People are still subscribed to the subreddit. When a post gets made, it goes on their reddit feed. Lots of mobile users in particular will just have seen it pop up while doomscrolling.

Jerking it for hours in an empty hotel room, bathed in the natural understanding that at home your partner is doing the same

“New right” redirects to “Right-wing populism” and I would like anyone to explain to me how is the same old reactionary nonsense “new” in any way. In any case, how the fuck is it possible to be associated with anti-fascists and fascists at the same time?

I’d have gone with Neue Americanische Freundschaft but it’s both too subtle and already taken

I’ve finally got around to replying to this but it’s been burning a hole in my subconscious

I think that’s a naive interpretation of the interests in play here.

Altman aptly demonstrated that a yes/no on regulations isn’t the money’s goal here, the goal is to control how things get regulated. But at the same time Democrats are hardly “eager to regulate” simpliciter, and the TESCREALs/Silicon Valley can hardly be said to have felt the hammer come down in the past. It may be part of some players’ rhetoric (e.g. Peter Thiel) that the Republicans (both pre- and post-Trump) are their real friends insofar as the Republicans are eager to just throw out corporate regulations entirely, but that’s a different issue: it’s no longer one of whether you can buy influence, it’s a matter of who you choose to buy influence with in the government, or better yet which government you try to put in power.

It should be noted at this point that mentioning Thiel is hardly out of court, even if he’s not in the LessWrong stream: he shares goals and spaces with big elements of the general TESCREAL stream. He’s put money into Moldbug’s neo-reaction, which is ultimately what puts Nick Land sufficiently on the radar to find his way into Marc Andreesen’s ludicrous manifesto.

And why should the TESCREALs fear being painted as a satanic cult in the first place? Has that been a problem for anybody but queer people and schoolteachers up to this point? It seems unlikely to me that anyone involved in Open AI or Anthropic is going to just stop spending their absolute oceans of capital for fear that LibsOfTikTok is going to throw the spotlight on them. And why would Raichik do that in the first place? The witch hunters aren’t looking for actual witches, they’re looking for political targets, and I don’t see what’s in it for them in going after some of the wealthiest people on the West Coast except in the most abstract “West Coast elites” fashion, which as we all know is just another way of targeting liberals and queers.

I had a long reply which i think made some errors of interpretation as to what you’re saying. I find this “cancels” language confusing, but I don’t have the energy to do any more in-depth clarification on this thing!

Ooooh I get it for Yudkowsky now, I thought you were targeting something else in his comment, on Davis I remain a bit confused, because previously you seemed to be saying that his epistemic luck was in having come up with the term - but this cannot be an example of epistemic luck because there is nothing (relevantly) epistemic in coming up with a term

I suppose I must be confused, your saying that the piece was interesting was just because it made you think about the phrase “Gettier attack”?

Un-fucking-believable

Apparently, pace my own username, you don’t know who the fuck I am.

I don’t think any of that first paragraph is true. LessWrong and EA very blatantly do not teach people how to spot fallacious reasoning. Nor does the culture of either encourage the adherents of their one movement to repress their “irrational” emotions. Fallacious reasoning, emotional reasoning, irrational thinking - all three of these self-evidently ran rampant in the culture, so there has to be something else going on here which would explain both what the culture is like and why you have an impression that seems to line up so squarely with their self-presentation.

Rather, it seems that what happens at LessWrong and EA is roughly that a charismatic self-presentation of “rational thinking” (with attendant ideas along the lines of repressing one’s emotions and so on) hooks in impressionable people, who - like victims of any multi-level marketing scheme - quickly replace their own styles and habits of thought with those propounded and taught by the movement. So those people do do something like “repress” their emotions, but only in the sense that they repress those styles of thought and emotional presentation which had previously come naturally to them. But of course the movement also teaches that it is right and proper or that there is even a sort of duty to make impassioned (whiny) emotional appeals to this or that privileged source of the right kind of emotions to feel (such as feeling indignant about normie reasoning, or feminism, or whatever), which are (some would say fallaciously) considered above rational criticism themselves.

You can see that sort of thing play out in basically any rationalist discussion or article at Vox’s “Future Perfect”!

So what you describe with respect to drugs and so on is true enough but misses the point. It’s rather that throughout the movement there’s a strong current of precisely the things that in its self-presentation the movement is supposed to ward off. The drug scene isn’t an outlet for repressed feelings, it’s just a particular place (of many) towards which the movement’s leaders have directed the energies (which they don’t repress but encourage) of their followers.

The shame and guilt thing is a separate issue, it has nothing to do with the conscious or directed repression of emotions under the auspices of the movement.

This whole situation is making me so glad I stopped taking drugs and never learned to program

Born too young to be made to learn how to program in school

Born too old to lose my code monkey job to a literal mechanical code monkey in a mutually disastrous management fuckup

Born just in time to burn out on drugs and alcohol and watch the machine revolution from home

Btw…

I am not going to discuss the actual experiments that have been done on calibration—you can find them in my book chapter on cognitive biases and global catastrophic risk1—because I’ve seen that when I blurt this out to people without proper preparation, they thereafter use it as a Fully General Counterargument, which somehow leaps to mind whenever they have to discount the confidence of someone whose opinion they dislike, and fails to be available when they consider their own opinions.

lol

Ed: oh fuck it my bad you’re a horrible racist. Alright

The question is always, and I mean ALWAYS “what exactly do you mean by ask questions and discuss issues?” Because from the very first second you complain that people don’t do that, it is a universal law that I will ultimately or quickly find you (a) refusing to do that, (b) complaining about somebody who did exactly that because it didn’t go your way. Some valorised ideal of “someone who asks questions and discusses issues” is cant, it is for all intents and purposes meaningless beyond what LessWrongers would call “signalling” that this is the sort of person you personally would like to be, hugely conditioned by class/culture/etc.

It’s almost exclusively a matter of vocabulary: people identify speaking in a particular register with being that kind of person as they understand that ideal, to the point that they will literally be blind and deaf to real life question marks in order to push an interpretation through as to whether or not their conversation partner matches up.

Don’t say stuff like that, be concrete and specific.