As suggested at this thread to general āyeah sounds coolā. Letās see if this goes anywhere.
Original inspiration:
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to make it a post, thereās no quota here
lmao this is one of my all time favorite grifts. Iāve never understood why it isnāt more popular among us connoisseurs. itās so baldfaced to say āstatistically, someone probably has oracular powers, and thanks to science, here they are. you need only pay us a small incense and rites fee to access themā
Imo because the whole topic of superforecasters and prediction markets is both undercriticized and kaleidoskopically preposterous in a way that makes it feel like you shouldnāt broach the topic unless you are prepared to commit to some diatribe length posting.
Which somebody should, itās a shame there is yet no one single place you can point to and say āhereās why this thing is weird and grifty and pretend science while striclty promoted by the scientology of AI, and also thereās crypto involvedā.
Isnāt it weird these people came out of internet atheism of all things and go right into this stuff?
Itās really gotta be emphasised that these guys didnāt come out of internet atheism and frankly I would really like to know where that idea came from. Itās a completely different thing which, arguably, predates internet atheism (if we read āinternet atheismā as beginning in the early 2000s - but we could obviously push back that date much earlier). These guys are more or less out of Silicon Valley, Emile P Torres has coined the term āTESCREALSā (modified to āTREACLESā) for - and I had to google this even though I know all the names independently - āTranshumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermismā.
Itās a confluence of futurism cults which primarily emerged online (even on the early internet), but also in airport books by e.g. Ray Kurzweil in the 90s, and has gradually made its away into the wider culture, with EA and longtermism the now most successful outgrowths of its spores in the academy.
Whereas internet atheism kind of bottoms out in 1990s polemics against religion - nominally Christianity, but ultimately fuelled by the end of the Cold War and the Westās hunger for a new enemy (hey look over there, itās some brown people with a weird religion) - the TREACLES ācluster of ideologiesā (I prefer āgenealogyā, because this is ultimately about a political genealogy) has deep roots in the weirdest end of libertarian economics/philosophy and rabid anti-communism. And therefore the Cold War (and even pre-Cold War) need for a capitalist political religion. OK the last part is my opinion, but (a) I think it stands up, and (b) it explains the clearly deeply felt need for a techno-religion which justifies the most insane shit as long as thereās money in it.
Yeah, I hung out a lot in Internet skeptic/atheist circles during the 2005-10 era, and as far as I can recall, the overlap with LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, etc., was pretty much nil. This was how that world treated Ray Kurzweil.
I read
and immediately thought someone should introduce PZ Meyers to rat/EA as soon as possible.
Turns out heās aware of them since at least 2016:
Are these people for real?
More recently, it seems that as an evolutionary biologist he apparently has thoughts on the rat concept of genetics: The eugenicists are always oozing out of the woodwork
FWiW I used to read PZM quite a bit before he pivoted to doing youtube videos which I donāt have the patience for, and he checked out of the new atheist movement (such as it was) pretty much as soon as it became evident that it was gradually turning into a safe space for islamophobia and misogyny.
PZ is aware and thinks theyāre bozos. As a biologist, he was particularly pointed about cryonics.
Technoloons is a good word, going to have to remember that
I wonder if the existence of RationalWiki contributes to the confusion. Even though itās unrelated to and critical towards TREACLES, the name can cause confusion.