I’m still not convinced Yudkowsky thinks that

You should keep it that way; if you read more of his shit then his fascist proclivities will trip over themselves trying to convert you. But also it’ll cause psychic damage. So best to just avoid.

Back when I was a teenager and didn't know about LW or any of these turds, HPMoR came across my desk. I read less than five chapters before I realised I couldn't stand the smugness of MC Potter and dropped it. I took the most rational course of action after this and became a HPMoR hater. How could I prove, objectively, that this was a bad fic^[Note: This was just a framing device for this comment. I don't actually "hate" HPMoR. I mostly forgot about it until LW popped up in my life again like ten years later and I when into a K-hole and learned that the Bay Area, where I was soon to move for work, was filled with technofascists.]?

Initially, I was thinking about how it's kind of stupid to take a world with magic in it, then write a story about trying to impose "scientific" or "rational" concepts outside of that world onto it. It's kind of a non-starter in the sense that it feels like the point of a magical setting is to remove some of the annoyances of reality. I mean, that's the entire plot of HP to start with: Potter had a shit life, and now he gets to do dope wizard shit. Bringing in rationality to a magical world would seem to spoil the whole thing.

But then I realised that I don't read that much fiction and that there are probably enough counterexamples where I'm wrong, and that this idea is pulled off well. So I thought some more. How do you write a story that "rationally" talks about magic? I think it's an exercise in worldbuilding. Like, if you're going to write a story about a magical world and call out all the ways it doesn't fit with the economic and scientific models that apply to the mortal world, that kind of necessitates some reasoning about why.

For example, I remember that MC HP points out that you could perform arbitrage by exploiting the exchange rates between gold and silver in the mortal and magic worlds. OK, sure. The only thing that justified why the magical world hadn't closed this loophole was that the mortal and magic worlds were disconnected. My argument is: this is fine if the thing you're explaining is why mortals don't see fairies or dragons fly around every day. It's not fine if you're talking about arbitrage. You're saying that, in the magical world, nobody, at any point, has seen that you can buy something in one place for a lower price than you can sell elsewhere? Yud, of course, lampshades all this with Potter just saying "Boy, are these magical bumpkins stupid."

This is the only example I have to draw on from HPMoR because I ain't gonna read that shit to find more, but I guarantee that Yud never does the research about how all the models and laws and theories he likes to teach actually came about, and which ones would definitely be observable or applicable in the magic world and which wouldn't be.

General HPMoR

🫡

hey, props to the author for writing all that. This is my version:

So You Think You've Awoken ChatGPT

Unfortunately, you are stupid beyond remedy. If you can read this, I pity you.

NBC/the media really killing it with painting him as a self-radicalised spook.

Science: “our current understanding of genetics leads us to believe IQ is not heritable”.

This fucking guy: “IQ is heritable and you just haven’t proved it yet. Citation: I belong to a race with good genetics, unlike you”

Second, is the more common "IQ isn't intelligence" trick. Sure, the measure doesn't encompass everything that is making intelligence, but it is still a somewhat interesting proxy as there is a high correlation between intelligence and IQ.

Any time you see something like this, what it’s really saying is:

IQ is intelligence to me and nothing you say can dissuade me. I just have a high enough IQ to write a disclaimer for plausible deniability.

See what’s really fun here is that once again the libertarians are blissfully unaware of their natural predator: bears.

That's a lot of words about what is or isn't a reliable source from one who doesn't seem to know what a reliable source is. For a person of these beliefs, it is not surprising at all that their criteria seem to be:

• anything that agrees with them is reliable
• anything David Gerard considers unreliable is reliable because David Gerard is a big meanie and won't include citations to HBD articles, uwu
• anything that David Gerard or any friendly associate of David Gerard publishes is UNreliable, again because he is a meanie; see above, uwu

Dawg, maybe you need to step back from this all. As Voltaire once said, reality has a well-known liberal bias. Your beliefs are probably just counter to reality, and the corpus of data is not in your favour.

my new light novel: that time I biohacked myself to become smarter by taking testosterone suppressants and woke up the next day as a doomed villainess

The continuation of the stray cats thing:

One of these cats gave me fleas so I will no longer engage in petting stray cats

lol

She’s 35 and her sum total understanding of culture and race has lead to this. I think she has been effectively a Nazi from way back.