Why is it that religion as a whole is fine, but not this religion?
Me: This plant is poisonous.
You, a lesswrong brain genius: Plants are a vital part of the Earth's ecosystem. They make the oxygen that we breathe. You call yourself a vegetarian, and yet you have a problem with this plant. Why is it that plants as a whole are fine, but not this plant?
Me: This plant is poisonous.
Let's see who he reads. Vox Day (who is now using ChatGPT to "disprove" evolution), Christopher Rufo, Curtis Yarvin, Emil Kirkegaard, Mars Review model Bimbo Ubermensch.... It's a real Who's Who of Why The Fuck Do I Know Who These People Are?!
For what it's worth I know one of the founders of e/acc and they told me they were radicalized by a date they had with you where they felt you bullied them about this subject.
A-and yep, that's my dose of cursed for the day
It took me one (1) science-fiction convention to discover that liking the same TV show as somebody does not mean we vibrate on the same soul wavelength. I imagine that professional writers learn rather quickly that just because somebody bought your book doesn't mean that you want to spend time with them.
The under-acknowledged Rule Zero for all this is that the Sequences were always cult shit. They were not intended to explain Solomonoff induction in the way that a textbook would, so that the reader might learn to reason about the concept. Instead, the ploy was to rig the game: Present the desired conclusion as the "simplest", pretend that "simplicity" is quantifiable, assert that scientists are insufficiently Rational(TM) because they reject the quantifiably "simplest" answer... School bad, blog posts good, tithe to MIRI.
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.
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
Intelligent design theory involves probabilistic judgments such as "irreducible complexity", the idea that life is too complex and well-organized to have been produced randomly by undirected evolution. Such probabilistic judgments rely on either a causal model (e.g. a model of how evolution would work and what structures it could create), or some global model that yields probabilities more directly.
No, they rely upon numbers extracted from up a creationist's colon.
There is a duality between cosmic expansion and atom shrinkage.
Hey now, the atom just got out of a cold swimming pool.
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.
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.
We should have known the English rain was trouble when it started giving people tans
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 wrote 800 words explaining how TracingWoodgrains is a dishonest hack, when I could have been getting high instead.
But we don't need to rely on my regrets to make this judgment, because we have a science-based system on this ~~podcast~~ instance. We can sort all the SneerClub comments by most rated. Nothing that the community has deemed an objective banger is vague.