Comment by Eliezer Yudkowsky - I may never actually use this in a story, but in another universe I had thought of having a character mention that... call it the forces of magic with normative dimension... had evaluated one pedophile who had known his desires were harmful to innocents and never acted upon them, while living a life of above-average virtue; and another pedophile who had acted on those desires, at harm to others. So the said forces of normatively dimensioned magic transformed the second pedophile's body into that of a little girl, delivered to the first pedophile along with the equivalent of an explanatory placard. Problem solved. And indeed the 'problem' as I had perceived it was, "What if a virtuous person deserving our aid wishes to retain their current sexual desires and not be frustrated thereby?"
(As always, pedophilia is not the same as ephebophilia.)
I also remark that the human equivalent of a utility function, not that we actually have one, often revolves around desires whose frustration produces pain. A vanilla rational agent (Bayes probabilities, expected utility max) would not see any need to change its utility function even if one of its components seemed highly probable though not absolutely certain to be eternally frustrated, since it would suffer no pain thereby.
David wrote the better parts of that article! we’ve also got a few threads on urbit here on awful.systems (for example) — we dig into Yarvin’s original spec and find where he flat out says the namespace is meant to be an implementation of neoreactionary (technofascist) ideas, and I find some light but damning evidence that all of the supposedly interesting ideas in urbit are poorly implemented, plagiarized versions of ideas that Eelco Dolstra wrote about when describing the mathematics behind the then-obscure NixOS, for a master’s thesis whose publishing date was right before when Yarvin claims to have started on urbit
oh also, Tlon, the company behind urbit that certainly isn’t just Yarvin and Thiel hiding behind a shrub giggling, is a cult accelerator responsible for at least one high-profile death cult (Remilia, who host a bunch of infrastructure on urbit and are extremely active in the urbit community)
just in case you wondered if this rabbit hole led anywhere remotely sane
@self So basically it’s like a science fiction novel, except that they haven’t realised that it’s one of those novels where the author develops an entire society based on some weird totalitarian cult just so they can spend the rest of the plot demonstrating how nutso said society is?
Graydon Hoare pointed out on Mastodon (and more) that Urbit was in fact the Antiversity that Moldbug conspicuously failed to write up in the Unqualified Reservations days.
He believes Urbit will perform the social control function that he thinks universities perform.
You have to unpack a few zillion very dumb social assumptions there. (Or, y’know, not.)
@dgerard Oh, the Antiversity! I remember that. I think it was one of the first Lovecraftian horrors I was exposed to when I first started to take an interest in this particular rabbithole of weird.
El Sandifer and I just could not work out what the arsing fuck Yarvin was going on about there, El worked way too hard trying to track it down, and eventually we decided he just failed to write it despite taking people’s money to. Kicking myself we didn’t work out it was Urbit.
David wrote the better parts of that article! we’ve also got a few threads on urbit here on awful.systems (for example) — we dig into Yarvin’s original spec and find where he flat out says the namespace is meant to be an implementation of neoreactionary (technofascist) ideas, and I find some light but damning evidence that all of the supposedly interesting ideas in urbit are poorly implemented, plagiarized versions of ideas that Eelco Dolstra wrote about when describing the mathematics behind the then-obscure NixOS, for a master’s thesis whose publishing date was right before when Yarvin claims to have started on urbit
oh also, Tlon, the company behind urbit that certainly isn’t just Yarvin and Thiel hiding behind a shrub giggling, is a cult accelerator responsible for at least one high-profile death cult (Remilia, who host a bunch of infrastructure on urbit and are extremely active in the urbit community)
just in case you wondered if this rabbit hole led anywhere remotely sane
@self So basically it’s like a science fiction novel, except that they haven’t realised that it’s one of those novels where the author develops an entire society based on some weird totalitarian cult just so they can spend the rest of the plot demonstrating how nutso said society is?
yep! all these weird fuckers dream of pulling an L Ron and being taken seriously
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Graydon Hoare pointed out on Mastodon (and more) that Urbit was in fact the Antiversity that Moldbug conspicuously failed to write up in the Unqualified Reservations days.
He believes Urbit will perform the social control function that he thinks universities perform.
You have to unpack a few zillion very dumb social assumptions there. (Or, y’know, not.)
@dgerard Oh, the Antiversity! I remember that. I think it was one of the first Lovecraftian horrors I was exposed to when I first started to take an interest in this particular rabbithole of weird.
El Sandifer and I just could not work out what the arsing fuck Yarvin was going on about there, El worked way too hard trying to track it down, and eventually we decided he just failed to write it despite taking people’s money to. Kicking myself we didn’t work out it was Urbit.
I did not have Mr. Rust in the anti-Urbit camp (or even in the know-about-Urbit camp)
Also I guess Wikipedia is now part of the Cathedral
we’re all convinced we’re Denis Diderot, none more Cathedral