Actually, he wrote an essay about this back in 2007 [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6FmqiAgS8h4EJm86s/how-to-convince-me-that-2-2-3](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6FmqiAgS8h4EJm86s/how-to-convince-me-that-2-2-3) and I think that is part of what is causing him to fail to notice how stupid this whole thing is (or at least to not clearly stand against it; I don't think he's actually in ~~James Lindsay~~ Conceptual Penis Man's camp on this)
God damn it Yud. Much more of this and people will start to suspect
that you were lying when you said you regretted being a minor part of
the alt-right pipeline.
Maybe he did ~~a count of how his big donors line up politically~~ some utilitarian calculations and decided supporting fascism was a small price to pay for ~~funding his grift~~ securing a future for our children ~~from skynet~~ with friendly AI.
There are also a few people trying to make him see reason, such as
>Replying to [@ESYudkowsky](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky)
>
>This tweet has a holocaust denier account labeling you with #’OurGuy
*but they are in the minority*
Can anyone give me a tldr on where the fuck this 2 + 2 = 5 meme comes
from? This seems to be the new conservative Boogeyman. Was this another
4chan troll campaign or something?
None of the replies to this seem to have pointed out that 2+2=5 has become a shorthand used by rightwing people to summarise the position of trans rights activists. In other words, they are equating something like "trans women are women" with "2+2=5".
I am a mathematician, and frankly I found a lot of the response from mathematicians to be faintly embarrassing. I don't disagree with anything in Kareem Carr's thread exactly, but it seems to me to be beside the point.
[https://twitter.com/kareem\_carr/status/1289724475609501697](https://twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/1289724475609501697)
[https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1289040008624705542](https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1289040008624705542)
It's just James Lindsay being a dickhead.
Read Kareem's thread if you want to know the actual reasoning behind it
Cj discovered that scientists can deal with people going all in on bad faith arguments (a known failure mode of peer review imho), and he is going all in on this making it his (their, to be correct he isnt alone) right wing grift. He tried hoaxing peer review for years and now is making weird anti left memes (for which he has his own stupid name of course)
I think that thread was in response to the initial, uh, controversy, and in the narrow sense there was probably a precipitating interaction right before that (summed up well by Lindsay's "meme" in which he creates a quote and attributes it to himself)
Since scrolling that far back on Lindsay's twitter is not a torture I would inflict upon anyone, I'll settle for noting that in a wider sense we can't truly pinpoint the individual thing that caused this all to blow up, since accusing one's political enemies of saying 2+2=5 has been a thing for a very long time. I do however think we can confidently say it's got a lot of not-so-bright peepers on it right now because of Lindsay's massive audience, and his (hopefully) brief harassment campaign against Kareem.
Kareem's big point is that it is shameful for a math PhD (as James Lindsay, the conceptual penis man, ostensibly is, despite his ridiculous and vapid thesis that reads rather like basic lecture notes on combinatorics) to be so pestiferously inflexible on this, and that being able to spitball possible systems where 2+2 would equal five is a relatively low bar to pass to demonstrate mathematical aptitude.
In the end, Lindsay has politicized 2+2=4 rather than thinking about it like a mathematician would -- his math background means nothing since he isn't using it, and thus his ideas on the matter are easily crushed by actual mathematicians
You can learn everything by gambling, the only reason to actually study math is signalling.
set sneerseverity=2
(unironically wrt economists)
set sneerseverity=1
(unironically wrt Robin Hanson)
Yudkowsky is exactly the sort of person who’d be dumb enough—whether intentionally or otherwise—to fall for James Lindsay’s schtick
But he’s like hella late to this
God damn it Yud. Much more of this and people will start to suspect that you were lying when you said you regretted being a minor part of the alt-right pipeline.
OH GOD THERE’S A TSHIRT ALREADY
btw be sure to check out all the morons in the replies
someone who describes themselves with
tried to use incorrect modular arithmetic to make fun of someone who had replied with correct modular arithmetic
Can anyone give me a tldr on where the fuck this 2 + 2 = 5 meme comes from? This seems to be the new conservative Boogeyman. Was this another 4chan troll campaign or something?
A good place to start would be actually learning about math yourself, Yud.