First, learn the difference between scorn or disdain and hate.
Second, read the comments in the thread already made about those "'sort of' correct" predictions.
Mastodon has Reply Guys. Lemmy has Cater To Me Whilst I Am Literally, Not Figuratively, Taking a Shit Guys.
Making an analogy to something more familiar, or to anything that actually happens in real life, is too pedestrian for a true visionary.
(It's just a guess on my part, but given the extent to which conspiracy theorists are all marinating in a common miasma these days, I'd expect that a 9/11 twoofer would be more likely to deny relativity for being "Jewish physics".)
And here's Ben Goertzel, formerly MIRI's director of research:
I find myself mentally comparing Langan to Eliezer Yudkowsky, another high-IQ maverick who has personally avoided the academic establishment, while developing his own deep and idiosyncratic view of the universe. Both Langan and Yudkowsky have the habit of introducing a lot of novel vocabulary for describing their ideas, though they have different styles of doing so (Langan likes inventing new words; Yudkowsky prefers assigning new meanings to commonplace phrases, e.g. “Friendly AI” or any of the zillion other “defined terms” commonplace on the Less Wrong blog/network he founded). [...] Langan’s style is very clear and elegant, in some places beautiful, but doesn’t do the reader any favors — you really have to read each sentence and absorb it fully before going on to the next.
zoom and enhance
Langan’s style is very clear and elegant
Typical Langan, for reference:
In the CTMU, the self-inclusion process is known as conspansion and occurs at the distributed, Lorentz-invariant conspansion rate c, a time-space conversion factor already familiar as the speed of light in vacuo (conspansion consists of two alternative phases accounting for the wave and particle properties of matter and affording a logical explanation for accelerating cosmic expansion).
Goertzel is also co-editor of a book called Evidence for Psi — he's a Cosmist who believes in psychic powers.
Quoted for posterity/convenience:
in a world of greater legibility, romantic partners would have the conversation about "I'd trade up if I found somebody 10%/25%/125% better than you" in advance, and make sure they have common knowledge of the numbers
(Marriage makes sense as a promise not to do that period; but if so, you want to make sure that both partners are on the same page about that. Not everyone assumes that marriage means that.)
Her: I am never, ever letting you go unless I find someone 75% better. Me: Works for me.
oh hello there Performative Allistic Twitter
It’s not worth explaining because it’s stupid, but Roko’s conclusion was
(jazzy finger-snaps of approval)
I suspect that this is less about using language with which one's audience is familiar to convey a message accurately, and more about making the message sound obviously right and affirming the smartness of the audience because Computer Words.
I'm disappointed that they never (to my knowledge) tried to justify the purchase by saying they needed a castle to build a fortified base that would be safe against marauders in the event of civilizational collapse. The return on investment for keeping a catastrophic failure from becoming an existential one is (handwave, handwave) at least 10^69.
"We need a castle for Isaac Asimov's Foundation Beyond Thunderdome" would, at least, be on brand.
I just can't respect a man who is posturing and arrogant yet still fails to go for the phrasing "to whom you are speaking".
The opening line is... certainly a phrase.
I have been working on a research project into the scale, tractability and neglectedness of child marriage.
Later:
Some studies even showed that child marriage was associated with more positive outcomes, such as higher contraceptive use
Ummmmmmmmmm
Suppose you say that you’re 99.99% confident that 2 + 2 = 4.
Then you're a dillbrain.
Then you have just asserted that you could make 10,000 independent statements, in which you repose equal confidence, and be wrong, on average, around once. Maybe for 2 + 2 = 4 this extraordinary degree of confidence would be possible
Yes, how extraordinary that I can say every day that the guy in front of me at the bodega won't win the Powerball. Or that [SystemRandom().random() >= 0.9999 for i in range(10000)] makes a list that is False in all but one spot.
P(x|y) is defined as P(x,y)/P(y). P(A|A) is defined as P(A,A)/P(A) = P(A)/P(A) = 1. The ratio of these two probabilities may be 1, but I deny that there's any actual probability that's equal to 1. P(|) is a mere notational convenience, nothing more.
No, you kneebiter.
The Singularity (of hating that we know what those words mean) Is Near