They gave him a thread in which to complain about being banned... Are these people polyamorous just because they don't know how to break up?
The key component of making good sneer club criticism is to never actually say out loud what your problem is.
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.
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?!
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.
Sounds like it could be the plot of a mystery novel akin to JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series.
The author is very much that type of guy:
Florida Man. Individualist. Free minds and free markets. Distrustful of ideologies, whether left or right.
"Ah," said Arthur, "this is obviously some strange usage of the word scientist that I wasn't previously aware of."
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)"
Consistent content that helps support people in their everyday lives [...] Just “selected Sequences reading and discussion” could be a reasonable format.
Bible study. You've reinvented Bible study.
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
I know both Watson and Myers. Neither of them were interested in "being tastemakers"; both of them stood on the right side of trying to make the skeptic/atheist spaces less of a sexist waste dump, and both of them caught hell for it. Myers was the one who blew the lid off Shermer's history of sexual harassment (and got blackballed from a lot of skeptics' events because of it). He was also part of the effort to make Atheism Plus a thing, and Watson was in favor too.* Carrier sued Myers and others after being removed from FreethoughtBlogs on what we'd now call #MeToo reasons. The rage tsunami directed at Watson for saying "guys, don't do that" was basically the trial run for GamerGate. More than anything else, it was the skeptic movement's decision that "no actually, being sexist is more fun" which drove out everyone interested in doing more than relitigating Bigfoot.
Harriet Hall got into trouble for just-asking-questions transphobia.
*The McCreight mentioned in that blog post later chose the name "Jey" and uses they/he pronouns.