TL;DR:
I rant a bunch about how the silly eschatology of Yudkowsky and his cult have been hijacked by monopolistic corporate goons to push generative AI. Figured y’all might be interested.
You might notice that I really, really don’t like Yudkowsky and the Rationalists. Honestly, the biggest reason? It’s because they almost lured me into their nonsense. The only reason I figured out how awful they were and avoided being sucked in? It’s because I read one of Yudkowsky’s posts claiming his rational methods were superior to the scientific method, which set off a lot of alarm bells in my head, and sent me down a serious research rabbit hole. I do not take kindly to people making a sucker out of me.
Yeah I felt a certain allure back when I was tragically afflicted with teenager brain and thought the idea of thinking logically was neato. At the time Mr. Yudkowsky was on the Overcoming Bias blog.
Eventually I noticed they were horribly racist, sexist, unscientific, and not-as-logically-thinking-as-advertised because of their weird evo-psych and gender beliefs and drifted away to the feminism blog-o-sphere instead (where I caused enough minor drama for a TERF to angrily blog about me haha, the internet was so much fun back then).
Hah I wish I could say I was still a teenager when I almost got sucked in, but…
And yeah, the internet was so much more fun back in the day.
I finally got to reading this through after work and there’s so much good stuff in there! one thread I wanted to pick at in particular:
All of this AI doomer ideology being used? We can trace all of it back to the SFF community. To the delightful Singularity novels of the 80s, 90s, and naughts. (To their credit, all of the singularity fiction writers I’ve seen mention the topic are pretty repulsed by the Rationalists and their ilk.)
it’s really reassuring to see a science fiction and fantasy industry perspective on TESCREAL ideas alongside a deep dive into the history of how the rationalists took ideas they got from sci-fi and twisted them into a cult. to be honest, ever since rationalist ideas started capturing large portions of my industry (programming), I’ve felt kind of foolish reading the sci-fi I used to be a big fan of. I feel like reading the perspective in your post actually went a ways towards repairing my relationship with that fiction.
it’s good to know that e.g. our good friend Charlie has the correct perspective on these bozos
Another one who has written critically about the Singularity is Ken MacLeod, in his Fall Revolution series. Basically, the 1%-eters upload, eff off to Jupiter, and EMP-bomb the rest of the solar system in when their simulations run amuck.
Sigh added to the list. (I already enjoyed his corp wars stories, the addition of reactionaries including the minority reactionary felt so topical)
The Fall Revolutions books are quite old. I didn’t really get into the Corp War trilogy.
Newton’s Wake is also a nice commentary on a hard takeoff singularity where the dominant faction is a Glaswegian crime gang.
Now there is a concept, the Glaswegian crime gang singularity.
Are ice cream vans involved?
Charlie always comes to mind when I say I want to read better sci-fi — he’s very high on my reading list once I get through the stack of material I’ve gathered for the next draft of A Brief Primer on Technofascism
Yeah, I thought about bringing his ideas up more as examples (definitely seen him pop in Sneerclub a few times), but I’ve got no idea if he would want to be even more prominent in this conversation than he already is. And the post was already more than long enough.
I mean, a lot of that fiction is just really good! Frankly, the rationalists tend to miss the point so hard, hyperfocusing on the cool gadgets and missing the commentaries on civilization, society, history, human nature, etc. Don’t let their awful beige California ideology ruin your fondness of some genuinely entertaining, thought-provoking literature.
awesome!
Thanks!
Good rant, seems not controversial or weird at all.
(And lol, because I also go ‘sigh, okay this is going to sound weird as fuck’ when I talk to people outside of here about this LWsphere stuff. I do sometimes call sneerclub a hategroup but just out of the ‘here is the steelman handout for the LW people’ impulse, and a reminded to myself that while I don’t think it is one now, it could very easily turn into one, esp if we were to start brigading. I have a solution on how to fix all that, but sadly I cannot fit that all in the margin of this comment).
Hm. Maybe we should get Tony Ortega to start covering the rats. He’s done good work on Scientology, independently now and earlier at the Village Voice and other papers.
I have a solution on how to fix all that, but sadly I cannot fit that all in the margin of this comment
definitely feel free to start at thread in the instance meta sub to discuss if you don’t mind making the idea public, or DM myself or David on here if you’d prefer to keep it private
Sorry it was a Fermats Last Theorem joke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat’s_Last_Theorem I don’t have any real ideas, it is just a thing I worry about (but without proof, esp as right now this place is tiny as F and I have not seen anybody do anything bad (imho), stuff like punching down or excessive stalking (while punching down)).
Thank you!
I actually have some thoughts about that topic as well- could be an interesting thread! (I personally think that we are, at least to a small extent, similar dynamic-wise to the cult survivor networks that help their friends and family escape the cult they themselves escaped- after all, a huge number of us are former Rationalists or, like myself, narrowly escaped their gravitational pull. Kinda puts a weird twist on our relationship to the Rationalists. Doesn’t make us immune from transitioning from “unkind critics” to something worse, especially if we were to start brigading or something else awful, but I think has some valuable social lessons for the group?)
I didn’t actually have that much thoughts sorry, I was making a fermats last theorem joke.
And im not sure how much the mods want to change it into a support group. I thankfully never could really fall into the Rationalists as I live in The Netherlands, it did give me brainrot on certain subjects, enough for people to start mentioning that I sometimes defend weird things, and that was one of the many things which got me into becoming a little bit more critical of the movement. (that and well, reading and interacting with slatestarcodex reddit people, at least I got out before they created themotte). There are also enough people here (or at least there were on reddit not sure if they jumped over) who were onto the Rationalists from the start due to badphil stuff.
So, guess I do have thoughts. It should probably be both here, a sort of support network and a ‘lol ow god, get over highschool’ place. Bit like how reddit was. And on reddit even after we got more and more people following, the amount of brigading going on was pretty low.
And im not sure how much the mods want to change it into a support group.
i mean, not really? while i don’t want to be needlessly cruel to recent leavers, and we can and have helped, that’s not why sneerclub exists. that said, there’s nowhere else, so they’re gonna end up here anyway. so i guess don’t be unfairly cruel. just fairly cruel.
Yeah being a full-on support group sounds EXHAUSTING. But we definitely already fulfilled that role to a small extent for a small number of people, especially back on Reddit where this space and rationalist spaces were more porous?
And I’m all for just cruelty to the eugenicists, neoreactionaries, and other nasties of the Rationalist movement. They have MORE than earned it. Something something Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance something something.
Oh damn that’s actually pretty good, I’m sad I didn’t get the joke. (Lots of jokes sail over my head. I’m very literal much of the time, hah.)
I was in the States, so I was more at risk- but I’m a huge science nerd, enough that Yudkowsky’s anti-science crap tossed up a BUNCH of red flags for me, and convinced me to start seriously researching the Rationalists and looking for critics.
Yeah it’s interesting to see which of the regulars from Reddit transfer over or not. Took me months, and it was researching for this essay among old Sneerclub posts that inspired the switch.
Don’t worry about not getting the joke, you need to have heard of it, and need to have remembered it. I just recall it because people told me a story about the joke being written on a toilet door somewhere. (even nerd toilet graffiti is deeply cringe in a way).
the prophecy is real!
I’m still reading it, but I really like what I’ve seen from your rant so far (and it’s properly NSFW-tagged here, which we appreciate)! definitely feel free to check out the MoreWrite sub here if you want to write more on generative AI in the future and would like to bounce some ideas off of a friendly community
if it’s alright with you, I grabbed an archived copy of this post for folks who’d prefer to view it without having to visit reddit directly
I spent a lot of time on r/SneerClub back in the day, I know to keep things NSFW, hah! And I’ll check out MoreWrite, that sounds fun!
And the archived copy is totally fine by me, who knows how long Reddit will survive?
And the archived copy is totally fine by me, who knows how long Reddit will survive?
given how thoroughly adequate lemmy and kbin are as federated reddit replacements (and in some cases they’re better, in spite of the jank — there’s nobody pushing shareholder and advertiser interests to the detriment of communities here), I suspect Reddit may not survive too far past whatever monetization scheme follows their future failed IPO
Pretty much how I feel. Genuinely considering starting a lemmy instance or something to take over for the subreddit for my books.
I can definitely recommend it! feel free to check out the source code for our instance deployment if you’d like to see how we manage it in production (though we host natively on NixOS instead of using the Docker containers that the lemmy devs provide)
This is arcane, eldritch knowledge my mortal brain cannot comprehend.
My web guy can probably read it just fine, though, thanks for sharing!
ah, exposure to NixOS may cause your web guy to either crash or become unreadable as all of his output becomes functional programming, but he may be able to data mine some good settings from our config
i dunno, that’s a hell of a lot of inertia. way more than digg had. its death will be a long slow decay.
