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

  • @blakestaceyMA
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    2110 months ago

    Wokism is a conspiracy by Big Kitchenware to sell more woks

  • @gerikson
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    2010 months ago

    Even fucking Donald Trump as said that “woke” doesn’t mean anything. You’d think a bunch of “rationalists” would bother to define the term before complaining about it.

    • David GerardOPMA
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      1810 months ago

      “Oh, you know the ones”

  • @swlabr
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    1610 months ago

    MediaCorp: “In the interests of increasing our company valuation, we will make our business decisions as far right as legally acceptable, as any profit-seeking company is wont to do. Unrelatedly, inside our economic framework, we don’t care about the actors and writers since we can replace them with robots. They can starve to death after they lose their homes.”

    LW: crickets chirping

    MediaCorp: “We will continue to have token representation in our media to remain palatable to statistically significant market segments”

    LW: “Where’s the economic incentive? DAE silent majority???”

    • @kuna
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      8 months ago

      deleted by creator

  • keepcarrot [she/her]
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    1410 months ago

    I am told lesswrong is centrist and does not hate queer people, women, minorities, the poor so idk. Will wait for some quality dunks tho.

    Maybe movies like Barbie or whatever sell. Who can question the inscrutable prophetic minds of movie executives?

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
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      610 months ago

      I am told lesswrong is centrist and does not hate queer people, women, minorities, the poor so idk.

      I dug up so much out and out bigotry (often thinly masked in robot LARPing and Harry Potter jargon) over time that I don’t even know where to begin to link to examples of that without just using the Spongebob meme where he’s tearing up the wallpaper and pointing around and outside the house.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn
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    10 months ago

    Let us list some of the specific concrete examples of wokeism in this blog post and comments. For fun.

    1. a gay kiss in the background of a scene in Star Wars
    2. The movie Knives Out
    3. What James Damore got fired from Google for pushing back against (if you don’t remember this; he has pushing back against the idea that women make for just as good programmers as men do)
    4. Suing twitter for firing a significantly higher percentage of women than men during layoffs
    5. The episode The Star Spangled Man from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier where Sam Wilson gets profiled by police.
    6. Talking about ones membership of a protected group all the time
    7. Leaving / Disinvesting from Twitter after Elon Musk purchased it.
    8. Disney releasing a new Black Princess
    9. Corporate training that trains people to discriminate against majorities instead of minorities

    OK that’s probably enough…

    • Sailor Sega Saturn
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      10 months ago

      Also it was a close race, but the award for “most WTF comment” is a tie between:

      A policeman stops a black man, who complains about racial profiling, and then the policeman finds evidence of a crime, and says something like “police go where the crime is”?

      and

      please understand that the reason my mental netcode detected your behavior as agentic still seems to have been justified at the time.

      • @bitofhope
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        1510 months ago

        my mental netcode

        That not only sounds like robot LARP but a gamer attempting to talk like a programmer. I haven’t heard the word “netcode” used outside of video games context and even taking it as a metaphor for an aspect of human decision making, it shouldn’t be responsible for determining the agency of someone’s behavior.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]
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        1110 months ago

        please understand that the reason my mental netcode detected your behavior as agentic still seems to have been justified at the time.

        Please understand that LARPing as a robot and using robot talk to try to sound very smart is fucking cringe. the-more-you-know

  • raktheundead
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    1110 months 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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      1110 months ago

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

  • UlyssesT [he/him]
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    910 months ago

    IT IS LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE WITHOUT A SELF-INTEREST MOTIVE galaxy-brain