To say it another way: We call them lecture halls, not debate halls, Yud.
From all my years in physics, I'm hard pressed to remember anything that resembles a debate as Yud seems to envision it. You might occasionally get a panel, where N participants sit on a stage and provide O(N) opinions.
Why did Yudkowsky choose to tweet about this now? Is there an article coming out suggesting that he's had relations with underage women, and he's trying to get ahead of it? Hmm.
I'll raise the question here instead of in the thread that gave me the idea, since it feels not quite right to bring the awful to NotAwfulTech:
At this point, I have real reservations recommending anything that Scott Aaronson has written for any purpose. I'm not going to elide his actual contributions to science, but I can't suggest that a student read any expository writing of his, not without such heavy caveats and contextualizing that my conscience would welcome any alternative. So, then: What do people read him for, and what are the alternatives?
I ... just ... what?
He made up a whole society to be mad at.
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.)
It's true: The sneerclub mod interface is a replica of the mummification machine from Young Sherlock Holmes, and when we ban people, we actually drown them in wax.
It only works with the chanting, of course.
Given the ... calibre of thinking on display in his other tweets (xharts?), I wouldn't be surprised if he just typed "Zizians" into Reddit's search box; /r/sneerclub currently comes up a few times near the top of results there.
"Ah," said Arthur, "this is obviously some strange usage of the word scientist that I wasn't previously aware of."
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 don't know of any either... To amend my earlier comment: it looks like a ghastly New Scientist/Forbes cocktail-party axis, with a dose of TESCREAL.