The discussion in the comments has continued in a low-key way. Now they're making excuses for why the nutbar is incomprehensible:

To understand why Chris thinks this way, it's important to remember that he had never been acculturated into the norms of the modern intellectual elite...

Langan has been "working" on the CTMU since the 1990s. People have been born since then and have had time to learn how to talk like academics.

And now I envy the me of five minutes ago.

"Solomonoff induction" is the string of mouth noises that Rationalists make when they want to justify their preconceived notion as the "simplest" possibility, by burying all the tacit assumptions that actual experience would let them recognize.

Yeah, it's been ages since I've heard anyone be that indirect about it... and if one is being indirect, the point is to minimize the reaction, not deliberately provoke one.

Whenever I see "rationalist" abbreviated to "rat", I think of the Sliders episode where they land on Fundamentalist Earth and discover an underground movement of "radical rationalists" or "rad rats".

So, if for no other reason, we should avoid abbreviating "rationalist" to "rat" because we do not need life to resemble Sliders.

Probably unrelated to the Eudaemons, the UC Santa Cruz grad students in the '70s who built hidden wearable computers to beat roulette.

It has come up before, but I don't mind seeing it posted at top level.

That hat could only work with New Year's Eve glasses from a year with "00".

In short: too correlated.

Thanks for taking on that task (I linked to your post to provide further details).

When I was an undergrad at MIT, I knew (not terribly well) the people who invited him to "debate" Time Cube there. He came to a low-key student party; someone tried to teach him the game of go because, you know, squares. The whole thing seemed funny at first and then vaguely mean-spirited and exploitative, so I blew off the "debate" itself. What sticks with me most after all these years are the vibes. He was genuinely happy to be there, a little perplexed and stand-offish among all the college kids... and on some level beneath that, wounded and angry.

Of the odd people in our orbit, Gene Ray was much less genial than Love 22, the street entertainer/numerologist from Key West who showed up for baseball games and who delighted in showing off his passport, which gave his legal name as "LOVE XXII". The Roman numerals meant that he was royalty in Europe, he'd say.

Much appreciated. This isn't the first time that archive.ph has gone all GOTO 10 about clicking squares, but I don't know what the cause might be.