Those comments are tight, but really the problem with trying to explain any of this to laypeople isn’t exposing how wrong it is. The hard part is making any sense of it.

Like if I told you Donald Trump has connections with a cult that believes grandmothers are a species of raspberry, whose goal is turning Denmark into cheese and oh, a splinter group of theirs just murdered a police officer. That will just raise more questions than it answers. How the hell did they come to believe that? Why would anyone want that? And then I have to choose between looking like a loony conspiracy theorist, doing an impromptu lecture or just having to decide you actually probably don’t want to know.

I don’t think Yud is that hard to explain. He’s a science fiction fanboy who never let go of his adolescent delusions of grandeur. He was never successfully disabused from the notion that he’s always the smartest person in the room and he didn’t pursue high school, let alone college education to give him the expertise to recognize just how difficult his goal is. Blud thinks he’s gonna create a superhumanly intelligent machine when he struggles with basic programming tasks.

He’s kinda comparable to Elon Musk in a way. Brain uploading and superhuman AI are sort of in the same “cool sci fi tech” category as Mars colonization, brain implants and vactrain gadgetbahns. It’s easy to forget that not too many years ago the public’s perception of Musk was very different. A lot of people saw him as a cool Tony Stark figure who was finally going to give us our damn flying cars.

Yudkowsky is sometimes good at knowing just a bit more about things than his audience and making it seem like he knows a lot more than he does. The first time I started reading HPMoR I thought the author was an actual theoretical physicist or something and when the story said I could learn everything Harry knows for free on this LessWrong site I though I could learn what it means for something to be “implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian” or what that those “timeless formulations of quantum mechanics” were about. Instead it was just poorly paced essays on bog standard logical fallacies and cognitive biases explained using their weird homegrown terminology.

Also, it’s really easy to be convinced of thing when you really want to believe in it. I know personally some very smart and worldly people who have been way too impressed by ChatGPT. Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you’re about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.

His fantasies of becoming immortal through having a God AI simulate his mind forever aren’t the weird part. Any imaginative 15 year old computer nerd can have those fantasies. The weird parts are that he never grew out of those fantasies and that he managed to make some rich and influential contacts while holding on to his chuunibyō delusions.

Anyone can become a cult leader through the power of buying into your own hype and infinite thielbux.

8kw is rookie numbers. That’s like a median Eliezer tweet.

Matt Levine, qntm

I can see why these would appeal to LW crowd. One of them writes cosmic horror about monstrous alien phenomena that can’t be directly perceived preying on humanity and all life in the universe, and qntm writes wordy science fiction.

No comment on Wildbow. I’m sure Worm is excellent but I’m just not in the market for three HPMoR wordcounts of capeshit, so I don’t know what his deal is. Bummer for him to have one of his characters be the indirect namesake of a notorious murder cult.

Wow, what an honor it must be to get invited to speak with such luminaries as Scott Siskind, Jordan Lasker, Eric S. Raymond, Paul Graham, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Vitalik Buterin and Aella. Maybe if I write ten million words of high-concept genre fiction I can make the organizers think I’m also a white supremacist and/or a neoliberal vampire.

It stands for Effective Altruism, which isn’t about either of those things.

First impression: queer (and therefore better) take on whatever Cybersmith was on about(??)

If he wrote it now, the patronus animal would be an RTX 5090.

He’s a renowned AI researcher in the same way as Andrew Wakefield is a renowned doctor.

I listened to parts 2—4 today and even with an above-average familiarity with rationalist weirdness it was a wild fucking ride.

Kinda wild to have a community of vegan trans women whose most notable victims are a border patrol agent and a landlord and who are still the baddies in this situation.

The HPMOR/LW parts and to a lesser extent bits of CFAR were absolutely familiar (and all the more cringeworthy for it). Never quite realized exactly how obviously psychologically torturous cult shit CFAR event were about.

I remember a YouTube personality around that time called BoyInABand who was a legitimately talented musician, but among his most popular videos were one where he praised Elon Musk and another called “don’t stay in school” whoch advocated for exactly that.

I don’t remember if it was the anti-school song, the Musk fanboyism or inappropriate relationship with an underage fan that first got him cancelled but I think he deservedly got owned for each of them.

And of course, that “pronatalists” should be in scare quotes. They’re pro rich white people (“or elites as they happily let journos call them”) having more kids.

I wonder if any of the hacks ever managed to get them to talk about how they feel about poor white people or “elite” people of color having more kids. Would they seem ambivalent about that? On one hand, they’re eugenicists, on the other, they believe in great replacement.

As per Nitish Pahwa’s article from yesterday (linked here) they were “trying for their fifth” last month, which is certainly more than the average nowadays but still rookie numbers for pronatalists.

Ultraman in particular may have been a big trendsetter in using Christian imagery for flavor in Japanese science fiction media at the time.

My take is that the meaning of the Abrahamic references in Eva goes a little bit deeper than just random aesthetics. Most of the allusions fit their mythological counterparts neatly enough, that clearly some research went into them and the references aren’t just random. I don’t think the series is trying to comment on Abrahamic religion, though. The references are considered and deliberate as worldbuilding devices, but ultimately just there for flavor.

And yeah, jury’s still out on whether in-universe they’re really invoking biblical figures and concepts or if someone at NERV/SEELE/GEHIRN was simply feeling a bit pretentious with their code name scheme.

Also it borrows a lot of imagery from esoteric judaism and christianity, but mostly for the sake of aesthetics or very surface level symbolism, a bit like a western show might use buddhist symbolism just for the sake of being a little bit exotic.

Oh no, it’s a very serious (in context of a psychological tragedy sci-fi anime with bionic mecha fighting lovecraftian kaiju) paramilitary national (or maybe a supranational) goverment body affiliated with a shadowy cabal of conspirators.

Its logo is also quite heavily featured on the unscalable mountains of promotional merchandise for the franchise, so it’s an easy thing to name drop if you don’t know or remember much from the show but want to feel like you’re making a deep cut reference because you remember the name from a coffee mug you have or something.

NERV is the organization that runs the eponymous mech suits. It’s a bit like if someone asked about the Simpsons and he just replied “Springfield!” like yea that’s a thing from the show, but couldn’t you think of a quote from a character or something?

Could have called yourself anything and you go for “Creamy Recoil”?

Counter-objection: so do all species of the nazi genus.

Almost nostalgic to see a TREACLES sect still deferring to Eliezer’s Testament. For the past couple of years the Ratheology of old with the XK-class end of the world events and alignof AI has been sadly¹ sidelined by the even worse phrenology and nrx crap. If not for the murder cults and sex crimes, I’d prefer the nerds reinventing Pascal’s Wager over the JAQoff lanyard nazis².

1: And it being sad is in and of itself sad.

2: A subspecies of the tie nazi, adapted to the environmental niche of technology industry work