“we’re in a situation where parasitism is absolutely out of control. The latest #superstraight trend is a great example. We have people who want to coerce straight men into having sexual relations with other men using moral arguments…One way that we can outwit parasites is to make systems less legible. You can actually see this happening with memes, pepes, 4chan, pseudonymous profiles etc.”

Cannot be overstated the extent to which all this pseudo-intellectual framing is actually just people who embrace reactionary ideologies but feel too smart for it so have built their own highly stylised framework to house them in.

Always comes back to a preoccupation with sex as well, this is what it looks like when you let not getting your dick sucked in high school run your life decades later.

So, I’ve only seen this “superstraight” thing on a shitpost meme sub. Are the twitters actually pushing this as a new, serious thing? Am I going to have to listen to Ari Melber talk over someone about this on The Beat?

This reboot of Roko’s Modern Life is turrible.

A little thought: the rationalist view that the greatest menace to western civilization are…people with dyed hair perfectly aligns with their idea that any problem humanity faces can be solved with the acausal robot god.

If the rats are so into posthumanism, why not pursue a wide variety of sapient, supersapient and subsapience forms.

At least attempting to add an extra pair of working limbs to their midsection and altering the brain’s proprioception/motion structures to accomodate that is interesting, and also fits the whole focus of modifying oneself to survive X-Risks (see Stephen Baxter)

Like the Liquid Ones who remolded their stretchy skeletons into interlocking rings and grow to *adulthood on metal trellises and shoot spore from certain ring spots like ferns and have scallop eyes and air filterers like sponges in place of mouths/lungs?

Or the subsapient eusocial molepeople who burrow deep underground, the less said of which the better?

So much effort wasted on xenophobia instead of actually contacting aliens or actively working on becoming truly physically and mentally alien

You know how you sometimes read something and you think “I can see how you’re thinking about things and it shows that you just have an extremely poor understanding of what you’re talking about.”?

I don’t even know where to begin, but imagine being so naïve that you assume you’re the first person to imagine “thinking about the pros and cons of new ideas”? I’m not even going to touch upon the last 4 tweets of the thread which are just a sequence of non-sequiturs.

This seems like either a misreading of the Enlightenment or the author using game theory metaphorically but in a deeply unclear way.

I can think of at least three thinkers during the Enlightenment who appeared to understand that conflict will be pervasive through society and that something must be done about it.

1. Famously, Madison argued in Federalist 10 that factions based on opinions, passions, and interests function as a threat to republican government and that the strategy of removing their cause (either through restriction of liberty or social engineering) is not practical, thus the government must be set up to reduce the effects of factions by reducing (but not too far) the connection between representative and constituency and by being expansive in size, to reduce the chances than any one faction might obtain a majority and thus enact ‘wicked designs’ (e.g. ‘an equal division of property’).
2. I have never read Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, but the impression I have is that it makes a similar argument, believing that to prevent tyranny, one ought divide the power of the state into different organs with different functions.
3. Perhaps these are political approaches and don’t properly understand social problems (although considering Madison’s argument emphasised the fallibility of human reason, people’s self-love causing them to prefer actions that benefit themselves over the common good, etc., I think that would be a misreading), but Jefferson seems to give a good example in his Notes on Virginia.
   1. He morally condemns slavery, but rather than favouring political equality between the races, he instead favours the expulsion of blacks from the America, due to perceived differences in their temperaments and abilities.
   2. Perhaps, Roko might discount that as being an example of prejudice considering the communities he runs in, but even Jefferson notes that an additional reason to favour this policy of ethnic cleansing relates to aesthetic factors (he claims to perceive black folk as grotesque) and to historic prejudices both groups would develop for each other (“Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations […]”).

I just want to emphasise how weird the invocation of game theory is. When I think of game theory, I think of formal models that try to abstract from a situation and determine the strategies of individual agents. But his own examples just seem to be the recognition that people (either individually or collectively) might have different goals, and thus come into conflict, along with a belief that at least some of those goals are bad in some way (parasitism seems like a word with a rather negative valence).

But that’s boring. You can find that in Plato. You can find that in Machiavelli. You can find that in Madison. You can find that in Marx. The interesting thing about game theory, (I think, not a game theorist), is its attempt to formalise that common intuition and its attempt to explain and predict behaviour with reference to individual incentives, not the commonplace insight that conflict exists.

Trans women are parasites, huh Roko? A new transphobic twist on an old Nazi classic! Hmm, well, it’s not exactly new, is it? Given how the Nazis said exactly that. I guess it’s more of a reiteration of an old Nazi classic. Wonder what that makes you.

this guy doesn’t know shit about the enlightenment or game theory, and one day years from now after a lifetime of success and happiness poured upon him by a grateful society he will die without ever knowing more about them

And who determines who is or isnt a parasite smarty pants man. Seems to me there is good bucks in being a parasitic ‘parasite detector’.

You are an ideas man, Roko

“Parasitism” means what, in this context?

The thought experiment is fucking stupid because it only works if the AI is a right wing nut job.

I tried entertaining him for a moment. He already started losing me in the first couple tweets by assuming Enlightenment moral and political philosophy never entailed addressing his concerns. He also neglected the fact that plenty of social scientists, philosophers and intellectuals in the last century have already been updating philosophy originating in the Enlightenment in light of game theory, etc.

He comes across like he thinks he is real clever when he says some of today’s thinkers pointed out some Enlightenment-style thinkers in the past were wary of running headlong into progress but also wary of being too static. That’s just another way of pointing out how plenty of classical liberal and conservative philosophers in the Enlightenment tradition are anathema to leftism but aren’t always on board with the far-right either. He would know knowing that basic fact isn’t an insight worth showing off about if he wasn’t totally bluffing about how well he understands Enlightenment thought.

He lost me by then but it was so ridiculous that he hooked me back in with how funny the idea was that the Super Straight movement, as the reactionary Twitter trend of the week, was a bold example of the kind of the new, challenging experiments to which Enlightenment thought should be subjected.