I happened to be at mass today. There was a little explanation in the missalette that not only did Jesus's death redeem the sins of everyone today, he also redeemed all the sinners who lived and died before Christ came. I dunno, it reminded me of the Roko's Basilisk eternal judgment computer simulation....

I can only assume the vibes were rancid

I recently got The Secret Public on CD and spent yesterday evening listening to it. Plenty of interesting LGBT+ history and there are some really great songs on there - the 60s songs really appeal to me, especially the girl groups, but there's also some good tough 70s funk and disco.

I don't know if I've been listening to anything that's relevant to Sneer Club.

"AI gore, smug and pretentiousness" is a good summary of the sneer-subject of this server.

Unfortunately, I don't think so. One of the hosts of this show did make a blogpost about this episode with links to other interviews and podcast eps with McQuillan.

A moment of silence for the people of Honduras, who have to live with these weirdos.

Christ, Próspera is another planned city? What is it with these maniacs and planning ideologies that went out of fashion in the thirties?

The False Memory Foundation did a lot of damage by convincing people that you can't forget and then remember traumatic events. Yes, some people were coerced by memory regression therapists into recalling increasingly unlikely and spurious memories. But many people avoid thinking about traumatic events because it's painful, or use distractions to avoid remembering them. Traumatic memories from childhood can be particularly difficult to understand and deal with because the trauma occurred at an early stage of psychological development.

Whenever I see some new pearl of wisdom from Mr Yudkowsky, I think, "Surely it can't be that plainly, baldly wrong. Surely he can't have it that twisted, but still speak with so much authority...." I'm no expert, but I know slightly more about trauma than I do about computer science, maths or formal logic and this seems so incorrect.

Surely trauma is defined as something that you learn from in your body, not your mind; from your subconscious, not your conscious. By their nature, people cannot understand the meaning of a traumatic experience the same way they can understand an abstract idea.

Does Yudkowsky think traumatic memories aren't different from other memories - but psychiatrists are just too self interested to expose this? That people could get over their traumatic memories - but they're just too dopey to do so without a helpful tweet from Eliezer Y? And while it's fairly trivial really, does he actually think that the general public are impressed and intimidated by X and Y variables, a concept most of us were introduced to when we were 12 or 13?

it's not a great slogan. In the summer of 2020 there was a mad rush to find a slogan that was radical enough to be credible but not too radical to be popular. It was a bodge.

Well, I don't know if we're more fixated on individual genius now than ever before. But it does feel like we're living through a retreat from democracy. I don't know what's coming next but it probably won't be good.

That's the Amanda Marcotte incident. Here's an article about the incident (from the Atlantic's regular series, "annals of the nerd blogs we feel the need to share with the nation"). The article is very sympathetic to Scott A but some of it just cannot be made to sound sympathetic. He unironically believes (believed?) that nerd men are "some of society's least privileged males". He also refers to all non-nerd men as neanderthals....

What? I was describing how cults/high-control groups react to criticism. I wasn't trying to assess how accurate their beliefs are. Cults rely on having some beliefs which reasonable people might agree with. Those are the beliefs they present to the public. Cult literature often sounds plausible or benign even if it's not factually accurate.

Before there was greater awareness of what cults are and how they work, it wasn't uncommon for early press about cult groups to conclude that while some of the cult's beliefs were strange, they had good values and were doing good things for their communities so they were probably harmless. It was only later that stories begin to emerge about the extreme levels of control that cults were exercising over their members, how that control led to the exploitation and abuse of members, and how limited and transactional their "good works" were.

If a group with that model of control and exploitation claimed to have access to a source of genuinely new and scientifically significant knowledge, they are the worst people to be in control of it, because: a) Cults keep back the larger part of their beliefs from the public in order to extract as much in money, volunteer time and other resources from their members. If a cult did have a direct line to Xenu, it would be directly in their interests to strictly limit how much other people can know about Xenu without paying exorbitant fees and submitting to cult authority. b) Cults are run by people whose ethics are compromised. Cult leaders believe above all else in their right to power and/or wealth and everything else including the health and safety of others comes second. They bully and indoctrinate their subordinates until cult members believe that there is no good and bad so much as there are things that are good for the cult and things that are bad for the cult. If people with such compromised ethics gain access to Xenu's special information (why are we assuming Xenu will be wise and helpful anyway? In Scientology mythos, Xenu is evil. And also dead.) they will use it to improve the position of the cult and impose their beliefs on as many people as possible. c) due to the above mentioned, it will be extremely difficult for non-members to assess the accuracy of information provided by the cult.