But that’s just the thing! Nietzche’s fundamental innovation is to view all of these things: morality, politics, economics, indeed any kind of social or philosophical question through an incredibly narrowly psychological lens. It’s his obsessive persistence in this, and his excessive sensitivity to the deep irrationality in human nature (I hesitate to go with many people in saying “brilliance”, because what’s “brilliance”?), which makes him such a powerful critic of Western culture. For Nietzsche, the entire history of the world is nothing more than the history of individual sick people working out their issues, and generally doing badly.

But Siskind doesn’t have any of that, because he can only think in terms of a shallow combination of overcoming bias and his own unexamined prejudices. Siskind’s problem is that he doesn’t even view the psychological psychologically.

Well I’m not really critiquing his writing style. I’m using a reasonably complementary analysis of his writing style to sternly criticise his thought. That means I fundamentally disagree with your own paragraph in praise of his thought, whereas I actually disagree with you that his writing is poor - I think he’s an intelligent and effective writer.

Yeah, this is just as much or more a narrativisation of the inevitable conceptual trend as it is an attempt to explain what actually happened one event after another. If I were writing a book it would go next to much longer passages about racism and race science in American and world history and about race science in California Ideology land and the rationalist movement itself. This story would appear with a “but LessWrong would always have turned out this way”.

It’s notable, I think, that you can tell the same sort of story about Spencer back in the 19th century: as long as you have the backbone of naive biologism, everything will come out right for your Imperial project.

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.

Sure!

“We have built the torment nexus” but for more literate morons who read Borges

i’m gonna take a moment here to point out there seems to be a widespread historical error about bentham’s role

bentham was neither a “total” utilitarian, nor particularly hardcore about how to assess units of pleasure/pain - he believed (a) that what you want to do is work out in a practical fashion how to maximise pleasure and minimise pain of people who currently exist, and (b) that there were pretty impractical ways to do it

he was a legal mind, concerned with public policy and the rectification of injustice. the “total” view comes from sedgwick, who much later in the mid-19th century was the real formaliser of modern utilitarianism - it’s from him that the EA types get their incessant trade-offs and indeed specifically the view that future lives have, by parity of reason, to count. bentham by contrast was in many ways not a particularly philosophical thinker, and intended rather to apply a radically reduced psychological theory to social problem-solving - he also left behind very little finished work, inland this is a typical feature of his philosophical style

the “utility” reduction was something that had been floating around in british moral philosophy (then not distinguished from psychology) for some time, and bentham put it into action. by contrast, sidgwick was a later full time ethicist devoted to the academic study of the by then popular utilitarian system in the abstract

this idea of bentham the radical versus mill the moderate is justified, but seems to come, primarily, from mill’s aversion to bentham’s “pushpin is as good as poetry”, which permitted no weighting of the utilitarian scale in favour of “higher pleasures”

but it is easy to see in this light that bentham’s radicalism doesn’t give you the juice for an extension to EA, since the radicalism of EA is not in giving equal weight to all kinds of pleasure/pain

If the last act of the human race is to raise a forlorn statue of that woman in every town square it will be a fitting end

This is fun, after several paragraphs poo-pooing the risk of psychosis (and, frankly, fair enough, I literally have no domain knowledge here), we get:

Aggressive Behavior: This is just going to be the same as psychosis. Adderall isn’t going to magically turn gentle old grandmothers into killing machines. If you’re already a kind of violent guy, and you take a lot of Adderall, maybe it’ll push you over the edge.

Dude, have you ever met a user of [any stimulant]?

Even had I not been primed by the post, that unassuming banner pic would have set off the hairs up and down my arm

Alright I know you’re temp banned but let’s just leave this to remind you that - whatever your opinion of philosophers - in a territorial pissing match between philosophers and…a software course you took one time…the philosophers, who between them have a very different and would you believe it somewhat richer account of doxa (look at that, it’s even in Greek), probably have kind of an edge here.

No, but Singer does mean stuff like “supply birth control to people who don’t have birth control” and “make them rich and educated so they have fewer kids” which eugenics or not is a real policy response by governments which had to deal with famine pursued