posted on December 07, 2022 07:08 PM by
u/textlossarcade
43
u/textlossarcade55 pointsat 1670440190.000000
Fun game: go to any post of his where he mentions The NY Times and
how he thinks they are the scum of the earth and ask yourself “is this
an objective take, or is he maybe reacting to how The NY Times piece
impacted what people think of him”
That’s kind of great isn’t it? Like with every other one of these guys it’s like “I called that sick fuck a sick fuck and then he blocked me” or “I forget why that sick fuck blocked me but I’m pretty sure I called him a sick fuck”.
But no, with Siskind it’s like “yeah we got into it this one time, and he was just a total dick, everyone saw it, then he blocked me”.
FFS, he thinks there's a greater than a third chance that within our lifetimes the entire human race will be eliminated by malevolent AI.
And when I said in /r/askphilosophy that some people in EA communities have outlandish views about AI risk, the EA crowd came out of the woodwork to be indignant about how ridiculous I was being.
Relatedly, fucking lol at there's over a third chance of the elimination of the human race in our lifetime "which isn't enough to be really viscerally terrified about it." People get their understanding of statistical reasoning from *this guy*!?
Well you forget the fundamental complex is to *believe* that the crazy thing is true, to *know* that other people think it’s crazy, to *feel* it’s very important you understand it’s not crazy, but to *act* on the understanding that you will call them crazy if they tell you what they really think. So they *have* to ride that line between not telling the whole story and vehemently insisting that everything is actually normal. And it’s very stressful for them, so I understand why they get heated.
And they get their statistical reasoning from that guy because he’s the guy who tells them it’s somebody else’s fault if they get called names for being bad at statistics.
It’s all connected.
Holy shit a 33% chance the robots kill us all in 8 years? That is nuts.
(Im joking here about the 10 years to prevent the bad effects of clinate change thing a few years ago which god bad faithed into 'we will all die in 10 years'. Im making the implicit explicit so the Rationalist can follow along).
A big problem of both tech bros and these people, who are at least tech bro adjacent, is that everything has to be exciting and new. Both the problems (AI!) and the solutions (self driving cars! Effective Altruism). This results in them ignoring the very real, very urgent, and very mundane problems that we actually face as a species, and de emphasizes the unsexy but effective tools at hand to remediate them within our life time.
This strikes me as a really interesting characterization, so I'm mostly commenting on it just to consolidate it a bit better in my memory.
For anyone this means anything to, I am making associations between "everything has to be exciting and new" and a certain characterization of modernist aesthetics; and in turn, between this "big problem of both tech bros and these people" with the relevant sort of aesthetization of politics and civil society, that we see in certain political movements of a right-leaning kind, as well as certain philosophical trends usually perceived as left-leaning. Sorry for being gnomic, not prepared to flesh this out atm. As I say, making a note here mostly for my own benefit.
He had unacknowledged edits that were like twice as long as the comment he’d just written! I was backing up like three times per reply to everything he said like he thought I’d get tired, calling him on it, and he never once said anything, or maybe he blew it off once as somehow not worth discussing. Just really fucking *inconsiderate* at the most basic level.
I saw it a long while back, it isn't that interesting. It might also have been the moment where Scott or somebody else, can't recall went 'you sneerclubbers are always brigading our subs' and well, it always is just one of us posting (and even that I personally discourage, nothing good comes from it, and just feeds into the persecution complex and the feeling they heard both sides and came to a Rational Conclusion They Were Correct All Along), and that is why Dr Congot has that flair.
If I cannot position myself as an embattled iconoclast, I am
miserable and bored, and also one of my core tenets is to not care in
the slightest what others think about me.
The short version is that in a totalitarian state maybe you have to not say forbidden truths in order to do the most good and the subtext is that he thinks racism is true (the phrase is a reference to an actual post Scott Alexander wrote with that title which tells the story of a brave non-truth teller trying to make scientific advances under conditions of authoritarian refusal to embrace certain truths (almost like the woke mobs today won’t let you fawn openly over charles Murray’s bell curve bullshit, if you think about it, wink wink))
I still don't quite understand how people can claim to be rationalists, have some rudimentary understanding of biology and genetics, etc., and still believe racism is true. Like what is their proposed mechanism of action even?
There is a lot of 'academia' saying the race shit is actually real. And without deep dives into it, or deeper knowlegde about it it is very easy to get sucked into believing it esp if you are already primed a bit by believing the sjws (or before that the feminists) are crazy. (Not that Scott would do that dot dot dot winkemoji).
In the same way that there is a organization for pedagogy (1k members) with a similar name to the big org for pedagogy (100k members) where the former produces research saying gay parents actually hurt kids.
It is easy just set up parallel academic systems for your race realism, and fill it with neo-nazis, crypto-neo-nazis and gullible fools who don't recognize a dogwhistle like a spinning swastika.
And, a thing they do get correctly, the media who is looking for clicks, a false 'both sides' balance, and a tendency to promote these horrible people, will still spill ink on all this. That is how you get articles like 'this guy is trying to bring back race science and wants to kill minorities but he dresses well and is nice to his neighbors and dog'.
(This post is about the general far right btw, not Rationalism specifically)
Rationalism, like a lot of liberals helps to promote this by being blind to context and only looking at direct content. That is how you get slurs (from a list of accepted slurs, new slurs will be OK for a while, and also ALL slurs, so calling rich people names is also bad) being banned, but posts calling for the exile of minorities/degenerate (if they don't use the word degenerate) being fine (even if you cannot exile people like that you can't just go kick out your own civilian groups, no other country (who also all suck) will take them, which historically will lead to concentration and then deathcamps (the exile posters know this, but they count on others being to stupid to realize this)). This is also a problem with Musks new twitter moderation system btw. Who explicitly let people calling for the exile of groups of people back on twitter). See also Scott banning NRx for a while on his blog comments. Not people talking about neoreactionism, but just the words neoreaction/nrx etc.
Prob yes, I just know there is a secondary small rightwing org which other rightwingers use to push their hateful message regarding lgbt people, forgot the specific name but could look it up, doesn't really matter that much for the big point I was trying to make. But yes, pediatrics probably.
Yeah, the American Academy of Pediatrics (legit professional organization for youth medicine) vs the American College of Pediatricians (socially conservative activist organization for whitewashing conservative views but has a name that makes them sound more neutral)
Well, they've basically built an identity around thinking that assigning numbers to things solves philosophy, so from then on it's not too big a step to believe that doing the same thing to people (using IQ) will solve society.
Well yeah but I meant, how do they even think the race => IQ thing even works since they think IQ measures "real intelligence" and is mostly heritable... like do they think there's some high IQ gene that only white people have (something that is incredibly easy to disprove) or that melanin makes you stupid? Do they think all African people have the same genetic profiles even though there's way more genetic diversity within Africa than Europe or Asia? Like what's their cover story? None of it really makes any biological sense and I know there are biologists among the rationalists, so... I don't know wouldn't you at some point admit that you don't have a mechanism of action so your hypothesis can't be correct?
Wasn't one of the big Kolmogoroc Complicity posts also the other Scott (No not the dilbert one he is just deluded man who believes he can mind control the cummies, not a Rationalist, the other other Scott).
I can’t sneer much at that. It’s healthy to care more about the
quality of one’s haters and not the quantity of them.
I think it’s funny though that OP’s question was “I was really
interested in the EA and rationalist community until I learned about
SBF, not just the fraud thing but, like, wth is a polycule anyways?” and
Scott’s answer is, “pfff, SBF is hardly representative of the community,
most of us haven’t scammed people out of billions of dollars, and as a
polycule afficionado myself what SBF was into can hardly be considered a
polycule”.
Well that just inspires bunches of confidence don’t it?
and then a book coming out that was even endorsed by Elon Musk! It
really felt like we were on the verge of something great!
oh my sweet summer child. just wait until they find out about Musk
too.
How does "divorced from caring what other people think of you" transpire to "it's healthy to care more about the quality of one's haters and not the quantity of them"?
I’m always surprised how, even though all right-wing people grow up
hearing stories of Christians who heroically kept practicing their faith
even when despised by the secular world, and all left-wing people grow
up hearing stories of how gay and trans people heroically kept living
their true identity even when mainstream society hated and persecuted
them
Fun game: go to any post of his where he mentions The NY Times and how he thinks they are the scum of the earth and ask yourself “is this an objective take, or is he maybe reacting to how The NY Times piece impacted what people think of him”
[deleted]
If I cannot position myself as an embattled iconoclast, I am miserable and bored, and also one of my core tenets is to not care in the slightest what others think about me.
aaaaaand that’s why we don’t talk about neoreaction in public.
Care about what people think of you, only to the extent that it prevents you from being burned at the stake. Okay, gotcha.
Do I wanna know what the “Kolmogorov Complicity” and was it supposed to be complexity?
I can’t sneer much at that. It’s healthy to care more about the quality of one’s haters and not the quantity of them.
I think it’s funny though that OP’s question was “I was really interested in the EA and rationalist community until I learned about SBF, not just the fraud thing but, like, wth is a polycule anyways?” and Scott’s answer is, “pfff, SBF is hardly representative of the community, most of us haven’t scammed people out of billions of dollars, and as a polycule afficionado myself what SBF was into can hardly be considered a polycule”.
Well that just inspires bunches of confidence don’t it?
oh my sweet summer child. just wait until they find out about Musk too.
Are we a joke to you… ow wait shit we are…
Christ, what an asshole.