I usually say the following. I’m paraphrasing a spiel I have delivered in person several times and which seems to get things across.

'there’s a kind of decentralized cult called rationalism. they worship rational thinking, have lots of little rituals that are supposed to invoke more rational thinking, and spend a lot of time discussing their versions of angels and demons, which they conceive of as all powerful ai beings.

rationalists aren’t really interested in experiments or evidence, because they want to figure everything out with pure reasoning. they consider themselves experts on anything they’ve thought really hard about. they come up with a lot of apocalypse predictions and theories about race mingling.

silicon valley is saturated with rationalists. most of the people with a lot of money are not rationalists. but VCs and such find rationalists very useful, because they’re malleable and will claim with sincerity to be experts on any topic. for example, when AI companies claim to be inventing really intelligent beings, the people they put forward as supporting these claims are rationalists.’

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considering their endless history of scandal, good riddance

the Effective Onanism movement

however they are exactly canceled out by nonprofits aiming to promote fapping

seems bad

was it the white house ICE one. I was thinking of posting that but it’s so vile that I wavered

small thread about these guys:

https://bsky.app/profile/scgriffith.bsky.social/post/3llepnsvtpk2g

tldr only new thing I saw is that as a teenager the founder annoyed “over 100” academics until one of them, a computer scientist, endorsed his research about a mobile game that diagnoses you with Alzheimer’s in five minutes

hmm, interesting. I hadn’t heard of these guys. their original step 1 seems to have been building a mobile game that would diagnose you with Alzheimer’s in 10 minutes, but I guess at some point someone told them that was stupid:

So far, the team has raised $6 million in seed funding for a HIPAA-compliant app that, according to Patel, can help identify Alzheimer’s disease — even years before symptoms appear — after just 10 minutes of gameplay on a cellphone. It’s not purely a tech offering. Patel says the results are given to an “actual physician” affiliated with Craniometrix who “reviews, verifies, and signs that diagnostic” and returns it to a patient.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/10/this-yale-alum-wants-to-build-a-telemedicine-platform-expressly-for-alzheimers-disease/

my experience with my body as such has always been that it is my torturer and I am its victim.

(side note, gender affirming care resolved this. in my case HRT didn’t really help by itself, but facial feminization surgery immediately cured my dysphoria. also for some reason it cured my lower back pain)

(of course it wasn’t covered in any way, which represents exactly the sort of hostility to bodily agency transhumanists would prioritize over ten foot long electric current sensing dongs or whatever, if they were serious thinkers)

I used to think transhumanism was very cool because escaping the misery of physical existence would be great. for one thing, I’m trans, and my experience with my body as such has always been that it is my torturer and I am its victim. transhumanism to my understanding promised the liberation of hundreds of millions from actual oppression.

then I found out there was literally no reason to expect mind uploading or any variation thereof to be possible. and when you think about what else transhumanism is, there’s nothing to get excited about. these people don’t have any ideas or cogent analysis, just a powerful desire to evade limitations. it’s inevitable that to the extent they cohere they’re a cult: they’re a variety of sovereign citizen

they’re never going to let it go, are they? it doesn’t matter how long they spend receiving zero utility or signs of intelligence from their billion dollar ouji boards

interesting masto thread on doge’s use of AI, from someone who helped build their LLM:

https://elk.zone/carhenge.club/@skiles/114203147063483693

the phones seem to serve no practical purpose. they already have his number and I don’t think you can conclude much from call logs. so suppose they are symbolic. what he would be communicating is that he’s so fully pliant that he is willing to do things there is no possible excuse for, and not even for real benefit, just to suck up to them. the opposite of plausible deniability

I get the reasoning and it makes sense tbh. but having been at these places what I experienced just doesn’t reflect your theorycrafting. if my experience doesn’t line up with “well based on human nature it should be this or that way” I’m going to go with my experience every time

the subtext here that ppl at prestigious universities are less likely to be misogynists… it’s not correct

they’re almost identical. biggest difference is that barris is less charismatic (not being RDJ), creepier and more clearly a crypto nazi in the original. I don’t think you’re missing anything by sticking with the movie

I AM A GOD OF THE INTERNET *five seconds later* HELP MY MOUSE IS MOVING BY IT SELF

I reread (listened to actually) that book last week. it’s probably qualified as “uncomfortably prescient” at every point since idk the bush administration. in particular barris is exactly the sort of psycho this moment was made for, there’s not that much difference between him and musk

I do like bugs and spam!

I will write them in the box.

I will help you boost our stocks.

Thank you, Sam-I-am,

for letting me write bugs and spam!