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i'd like to add from personal knowledge: one of the doge boys from that infamous Wired article (who appear to have mostly been recruited from that same silicon valley milieu) used to run a small effective altruism blog

My favorite small domino is crappy rationalist Harry Potter fanfic

My main question is now, how long until someone turns this movement and all its sub-organizations into an Illuminati expansion set?

“Ironically, the family business survived her apostasy intact.” closing the part about @aella.bsky.social made me laugh out loud.

This makes me think it was probably for the good that I did not grow up in NorCal, because that’s kinda me

somewhere Yud explains that he wrote his Sequences because he was trying to tell people that AI x-risk is a problem, and he kept seeing the same poorly-thought-out counterarguments which makes it darkly ironic that the primary argument against AI risk now is just "look how weird Yudkowsky etc are"

📌 More in AI wackos

Gotdamn, I read the whole thing. My takeaway is to *still* tax billionaires out of existence (see my pinned comment). That amount of money comes with way too much power (until CU is nixed & real campaign financing reform is passed, but even then too) & hubris. There is a #BillionairesDisease afoot.

Well written and informative essay with some truly quotable bangers. Thanks for posting this.

A mostly accurate blend of history lesson and push piece with the aim of discrediting coxon by association. Lot of terrible weirdos out there, but a lot more decent people too.

Can’t wait for the south park episode, I’m sure it will be just as hilarious as the scientology episode, which was a classic.

sure. doesn't make it good writing

If you read carefully, you'll see that the problem here is not the sex (not the consensual activities, anyway) but the way in which having the network of romantic interrelationships almost totally overlap with the network of professional relationships creates adverse conflicts of interests

The stuff on the Thiel and the "Thiel thing" is just deeply incongruous, and suggests either a deep misunderstanding or more likely is the biggest evidence that this is deliberately constructed as a bad-faith hitpiece, inserted as an adjuvant to trigger the anti-Trump anti-bodies in the reader.

why are we talking about the exploration of a Harry Potter fanfic?

Waitwaitwait, is your implication here that Yud is not an arrogant misanthrope, because like, you know, huh?

Wut

is this a bit or are you having a psychotic break from reality?

My man, assessing someone’s credibility, whether they are incentivized to lie/exaggerate, etc. as part of evaluating the usefulness of their opinion is not ad hominem.

I accept your apology.

How could knowing more information about a thing ever be bad?

I didn’t, wrote this whole thing up in a helluva hurry. But it was too funny to change when I realized what I’d done

anyway, it'ssome kind of funny that 10 years ago i found this need for community rituals alienating & arguments for them offputting; but now that i turned out to be (accidentally?) right about these people's creepy need to recreate religion, i also have come to agree that humans need social ritual

in almost anyone else's hands this would be amazing

I wouldn't believe the world could make a religion so objectively unpleasant for its supplicants but Manicheanism snd Jains look like theyre having fun by comparison

I prefer the days when the Bay Area fringe religious movement was the Church of Satan

This is evidently a definition of "rational" with which I am unfamiliar. I love science fiction as much as anyone, but I recognize the "fiction" part of it.

Speaking as a life-long atheist, I struggle to comprehend people who actively choose to replace the thing they don’t believe in with another meaningless false importance. 🤷‍♂️

no it’s this guy’s (Eliezer Yudkowsky’s) blog posts and his Harry Potter fanfic

as an "eldest daughter" i viscerally understand a desctructive act of boundary enforcement while simultaneously being intensely skeptical that his were ever encroached on meaningfully enough to trigger it as a trauma response and not just childish tantrum

I said it once, and I'll say it again bsky.app/profile/frog...

Buffy literally had a whole team!

Bub, I don’t think that “I once broke my favorite toy rather than have to share it” is the shining example of rationality that you think it is.

Jesus Christ the dude’s intellectual and cultural intake is so incredibly stunted. Was he the boy from “Room”?

Meanwhile he is actually Xander, the dumb selfish prick

this is what they switched to after it was no longer acceptable to be a straight-up objectivist

I disliked this guy prior to this story, but not with any intensity behind the dislike. Now I actually really, aggressively dislike him.

Kinda what you expect from someone who didn't complete middle school.

I have my one thing I always need to bring up about Yudkowsky, because I think we don't talk enough about the short story he wrote ("3 worlds collide") where in the future humanity legalizes rape and it unlocks a golden age or whatever. It's not even core to the plot, just some world building.

here we find Eliezer Yudkowsky engaging in the classic 90s and 2000s genre of “insecure straight guy getting really defensive about liking Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

they called themselves the scoobies because there were like 4 or 5 of them. In the series finale she makes all potential slayers actual slayers by sharing the power. These people can't read.

This only gets funnier if you read it in a Werner Herzog voice

😳

Holy shit. I’ve known “intensely dorkly.” There were plenty of times I’ve BEEN “intensely dorky.” This paragraph isn’t nearly cute or harmless enough to qualify. This is a libertarian personality disorder at best. Delusional messiah complex at worst. (and we haven’t gotten to the race science yet)

I want you to know this passage is my first introduction to Eliezer Yudkowsky as a concept and my life will now be forever altered by this knowledge.

Something something I hate and all women and authority because my mom made me take diarrhea medicine when I was six, something something

How did you miss this, @mollyjongfast.bsky.social 🤣 (Also, disappointed that you had a "scary AI" dude on days after the rationalist episode.)

lol "his favourite squirt gun". Was he wearing a propeller hat and striped overalls too? Not only is it pathetic but he thinks it's bad ass and it's also probably completely entirely made up which makes it even funnier that he thinks it sounds cool.

“… he identifies with Buffy the vampire slayer…” 🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂

What an... Odd way too tell everyone reading your autobiography that you're a selfish little twat. Since when has "if I can't have it, no-one can" been the attitude of a hero? I must have missed that memo.

So he identifies with Buffy. But more resembles Warren from season 6.

paragraphs that make you do the "oof! aaah! ohhh!"s of an NPC standing in lava and taking fire damage

Everything is social dominance

I hope I never meet this person in real life because if I heard him speak for more than 30 seconds I would be overcome with the urge to punch him in the nose and he probably has enough power and influence to have me disappeared.

The image gets the story a little wrong, it's not that his parents lent it to another child, it's that they took it away from him and thus demonstrated that they didn't consider him to really own the toy as opposed to it just being on loan from them. So he asserted his ownership by destroying it

There’s a sad piece to Eli’s supervillain origin story that’s not very talked about, and that’s when his brother was senselessly murdered during a mugging. He was already well on his way to becoming who he is, but it seemed to turn his transhumanist bent up to 11.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is being called an AI researcher but I haven't encounter a single piece of useful research output from him at all. Rather sad Silicon Valley is so full of real smart people yet something he found the money to found his cult.

I didn't know small children read Ayn Rand

21 year-olds writing autobiographies should be illegal. Also, and I cannot explain why, but I read a portion of it. I had that Blonde Guy WTF face the whole time. But it had the whiff of this masterpiece - and would probably sound the same... bsky.app/profile/jsar...

lol I bet in company he never shuts the fuck up.

I love how capitalism propels people with these kinds of brains right to the top

This is the sort of probably-made-up anecdote that demonstrates, despite protests to the contrary, just how much all these movements owe to Ayn Rand, high priestess of convicing dorky white teen boys they're the future philosopher-kings of the world

Lol lifting your origin story from Hot Fuzz sure is something.

did he uhhhhhh watch the whole series

I cringed so hard I think I plunged into bradycardia.

God, it should have been his favorite copy of The Fountainhead isntead of a squirtgun.

"No, we're not in a cult" - people that are in a cult

like, all of this doomer shit used to be a lot _less_ overt, they'd hit you with it once you got far deep enough into it, but initially it was "yeah, these people care about effective giving and re-examining biases and science"

many such cases

These people are so goddamn stupid it's amazing they don't drown when it rains.

They're completely undersocialized. They have no clue what real people think, or why, and I'm not sure they can learn.

yeah it’s categorically a neoreligion

You mean Ray's original event?

If they think observing solstice is about "winning," I'm not sure if they're redeemable.

I’m less concerned with AI wiping out humanity than I am with people allowing it to seriously fuck shit up to the point where we might wish we’d been wiped out. But that’s still on humans.

All Aboard!!!

I say this wholeheartedly and maybe even lovingly: lols

I'm down.

Why are all of these dudes like this So fucking weird

*This article has been updated to change “Rationalism” to “Rationality.”* 🤔

Whyyyy is The Freight letting these freaks use their venue for this shit. At least I know where not to be in my town (and on my birthday, no less 🫠).

The what?

And there's MUSIC!

Maybe this was just falling back on our Gen X priors, but me and my friends just used the winter solstice to get wasted around a giant fire in the snow. Who knew that would sound healthier that what ever this is.

I prefer the reasonablists from Parks & Rec. Hail Zorp.

Sinners in the Hand of an Angry Robot (I am repeating myself here, but honestly it's worth comparing) digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcont...

is this somehow not Burning Man?

Why do mediocre white men always think they’re special? And Deep Space 9 is clearly the greatest show of all time, not Buffy. Pffftttt.

So basically, white Christian evangelical theocrats were invited in as funders & staff by the Repubs & took over the party in the 80's & 90's & then Randian Scientology sci-fi mystic tech autocrats were invited in as funders & staff & took over the Repub party & later Trump's admin in the 10's-20's.

I'm so glad I moved to Boston after college and not San Francisco. And I'm so glad I have a wife who keeps me grounded.

I don't think there's anything wrong with veganism, I think it's virtuous. I do think there's a lot wrong with murder

Yeah that's what I don't get. See I assumed the techbros were eager to have AI magically cheat death by uploading their consciousness or something. Now it seems like all these "AI will end humanity" statements they see as a positive? Like how is it "rational" to work towards death?

That’s about the sum of it

Highly recommend reading God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O'Gieblyn on this topic which tracks some od the specific mutations in theology and philosophy that got us here.

This is also true of most forms of marxism, historically. It's actually not at all uncommon.

We can only wish it was terminal

Precisely.

I think (better) there for I am (in charge)

Autodidacts and home schooled kids a plus.

speaking from experience this is a good description of the process

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣