Please calm down.

for some reason this has gotten people very worked up

Seriously I don’t know what I said that is so controversial or hard to understand.

I don’t know why it’s controversial here.

imagine coming into a conversation with people you don’t fucking know, taking a swing and a miss at one of them, and then telling the other parties in the conversation that they need to calm down — about racism.

the rest of your horseshit post is just you restating your original point. we fucking got it. and since you missed ours, here it is one more time:

race science isn’t real. we’re under no obligation to use terms invented by racists that describe nothing. if we’re feeling particularly categorical about our racists on a given day, or pointing out that one is using the guise of race science? sure, use the term if you want.

tone policing people who want to call a racist a racist ain’t fucking it. what in the fuck do you think you added to this conversation? what does anyone gain from your sage advice that “X is Y but Y isn’t X” when the other poster didn’t say that Y is X but instead that Y doesn’t exist?

so yeah no I’m not calm, go fuck yourself. we don’t need anyone tone policing conversations about racism in favor of the god damn racists

Race pseudoscience is racist

yes, V0ldek said this

but not all racism is racial pseudoscience

they didn’t say this though, you did. race science is an excuse made up by racists to legitimize their own horseshit, just like how fascists invent a thousand different names to avoid being called what they are. call a spade a fucking spade.

why are you playing bullshit linguistic games in a discussion about racism? this is the exact same crap the “you can’t call everyone a nazi you know, that just waters down the term” tone police would pull when I’d talk about people who, shockingly, turned out to be fucking nazis.

“all nazis are fascists but not all fascists are nazis” who gives a shit, really. fascists and racists are whatever’s convenient for them at the time. a racist will and won’t believe in race science at any given time because it’s all just a convenient justification for the racist to do awful shit.

Alternately I guess I could like, ask for an instance ban or something, if that doesnt make the instance un-viewable from my account

hey no problem, we’ve got systems in place for this kind of thing. happy trails.

(though for the record, re the idea that right-wing posters are allowed in here without being told to go fuck themselves: lol)

no problem! I don’t mean to give you homework, just threads to read that might be of interest.

yeah, a few of us are Philosophy Tube fans, and I remember they’ve done a couple of good videos about parts of TESCREAL — their Effective Altruism and AI videos specifically come to mind.

if you’re familiar with Behind the Bastards, they’ve done a few videos I can recommend dissecting TESCREAL topics too:

• their episodes about the Zizians are definitely worth a listen; they explore and critique the group as a cult offshoot of LessWrong Rationalism.
• they did a couple of older videos on AI cults and their origins that are very good too.

also fair enough. you might still enjoy a scroll through our back archive of threads if you’ve got time for it — there is a historical context to transhumanism that people like Musk exploit to further their own goals, and that’s definitely something to be aware of, especially as TESCREAL elements gain overt political power. there are positive versions of transhumanism and the article calls one of them out — the Culture is effectively a model for socialist transhumanism — but one must be familiar with the historical baggage of the philosophy or risk giving cover to people currently looking to cause harm under transhumanism’s name.

fair enough!

but I don’t actually enjoy arguing and don’t have the skills for formalized “debate” anyway.

it’s ok, nobody does. that’s why we ban it unless it’s amusing (which effectively bans debate for everyone unless they know their audience well enough to not fuck up) — shitty debatelords take up a lot of thread space and mental energy and give essentially nothing back.

wherever “here” is

SneerClub is a fairly old community if you count in its Reddit origins; part of what we do here is sneering at technofascists and other adherents to the TESCREAL belief package, though SneerClub itself tends to focus on the LessWrong Rationalists. that’s the context we tend to apply to articles like the OP.

There is a certain irony to everyone involved in this argument, if it can be called that.

don’t do this debatefan here crap here, thanks

This, and similar writing I’ve seen, seems to make a fundamental mistake in treating time like only the next few, decades maybe, exist, that any objective that takes longer than that is impossible and not even worth trying, and that any problem that emerges after a longer period of time may be ignored.

this isn’t the article you’re thinking of. this article is about Silicon Valley technofascists making promises rooted in Golden Age science fiction as a manipulation tactic. at no point does the article state that, uh, long-term objectives aren’t worth trying because they’d take a long time??? and you had to ignore a lot of the text of the article, including a brief exploration of the techno-optimists and their fascist ties (and contrasting cases where futurism specifically isn’t fascist-adjacent), to come to the wrong conclusion about what the article’s about.

unless you think the debunked physics and unrealistic crap in Golden Age science fiction will come true if only we wish long and hard enough in which case, aw, precious, this article is about you!

The man probably went insane after psychedelic use, and I have never noticed @BasedBeffJezos to advocate for fixing the system by shooting individual executives. It's a great shot at drawing a plausible-sounding connection; but I think it's not valid criticism.

wait I’m confused, to be a more effective TESCREAL am I not supposed to be microdosing psychedelics every day? you’re sending mixed signals here, yud (also lol @ the pure Ronald Reagan energy of going “yep obviously drugs just make you murderously insane” based on nothing but vibes and the need to find a scapegoat that isn’t the consequences of your own ideology)

In April 2014, Gerard created a RationalWiki article about Effective Altruism, framing the subculture as “well-off libertarians congratulating each other on what wonderful human beings they are for working rapacious [s---]weasel jobs but choosing their charities well, but never in any way questioning the system that the problems are in the context of,” “a mechanism to push the libertarian idea that charity is superior to government action or funding,” and people who “will frequently be seen excusing their choice to work completely [f---]ing evil jobs because they're so charitable.”

it's fucking amazing how accurate this is, and almost a decade before SBF started explaining himself and never stopped

Kurzweil really is indistinguishable from a shitty phone psychic, including the followers who cherry pick “correct” predictions and interpret the incorrect ones so loosely they could mean anything (I’m waiting for some fucker to pop up and go “yeah duh Apple Vision Pro” in response to half of those, ignoring the inconvenient “works well and is popular” parts of the predictions)

An AI reads the entire legal code – which no human can know or obey – and threatens to enforce it, via police reports and lawsuits, against anyone who doesn’t comply with its orders.

what. eliezer what in the fuck are you talking about? this is the same logic that sovereign citizens use to pretend the law and courts are bound by magic spells that can be undone if you know the right words

holy fuck the number of people telling on themselves in that thread

No, he terminally values being attracted to children. He could still assign a strongly negative value to actually having sex with children. Good fantasy, bad reality.

So the said forces of normatively dimensioned magic transformed the second pedophile's body into that of a little girl, delivered to the first pedophile along with the equivalent of an explanatory placard. Problem solved.

please stop disguising your weird fucking sexual roleplay (at best, but let’s be honest, these weird fuckers need to imagine a world in which pedophilia is morally justified) as intellectual debate

The problem is solved by pairing those who wish to live longer at personal cost to themselves with virtuous pedophiles. The pedophiles get to have consensual intercourse with children capable of giving informed consent, and people willing to get turned into a child and get molested by a pedophile in return for being younger get that.

this one gets worse the longer you think about it! try it! there’s so much wrong!