won’t eat our faces this time.
which of you fuckers is DemocratBased? Be honest!
The lady doth protest too much
Not to necro this thread, but bless you for posting this so I can block MV’s Twitter, apparently he didn’t have the courtesy to do it for me.
I think that he’s probably narcissistic, which looks very similar to autism from the outside. But autism doesn’t turn people into cult leaders.
New here. Boo I so dislike Yud
On the real, is anyone here at all skeptical about the whole underlying infrastructure of determining and assigning “neurotypicality” and atypicality? I’ve been curious about this topic but have not seen it discussed by anyone anywhere (I’ve been). Seems like a fruitful conversation
You’d think for such an historically remarkable intelligence he’d be able to realize that, yes, he is indeed autistic.
I mean, deciding to dedicate his life to saving the world from the enemy in a science fiction novel and actually focusing on that goal for a decade requires a focus that neurotypicals don’t have.
(I am autistic myself, so I don’t mean the terms as a negative)