Heptbear.net

Jfc can I not even go to sleep without the equivalent of the USSR dissolving happening?

I think most people here would consider Singer to be if not openly right wing, at least worryingly adjacent. Rather too close to the beige technocratic Fascism of a Salazar.

I’m not talking about his open comments and I know the FAQ. I’m talking about a couple of letters that came up between him and alt right-neoreaction figures that displayed a lot more sympathy with their views than you might give credit for. I can’t find them in a quick search but I’m pressed for time right now so will link later.

My p(doom) for Ai is maybe 5%, my p(dystopiasignificantlyworsethantoday) is substantially higher. We should definitely be looking into it and almost none of the people who should look into it exist in silicon valley.

“Mary mother of god” must really throw them into a Protestant crisis. Is it idolatry if they claim it’s swearing?

Look, I know you’re arguing in good faith here, but…quite a few of us are very familiar with Big Yud’s arguments, and heck, I’m even partially sympathetic to a couple. There is some motivated suspicion here since rationalists and their singularitarian forebears have a habit of going reactionary (Anissimov, Bostrom, SSC, countless others) or having close ties to reactionaries (Thiel, most notably). I see no reason to believe you are like them but do realise a lot of transhumanist arguments are weaponised as right wing stalking horses.

But as someone who has been following and occasionally interacting with him since our Halcyon Youth on the Extropian mailing list, I’ve learned that

a) Yud can be spectacularly convincing and also spectacularly wrong by his own admission (see early work like “Staring into the Singularity” for this.) so you should cognitively guard against his rhetorical tools.

b) He has a habit of eliding and abstracting concepts so that they appear as a single consistent thing when they are actually several things, while appearing to do the exact opposite. This is most apparent at subjects he is not an expert in, quantum mechanics most notably (I think many worlds is correct, I think his argument for many worlds is bad. I am semi competent at the math of quantum mechanics)

I have specific, nuanced critiques of his main (not entirely invalid) argument on AI doom, but this is generally hard to get across because most of his own supporters don’t fully understand it.

Not true, plenty of people who supported the Nazis early on got shanked. Plenty of SPD members and Prussian aristocrats who jumped ship in 1933 prospered and achieved high rank. Until the Red Army rolled into town, anyway.

Slipped out of the rankings. Unacceptable gotta pump these numbers up!

Love the sub canon about what the eye of Magnus actually is. It’s so, so dumb I can’t help but like it.

The Tribes games are actually in the same continuity as the earthsiege/starsiege/cyberstorm mech pilot series.

Every TES game has you smash, vanish, or otherwise mess up one of the key structures of reality in the world as the goal of the game. None of them can be truly destroyed but at this point things gotta be looking bad.

The indie game called Heaven’s Vault has your characters foster mother as a primary antagonist and a religious fanatic but the Ng+ implies she might be right about everything.

Pretty much all the archaeology of Elden ring and the fact that even the earliest civilisation visible might not have been the first.

My favourite is how one of the Sermons of Vivec is about Pokemon.

When I am general secretary any trousers more closely tailored than 1660s petticoat breeches will result in reeducation.

How can someone who manipulates tensors for a living be as dumb as that guy was?

Skinny jeans. Curse on mankind.

I had issues with the specifics but he definitely had close contact with Big Yud and the proto rationalist set, as well as 90s-early 2000s transhumanist silicon valley types.

If you were more closely aligned with the softer Doctorow style tech types it might come off as strange vibes though.

I miss UT, but mostly because he was the only one close enough to the burning centre of the tech bro cult to actually be aware of the same things as me. Ah well at least everyone can mock Big Yud with me now.

I really need to write my “people’s history of transhumanism” one day

I don’t, but if someone is used to something like BG2 (let alone a modern RPG) just finding Balmora feels like being cut loose and told "find some dude, somewhere.’ yes they tell you how but the game hasn’t yet taught you that you actually need to read.

Yeah, the average chud is. That said, the real dedicated “I am a Liberal” liberals are worse. You know, the ones that openly admit that the “Rules-based order” is a stalking horse of US hegemony with no real meaning, and that that is good, actually.

Morrowind should have a start that gives just a little more direction and reason to keep playing.

Bring him back for the lulz but not Bringham Young.