So the primary doctrine is basically tech bros rewriting standard millenarian christianity from mythic fantasy into science fiction. But it seems like the founder wants to be a silicon valley influencer more than he wants to be a proper cult leader, meaning that some of the people who take this shit seriously have accumulated absurd amounts of money and power and occasionally the more deranged subgroups will spin off into a proper cult with everything that entails – including, now, being involved in multiple homicides!

That’s like a solid centiMoR, which is conveniently the share of HPMoR in which anything actually happens.

The classic “I don’t understand something therefore it must be incomprehensible” problem. Anyone who does understand it must therefore be either lying or insane. I’m not sure if we’ve moved forward or backwards by having the incomprehensible eldritch truth be progressive social ideology itself rather than the existence of black people and foreign cultures.

Behind the Bastards just wrapped their four-part series on the Zizzians, which has been a fun trip. Nothing like seeing the live reactions of someone who hasn’t been at least a little bit plugged into the whole space for years.

I haven’t finished part 4, but so far I’ve deeply appreciated Robert’s emphasis on how the Zizzian nonsense isn’t that far outside the bounds of normal Rationalist nonsense, and the Rationalist movement itself has a long history as a kind of cult incubator, even if Yud himself hasn’t fully leveraged his influence over a self-selecting high-control group.

Also the recurring reminders of the importance of touching grass and talking to people who haven’t internet-poisoned themselves with the same things you have.

There’s never a bad time to remember one of the foundational texts of academic sneerery.

Surely there have to be some cognitive scientists who are at least a little bit less racist who could furnish alternative definitions? The actual definition at issue does seem fairly innocuous from a layman’s perspective: “a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.” (Aside: it doesn’t do our credibility any favors that for all the concern about the source I had to actually track all the way to Microsoft’s paper to find the quote at issue.) The core issue is obviously that apparently they either took it completely out of context or else decided the fact that their source was explicitly arguing in favor of specious racist interpretations of shitty data wasn’t important. But it also feels like breaking down the idea itself may be valuable. Like, is there even a real consensus that those individual abilities or skills are actually correlated? Is it possible to be less vague than “among other things?” What does it mean to be “more able to learn from experience” or “more able to plan” that is rooted in an innate capacity rather than in the context and availability of good information? And on some level if that kind of intelligence is a unique and meaningful thing not emergent from context and circumstance, how are we supposed to see it emerge from statistical analysis of massive volumes of training data (Machine learning models are nothing but context and circumstance).

I don’t know enough about the state of non-racist neuroscience or whatever the relevant field is to know if these are even the right questions to ask, but it feels like there’s more room to question the definition itself than we’ve been taking advantage of. If nothing else the vagueness means that we haven’t really gotten any more specific than “the brain’s ability to brain good.”

These are AI bros, and should be assumed to be both racist and lazy. Of course they kept it.

Details emerge about Natal conference in Austin later this month, set to feature figures linked to far-right politics

I’m also learning some details about the Vegan Conference in Seattle, set to feature people who don’t eat meat.

Below a minimum level of hingedness the actual mental ability of the cult leader in question is irrelevant. On one hand it speaks to an ability to invent and operate incredibly complex frameworks and models of the world. On the other hand whatever intelligence they have isn’t sufficient for them to realize (or be convincible) that they’re fucking nutters.

This leads us into part 17 of my ongoing essay about how intelligence - as in “the raw mental resources supposedly measured by IQ or whatever other metrics” is useless and probably incoherent.

Heh. For a while there I had a phone love wallpaper that did the SamaritanOS You_Are_Being_Watched thing. Good times. Shame about Caviezel though.

At fair market value, considering the massive reduction in supply.

You know I was wondering about where the name came from and it’s sufficiently plausible that I believe it. Notably in the story her threat - the reason just being around her is so dangerous - is because she has some kind of perfect predictive ability on top of all the giant psychic kaiju nonsense. So she attacks a city and finds the one woman who needs to die in order for her super-thinker husband to go mad and build an army of evil robots or whatever.

It very much rhymes with the Rationalist image of a malevolent superintelligence and I can definitely understand it being popular in those circles, especially the “I’m too edgy to recognize that Taylor is wrong, actually” parts of the readership.

To be fair, the highest-level claims of just about any conspiracy theory sound at least plausible. Even Qanon tends to start off with claims that are basically confirmed by the Epstein case before they start extending the conspiracy to more places, incorporating Jesus, and excluding their preferred Messiah figures.

You know, the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” argument being implicitly extended to cover second-generation immigrants should if taken seriously, imply that these people aren’t actually obligated to follow US law, which presumably includes immigration law. You know, if you go by a text-first originalist interpretation of the constitution and the law.

Machines with a lot of precision parts that need to hold up to the kind of wear and tear either a Marine or a maniacal quilter are capable of dishing out. So many layers of fabric…

Oh wait, there’s one! How could I miss it when it’s got an RCS as big as a 747! In fact, it looks exactly like a civilian airliner. Huh.

Oh well, still a plane so missile goes bwshhhhhhhhhhh

It’s almost like when despots funnel oil money into maintaining power and self-aggrandizing megaprojects instead of basic public services you don’t see the “lots of education” part kicking in.

Meanwhile, if there are these outliers where low IQ didn’t prevent people from getting wealthy and there isn’t some kind of political economy reason for it, doesn’t that undermine the value of IQ as a metric? Like, you and I know that IQ is garbage but it’s worth noting how “maybe IQ is just garbage” is always floating at the edge of their reasoning.

Read through the whole affair and just had to keep shaking my head the whole way through. Like, they’re at least capable of pretending to disavow the Nazis and fundies who follow the same pro-kid-having definitely-not-eugenics ideas. And they talk about some of the real obstacles or having kids; raising a child and setting them up for something resembling success is expensive and hard and the world doesn’t exactly feel like it’s on an upwards trajectory. But rather than look at those problems in their own right and try to actually make living cheaper or easier for people in ways that would make having kids more viable and more rewarding (How long are you at the office? How much time and energy do you have when you get home?), these upper-class twits of their generation are trying to convince the few people for whom those aren’t as serious problems that they should have kids. Like, I’m all in favor of improving reproductive health and that kind of technology but we are nowhere near the point where that’s going to make a population-level impact on demographics. Like, they’re out here trying to figure out if they can make the run to third base when they’ve only just brained the mascot with a foul ball. Solve the actual problem in front of us first.

‘It became clear to me that people wanted more children than they were having,’ Babu says.

So clearly the best action is to constantly tell everyone how great kids are and that they should totally have them. Because that solves the problem of people wanting kids they don’t/can’t have. I try to read even our designated sneer fodder in good faith but I can’t understand why anyone thinks these people are at all intelligent beyond the “only slightly less than average” level. I thought Good Will Hunting taught everyone the difference between smart and rich, but maybe that was just me.

If only someone had written a pretty interesting case study in how you can use valid-looking data to prove anything, even the existence of psychic powers. And people have been trying to scientifically justify racism for just about as long as the scientific method has been a thing, while studying psychic powers didn’t really pick up until the latter half of the 20th century.