Suppose there are five true heresies, but anyone who’s on the record as believing more than one gets burned as a witch.
Two heresies leave Chicago traveling at 90 km/h and 100 km/h
Jessica asked if Yudkowsky denouncing neoreaction and the alt-right would still seem harmful, if he were to also to acknowledge, e.g., racial IQ differences?
uh
I agreed that that would be better, but realistically, I didn’t see why Yudkowsky should want to poke that hornet’s nest.
uhhhhhhhhh
a perfectly spherical heresy in a vacuum at absolute zero, and also it’s racist
This is not healthy.
ya dont fucken say
I don’t know what man-made horrors beyond my comprehension I just stubled upon, but this person really really really needs psychological help and possible to be forced out of their self-hatred jesus christ
Three major thoughts here: 1) this is the epitome of toxic individualism, 2) holy hell this person really needs to leave rationalism for their own health and happiness, 3) I love the idea that anyone can insist on quoting Ray “doesn’t believe in bisexuality” Blanchard while calling themselves a person focused on truth
This person is clearly struggling with who they are and has decided they don’t get to be themselves and is working back from there
And I just want to clarify my beef with Blanchard. It’s not just that he’s wrong about me and people I care about in ways that are hurtful, prejudiced, and used to cause harm. It’s also the fact that he’s held up by a certain type of person because they can’t be bothered to understand us or science. Sometimes in science one lone person speaks truth to a field that irrationally digs in their heels and refuses to see reason. I understand that. But sometimes some jackass looks identical to that and just happens to be wrong and using terrible methodology and because people outside the field don’t understand shit they latch on because the field is saying things that go against their preconceived notions and that person sounds kinda right.
Ray Blanchard is the Andrew Wakefield of sexology and a certain type of people insist he’s Galileo in that story that’s usually oversimplified because it makes for a better story than telling it truthfully.
jesus christ
like looking at an ai blending two photos: a generic terf and a generic rationalist. it’s IDENTICAL to typical terf whining (even down to the ‘civil war within the movement’ framing) except because its rationalist it’s expanded out into a wall of word salad
^F David Gerard
Imagine one day David Gerard of /r/SneerClub said, “Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist!” And you replied: “No, I’m not! That’s a lie.” And imagine E.T. Jaynes was still alive…
I‘m impressed at the way you still manage to live rent free in these chud’s heads. The bogeyman is real if you’re a rationalist apparently & his name is D.Gerard.
/r/SneerClub
these people are so terrified of Satan Church that they haven’t read the change of address we stabbed into the front door with a ceremonial dagger like 5 months ago
Imagine one day Dan Gackle of Hacker News fame banned the Linus Tech Tips guy for sockpuppeting but actually you were the sockpuppet. Also suppose Terry A. Davis were still alive so you went to ask him how to sockpuppet like a veteran, but instead you run into Timnit Gebru, who is also a terrorist. She calls you pronouns and slurs like TESCREAL and your pants drop to your ankles and everyone is laughing at you and also Terry calls you the N word because you don’t know how to write a compiler. Then you turn around and see Scott Siskind and Joanne Rowling and they’re also laughing at you and you start to cry.
Anyway you’d be really upset.
Picture a scene: the New York Times is releasing an article on Effective Altruism (EA) with an express goal to dig up every piece of negative information they can find. They contact Émile Torres, David Gerard, and Timnit Gebru, collect evidence about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board blowup, and Pasek’s Doom, start calling Astral Codex Ten (ACX) readers to ask them about rumors they’d heard about affinity between Effective Altruists, neoreactionaries, and something called TESCREAL. They spend hundreds of hours over six months on interviews and evidence collection, paying Émile and Timnit for their time and effort. The phrase “HBD” is muttered, but it’s nobody’s birthday.
From here.
I follow drama and blow-ups in a lot of different subcultures. It’s my job.
Wait, you can get paid for this???
The EA/LW community loves to think from first principles, and that is usually one of its finest traits. I notice and respect the times their first-principles thinking leads them to be correct about things broader society is incorrect about—a regular occurrence.
[citation fucking needed]
the fuck. apparently I secretly do run rationality.
scratching his itch to be productive by traveling the world and doing charity via talking with cool, smart people about meaningful ideas.
i’d want some pretty convincing evidence that the bit after “and” goes with the word “productive”.
@Geoffrey Miller, with his own long history of serious, sincere engagement within the rationalist community,
uh yeah lol ok
A thing that is sort of amazing about that article (by Woodgrains, who is supposed to be part of the leftwing people of themotte) is that their complaints about journalism being unfair to them is said by everybody all the time in every subculture when there is a non 100% puff piece on their subculture.
The problem with journalists is that they tend to shine a light on the parts of your subculture that you pretend isn’t there, but a part that you should really check out and do something about (a bit like that mole, ow god I’m projecting and need to call my doctor). How can you be a grown person and not have seen this happen to several groups over and over again already? How sheltered and only inside LW spheres are these people? (Rhetorical)
And this is without talking about how journalist are pressured for time, underpaid, etc etc. Seeing how six months of work isn’t enough to uncover the truth in their own paid sex slaves (yes, this is the intentionally worst way to describe that situation) and more work keeps piling up on up on just that case with claims, counterclaims, miss attributions etc should
tell them somethingupdate their priors about just how much work and how difficult journalism is, but it will not.(I know Woodgrains is praising the ability of LW to criticize themselves, but crucially he doesn’t really seem to notice that nothing changes, the various racists/sexists etc are still there and talking about happy birthdays (urgh). But hey at least it got Gwern mad)
leftwing people of themotte
lol the empty fucking set
Yeah remember how themotte had a “quality contributions of last month” post every month? The schism (for people not in the know: the less ‘far right culture war, more good faith discussions’ spinoff of themotte (how many layers deep are we now? Damn you Hanson!), what a failed project from the start, the culture war anger is the point and the draw of themotte) has a ‘Quality Contributions for the first half of 2023’ post. Guess there were no quality contributions the 6 months after that.
The thing that gets me the most about this is they can’t imagine that Eliezer might genuinely be in favor of inclusive language, and thus his use of people’s preferred pronouns must be a deliberate calculated political correctness move and thus in violation of the norms espoused by the sequences (which the author takes as a given the Eliezer has never broken before, and thus violating his own sequences is some sort of massive and unique problem).
To save you all having to read the rant…
—which would have been the end of the story, except that, as I explained in a subsequent–subsequent post, “A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning”, in late 2018, Eliezer Yudkowsky prevaricated about his own philosophy of language in a way that suggested that people were philosophically confused if they disputed that men could be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
Also, bonus sneer points, developing weird terminology for everything, referring to Eliezer and Scott as the Caliphs of rationality.
Caliphate officials (Eliezer, Scott, Anna) and loyalists (Steven) were patronizingly consoling me
One of the top replies does call this like it is…
A meaningful meta-level reply, such as “dude, relax, and get some psychological help” will probably get me classified as an enemy, and will be interpreted as further evidence about how sick and corrupt is the mainstream-rationalist society.
The false dichotomy between “material/biology/physics-based” and “metaphysical i.e. fake” is everywhere in everything lesswrong outputs yet it never fails to annoy me. Sometimes I wish I could take these people aside and bully some sense into them, but due to their nazi leanings maybe being selfdestructively wrong and stupid is a fitting punishment.
you would almost think these people were doing philosophy while deliberately learning fuck all about it
They skim read some utilitarianism, which is a limited school of thought (if it has any value at all), and jumped straight to “fuck yes! This is everything!”
“at last! I can do some really telling thought experiments!”
This is very undergraduate.
ties big yud and scott up in her basement, forces them to go through the critique of pure reason giving them a werther’s every time they manage to genuinely engage with the ideas
scott’s undergrad degree, he FUCKING MAJORED IN PHILOSOPHY
D:
Also, bonus sneer points, developing weird terminology for everything, referring to Eliezer and Scott as the Caliphs of rationality.
ahaha, this was a joke inside the subculture, which Scott A even posted about - because Scott was posting a lot on Slate Star Codex and Eliezer wasn’t really posting much at that time.
Right, its a joke, in the sense that the phrase “Caliph” started its usage in a non-serious fashion that got a chuckle, but the way Zack uses it, it really doesn’t feel like a joke. It feels like the author genuinely wants Eliezer to act as the central source of authority and truth among the rationalists and thus Eliezer must not endorse the heresy of inclusive language or else it will mean their holy prophet has contradicted the holy scripture causing a paradox.
“Kidding on the square” as they used to say.
a phrase for jokes that only work insofar as they’re true?
Religions will form even if the prophets don’t intend them to, I guess.
My “I am not a prophet, do not follow me, this is not a religion” shirt sure does get a lot of questions.
I am late to sneer culture. I read HPMOR back in the day and even visited LW and then forgot about it. EA (mosquito) was on my radar but since philanthropy is anyway a bandaid on societal problems I hadn’t bothered. Until FTX crashed. I already knew crypto was a scam, but a scam that wraps itself in bad philosophy is more interesting.
After a lot of old Twitter threads and Tumblr posts it finally clicked: They made the Harry Potter fanfic guy their prophet!
Which is so stupid that it fits perfectly into our timeline.
oh absolutely
LWers will literally
Instead of going to therapy
If I were to transition today and didn’t pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading me: making me think my transition was successful, even though it wasn’t.
This is the same fuckin’ diseased mentality that gets cis women harassed in changing rooms for having jawlines that are slightly too heavy.
The math is also weird and unclear in that way which feels like a person reaching for grandiose Theories Of It All without any experience solving more mundane problems first.
I feel like this is not an uncommon sentiment, the whole “but what if i don’t pass and feel stupid making everyone call me a woman?” thing. Most people don’t make this feeling the basis for an entire philosophical edifice, though.
Also the answer to the conundrum is just like, okay, so don’t do that then! No one said you have to! It’s not really about whether you are a woman in some cosmic sense, it’s just about what makes you feel most comfortable – if you want to transition but really feel that weird about the social transition part, you can always just take estrogen for the mental/physical effects and keep calling yourself a guy. Then do the rest of the stuff if/when strangers start consistently assuming you’re a woman anyway (after all, they’re not your friends, they have no reason to “lie” to you). It’s not the 1990s anymore, there’s no rule that says you have to come out to everyone in your life as the first step.
I’ve heard a variant of this as self-hating fatphobia. “If I wear a bikini & you body positive people admire me in it, you’re tricking me into thinking I’ve managed to pass for an attractive (ie. thin) person.” It probably has an equivalent in every form of body-oriented self-hatred & it’s sad & infuriating simultaneously. Infuriating partly because it’s outright enraged at the existence of people who don’t care if they pass as cis, thin, able-bodied, etc.
I had a friend for many years who would do this. To be clear, this person was otherwise a decent friend and I had good times with them. But they would constantly declare, loudly, to everyone, how fat they were. They would make constant comments on how fat, their relatives were. They’d insist that other people were making special arrangements for them because of their fatness.
No matter how many times people would assure this person that we largely did not care or consider their weight as any factor in hanging out with them or interacting with them, they would deny it. No matter how many times I or anyone else carefully suggested that there may be some value in speaking to a therapist about their anxiety around their weight, they would not listen.
This same person would also complain how much fat shame society as a whole inflicts. But they refused to acknowledge their own.
It is sad, and infuriating, and it eventually pushed me and many other people away.
Exactly. Yeah some trans women really don’t pass, some cis women don’t either. Nobody benefits from increased scrutiny on people’s gender except people selling fear of trans people or selling the tools to conform to gendered expectations.
But also if you’re unhappy with your meat sack change it because there’s no evidence you get another.
Zack’s ability to externalise problems onto all others is stupendous even as a rationalist
🎶 I see the girls go by dressed in their summer clothes / Priors all updating until my darkness goes 🎶
I ain’t reading all that.
I’m happy for u tho.
Or sorry that happened.104 minute read at LWer speed (uncritical, taking everything at face value, and you already understand their dialect of english)
Actual read time: depends on how often you snark tbh.
Could use GDQ any%/all% categories
I read a bit, and I’m very sorry it happened (the text being written)
I’m lying. I started to read and got as far as “minutiæ”. I want the OP to go get a job in editorial at the New Yorker creating diæreses instead of writing boring, fœtid, unfocused, pædagogically unsound treatises. Sadly OP’s logorrhœa is too far gone.
I’ve just dipped in and out of it all day - I can’t look away! It’s better than a car crash: you can slow down multiple times
Am I getting dumber while I read, though?
The only thing any of us can do is choose how we are going to get dumber every day
Going through random pages of Zack’s blog, which I don’t recommend unless you really like to look at self-harm, which you shouldn’t, … sometimes you find passages that make you remember the important things and you feel a little less bad about all the mess.
(The really hard part is overcoming the improbability of finding a wife who I could love and who could love me, and who is enthusiastic about starting a family qua eugenics project rather than merely qua family. Any single (cis) women reading this who like my writing: please, don’t hesitate to write me!)
Also this one’s really just kind of cute.
I continue to maintain that fandom conventions are boring. I enjoy consuming fiction. I even enjoy discussing fiction with friends—the work facilitating a connection with someone else present, rather than just between me and the distant author, or me and the universe of stories. But for the most part, these big, bustling conventions just don’t seem to facilitate that kind of intimacy. […]
But that’s okay. Ultimately, I did not come to Fan Expo San Francisco 2022 for the intimacy of analyzing fiction with friends who know me.
I came because of the loophole. As reactionary as it might seem in the current year, I am spiritually a child of the 20th century, and I do not crossdress in public. That would be weird. (Not harmlessly weird as an adjective of unserious self-deprecation, but weird in the proper sense, out-of-distribution weird.)
But to cosplay as a fictional character who happens to be female? That’s fine! Lots of people are dressed up as fictional characters at the convention, including characters who belong to categories that the cosplayer themself does not. That guy dressed up as a vampire isn’t actually a vampire, either.
@Amoeba_Girl @dgerard Sometimes I think there’s a goldmine of comedy to be had laughing at these eugenics types having kids and slowly realizing they aren’t rich like Musk and Grimes and have to care for these humans. Then I remember that isn’t funny at all, it’s extremely upsetting.
well, cute for someone who would transition to a trans neoreactionary
I admit my standards might have been lowered due to consuming too much of the brain sludge.
(Follows link to authors blog, reads blogroll)
JFC. Kathleen Stock. They have the entire universe of gender studies to choose from & Kathleen Stock is their philosopher of choice.
God it feels so fucking good not knowing who any of these idiots are, time to ruin that feeling forever
Is this stuff deliberately written to be word salad?
all the evidence is that Zack cannot not write like this
As somebody who has read terf shit to self harm in the past I want to thank this poor soul for writing something too impenetrable to even be readable let alone effective
