to placate trans ideology
(Ozymandias voice) "I fully commit to acausal theory twenty-five minutes from now."
second warning: an xcancel search for "zizians" turns up so much transphobia that you'll feel like it's a late night on the Nebuchadnezzar and Tank accidentally loaded your brain with JK Rowling instead of kung fu.
Wait, the splinter group from the cult whose leader wants to bomb datacenters might be violent?
"Consider it from the perspective of someone who does not exist and therefore has no preferences. Who would they pick?"
If you are a normal, decent, well-socialized human being, you probably have not heard about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Actually explaining what this thing is will have to happen in several different stages. But I should start by telling you this re-write of the first Harry Potter book is around 660,000 words long.
The entire Lord of the Rings series, including The Hobbit, comes in at a little less than 580,000 words.
The audiobook is 67 hours long.
(and I’m hoping they don’t secretly suck)
relatable mood
(thinks)
Cum Jabbar
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.
Graham takes the nebulous concept of "best" and, at great length and with great effort, fails to bring clarity.
Makery: The bakery ... for straight men! Now with scones in monster truck and shark testosterone flavors! GRAAARRR
Scott here is provoking me to inchoate "fuck your trolley problems" rage.
You know, if I were ever actually confronted with a situation where I had to choose one child's life over another, the trauma would fuck me up for years. Anyone who says they could feel self-righteous in that circumstance is emotionally and morally diseased.