And I also think that long-term, the historiography of this stuff will lean more heavily on Kurzweil as a source than Yudkowsky, because Kurzweil is better-organized and professionally published.

That is interesting to think about. (Something feels almost defiant about imagining a future that has history books and PhD theses.) My own feeling is that Yudkowsky brought something much more overtly and directly culty. Kurzweil's vibe in The Age of Spiritual Machines and such was, as I recall, "This is what the scientists say, and this is why that implies the Singularity." By contrast, Yudkowsky was saying, "The scientists are insufficiently Rational to accept the truth, so listen to me instead. Academia bad, blog posts good." He brought a more toxic variation, something that emotionally resonated with burnout-trending Gifted Kids in a way that Kurzweil's silly little graphs did not. There was no Rationality as self-help angle in Kurzweil, no mass of text whose sheer bulk helped to establish an elect group of the saved.

The MIRI, CFAR, EA triumvirate promised not just that you could be the hero of your own story but that your heroism could be deployed in the service of saving humanity itself from certain destruction. Is it so surprising that this promise attracted people who were not prepared to be bit players in group housing dramas and abstract technical papers?

Good point.

Logic. Rationality. Intelligence. Somewhere in all these attempts to harness them for our shared humanity, they’d been warped and twisted to destroy it.

Oh, the warping and twisting started long before Ziz. (The Sequences are cult shit.)

You thought water was great, but have you tried H~2~O~2~?

🎶 we don't need no water let the motherfucker burn 🎶

I'm imagining a Dorothy Parker review of Honor Levy. "It took gumption to call this My First Book, in the face of the inevitable riposte, 'And it should be your last.'"

Monday. Cold pizza and a vape around 2 pm. The Adderall at the Urbit meetup last night was too revolting, but what can you do? You can't stay up til 5 posting nrx thirst traps on just nothing. They had those divine dubstep remixers in the green coats, and Mike Crumplar was perfectly scathing, angling for a hate-fuck, and it couldn't have been funnier. Absolute VOG unit!

— from "Diary of a Dimes Square Lady (during Days of Panic, Frenzy and World Change)"

oh lordy, there's a whole post

Why did evolution give most males so much testosterone instead of making low-T nerds? Obviously testosterone makes you horny and buff.

"Compared to me, 78% of the human male population are low-T betas" —Hbomberguy

It's fun to stand on the shoulders of giants... and having the standard stuff down cold is the best way to convince experts that when you do have a zany idea, it might be worth considering.

Back in 2009, Yud asked who he should do a "bloggingheads" dialog with. Two people suggested Langan.

And one suggested Scott Adams.

Chris is actually very pleasant to talk to if (like me) it does not bother you that he acts like he is much smarter than you.

Langan:

Of course, I'm talking about a ~90% White America becoming ~50% White in around 60 years, a cataclysmic demographic upheaval which violates every conceivable standard of national sovereignty along with the will and interests of the US majority, and thus cannot have happened by accident.

It's not even "GIGO" with these people. "Garbage In, Garbage Out" implies that the process between input and output is legitimate at least. They're not trying to make justifiable decisions in the face of incomplete information, or detect inconsistencies among their own beliefs, or anything of the sort. They're just emitting math-shaped noises to bolster their own egos and further insulate their cult. They use language nominally about changing one's beliefs in order to keep their own beliefs locked in place.

I begin to believe that some people literally do not have senses of humor with which to distinguish impossible statements meant nonseriously from seriously.

"It's everyone else's fault they don't recognize me as a genius," said the dork ass loser

Apropos:

Musk, the boy, loved video games and computers and Dungeons & Dragons and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and he still does. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” Musk tells Isaacson. Isaacson doesn’t raise an eyebrow, and you can wonder whether he has read “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” or listened to the BBC 4 radio play on which it is based, first broadcast in 1978. It sounds like this:

Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former galactic empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax free. . . . Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural because no one was really poor, at least, no one worth speaking of.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is not a book about how “we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.” It is, among other things, a razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism:

And for these extremely rich merchants life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet-building.