It’s all a system. None of that shit is organic. Even on /r/SSC TP0 and Kirkegaard had to pretend they didn’t actually know each other personally

These people are racism Trotskyists

These people really need the Tao Te Ching

due to all the 20th century conflicts

I assume he’s referring to the same question I was asking: did you just extrapolate this from the phrase “fucked up, disastrous mess” (referring to the sheer number of different systems in Europe?), because I think the big long reply above seriously undersells the fact that “20th century conflicts” aren’t even mentioned or gestured at in the video. There’s a map showing…different countries…but while 20th century conflicts changed various borders in Europe, they aren’t the origin of the borders between countries in Europe, or the origin of different European countries developing their own independent rail systems without any centralised plan - because they’re different countries, and the various bodies which today unify much of the continent only began to come into existence after the Second World War.

If we were talking about Former Yugoslavia, you’d actually be right! The integrated rail infrastructure of that region was completely devastated by the 1990s. But that’s not the focus here.

I think it misses the word for the trees to put the emphasis on a libertarian bent. The British and American class systems are perfectly capable of enforcing the same rules for prestige and polite discussion in order to favour some preferred hegemonic power without endorsing libertarian values. Indeed libertarianism as a movement most certainly adopts those rules because - for all that it may derive political support from (primarily white) guys of all sorts of backgrounds - it’s a fundamentally aristocratic proposition, right down to almost absurdist details such as its propensity to distribute land amongst an elite who employ lesser beings to work it.

In the case of rationalism, the emphasis should instead be on control: Yudkowsky built his system to control what was and wasn’t acceptable thinking, ostensibly for the benefit of the thinker. Its departures from actually very good patterns of thinking are what take it into cult territory, as the rigidity of the rules meets the hard wall of reality, and forces adherents to choose between reality and fantasy.

And as I say below to David, sure, there were other trends in play (most especially - as I note above as well - the tendency for America’s moral arc to bend towards racism). But I’d push back on suggesting that IQ-fetishism is distinct from naive biologism. Rather, IQ-fetishism itself is an expression of naive biologism (as we can see tracing its antecedents through back to Herbert Spencer), because you don’t get IQ-fetishism without the spectres of relativism and nurturism which, politically, it purports to counter-act - “IQ” is a supposedly sound, stable, measurable, cognitive category, where the alternative is understood to be a tangled mess of occult entities which cannot be reduced to any structure in the brain (and IQ holds out the promise of being reducible to g, which is in its whole conception reducible to a structure in the brain).

In this way the speculative futurism is simply of a piece with the biologism: once you reduce everything to (this very peculiar and highly naive, already science-fictional, concept of) the physical, you can manipulate it to generate whatever future you want. By the same token, the eugenic and fascistic trend in science-fiction pursues the same conceptual route. But it is only with the right historical ingredients, and the right players to activate those ingredients - which is to say an unequal society and the tendency to have people who want to naturalise that inequality - that the mixture becomes potently racist, and Yudkowsky, so to speak, is the one building the pot to specification.

Scholars of fascism and nazism do it all the time! The target of quotes like that is supposed to be those who deliberately muddy the waters. The “call a nazi a nazi” principle is a blunt instrument, and there are other tools in the anti-nazi kit.

[some hours later…] ah, the quote is from AR Moxon, whom I happen to know is both (a) not remotely averse to going deeper on what makes the nazis, (b) distinctly averse to not going deeper

It’a a magnificent giveaway though. “All the stock images of that bird look the same to me”. Yeah, I agree that you’re not personally capable of critically assessing the material here.

I SAID I WANTED HOT WHEELS FOR CHRISTMAS

I don’t see how that works here. Humans don’t become impregnably narcissistic through bad management, rather insofar as management is the problem and as the scenario portrays it humans become incredibly good at managing information into increasingly tight self-serving loops. What the machine in this scenario would have to be able to do would not be “get super duper organised”. Rather it would have to be able to thoughtfully balance its own evolving systems against the input of other, perhaps significantly less powerful or efficient, systems in order to maintain a steady, manageable input of new information.

In other words, the machine would have to be able to slow down and become well-rounded. Or at least well-rounded in the somewhat perverse way that, for example, an eminent and uncorrupted historian is “well-rounded”.

In still other words it would have to be human, in the sense that human are already “open” information-processing creatures (rather than closed biological machines) who create processes for building systems out of that information. But the very problem faced by the machine’s designer is that humans like that don’t actually exist - no historian is actually that historian - and the human system-building processes that the machine’s designer will have to ape are fundamentally flawed, and flawed in the sense that there is, physically, no such unflawed process. You can only approach that historian by a constant careful balancing act, at best, and that as a matter just of sheer physical reality.

So the fanatics have to settle for a machine with a hard limit on what it can do and all they can do is speculate on how permissive that limit is. Quite likely, the machine has to do what the rest of us do: pick around in the available material to try to figure out what does and doesn’t work in context. Perhaps it can do so very fast, but so long as it isn’t to fold in on itself entirely it will have to slow down to a point at which it can co-operate effectively (this is how smart humans operate). At least, it will have to do all of this if it is to not be an impregnable narcissist.

That leaves a lot of wiggle room, but it dispenses with the most abject “to the moon” nonsense spouted by the anti-social man-children who come up with this shit.

Come on, you’re talking about America, when did mainstream popular appeal ever limit anyone with money?

This “Gettier” attack seems to me to have no more interesting content than a “stopped clock”. To use an extremely similar, extremely common phrase, the New York Times would have been “right for the wrong reasons” to call Scott Alexander a racist. And this would be conceptually identical to pointing out that, I dunno, crazed conspiracy theorists suggested before he was caught that Jeffrey Epstein was part of an extensive paedophile network.

But we see this happen all the time, in fact it’s such a key building block of our daily experience that we have at least two cliches devoted to capturing it.

Perhaps it would be interesting if we were to pick out authentic Gettier cases which are also accusations of some kind, but it seems likely that in any case (i.e. all cases) where an accusation is levelled with complex evidence, the character of justification fails to be the very kind which would generate a Gettier case. Gettier cases cease to function like Gettier cases when there is a swathe of evidence to be assessed, because already our sense of justification is partial and difficult to target with the precision characteristic of unexpected failure - such cases turn out to be just “stopped clocks”. The sense of counter-intuitivity here seems mostly to be generated by the convoluted grammar of your summarising assessment, but this is just an example of bare recursivity, since you’re applying the language of the post to the post itself.

The only thing any of us can do is choose how we are going to get dumber every day

My impression is that, as a group, on average, rationalists tend to both feel and repress more intense feelings of shame and guilt than the rest of society can be bothered dealing with, and I say that as somebody who has spent nearly two years doing addiction recovery