yes really, that’s literally the title of the post. (archive copy, older archive copy) LessWrong goes full Motte.

this was originally a LW front-page post, and was demoted to personal blog when it proved unpopular. it peaked at +10, dropped to -6 and is +17 right now.

but if anyone tries to make out this isn’t a normative rationalist: this guy, Michael “Valentine” Smith, is a cofounder of CFAR (the Center for Applied Rationality), a LessWrong offshoot that started being about how to do rational thinking … and finally admitted it was about “AI Risk”

this post is the Rationalist brain boys, the same guys who did FTX and Effective Altruism, going full IQ-Anon wondering how the market could fail so badly as not to care what weird disaster assholes think. this is the real Basilisk.

when they’re not spending charity money on buying themselves castles, this is what concerns the modern rationalist

several commenters answered “uh, the customers.” and tried to explain the concept of markets to OP, and how corporations like selling stuff to normal people and not just to barely-crypto-fash. they were duly downvoted to -20 by valiant culture warriors who weren’t putting up with that sort of SJW nonsense.

comment by author, who thinks “hard woke” is not only a thing, but a thing that profit-making corporations do so as not to make a profit: “For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t describe myself as leaning right.” lol ok dude

right-wingers really don’t believe in, or even understand, capitalism or markets at all. they believe in hierarchy. that’s what’s offended this dipshit.

now, you might think LessWrong Rationalists, Slate Star Codex readers, etc. tend towards behaving functionally indistinguishably from Nazis, but that’s only because they work so hard at learning from their neoreactionary comrades to reach that stage

why say in 10,000 words what you can say in 14

  • raktheundead
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    111 year ago

    In retrospect, maybe it’s kind of a pity that Silicon Valley as a collective didn’t struggle this much with an adequate answer to “what are customers :S”, because it might have stopped some of the biggest bullshit that came from them.

    • @gerikson
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      111 year ago

      Startups don’t really need customers, and startups are where it’s at for the SV / HN / LW crowd.