The MIRI, CFAR, EA triumvirate promised not just that you could be the hero of your own story but that your heroism could be deployed in the service of saving humanity itself from certain destruction. Is it so surprising that this promise attracted people who were not prepared to be bit players in group housing dramas and abstract technical papers?

Good point.

Logic. Rationality. Intelligence. Somewhere in all these attempts to harness them for our shared humanity, they’d been warped and twisted to destroy it.

Oh, the warping and twisting started long before Ziz. (The Sequences are cult shit.)

LaSota and those in her orbit alleged that CFAR and its leadership were laced with anti-trans beliefs and practices. (“That’s preposterous,” one member of the rationalist community, who is also trans, told me. “Rationalists have the most trans people of any group I’ve seen that isn’t explicitly about being trans. You’d just show up at a math event or house party, and it would be 20 percent trans.”)

The leadership can’t be transphobic because 20% of the membership is trans. In related news, the United States government cannot be sexist because [breaks down into bleak and bitter laughter]

Don’t think in detail about the future superintelligence that can hug you and turn you into TANG!

I was tempted to give them their free ticket to the egress for saying “paint their discourse with the purples”.

All Person Of Interest fanfiction must by Internet law be extremely gay to spite Caviezel.

• The Fifth Element as a Root/Shaw story
• Pacific Rim as a Finch/Reese story

Working in the field of genetics is a bizarre experience. No one seems to be interested in the most interesting applications of their research. […] The scientific establishment, however, seems to not have gotten the memo. […] I remember sitting through three days of talks at a hotel in Boston, watching prominent tenured professors in the field of genetics take turns misrepresenting their own data […] It is difficult to convey the actual level of insanity if you haven’t seen it yourself.

Like Yudkowsky writing about quantum mechanics, this is cult shit. “The scientists refuse to see the conclusion in front of their faces! We and we alone are sufficiently Rational to embrace the truth! Listen to us, not to scientists!”

Gene editing scales much, much better than embryo selection.

“… Mister Bond.”

The graphs look like they were made in Matplotlib, but on another level, they’re giving big crayon energy.

But could even a generation of Johns von Neumann outsmart the love child of Skynet and Samaritan from Person Of Interest?

Oh, but they’re just very concerned that American schools are forcing all the children into the same mold, don’t you see

gag me with a fucking spoon

Reached by the Chronicle, Yudkowsky said he would not read the letter for the same reason he refused to read the manuscript of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

Not even the MST3k version?

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.tv.mst3k/search?q=MiSTing%3A+Unabomber+Manifesto

Yeah, four kids is “the biggest family on the suburban block where I grew up”, not “time to build another cabin in the compound”.

Or they deliberately named things like the Lance of Longinus in order to fulfill a prophecy, or make it look like a prophecy was being fulfilled.

We are on the verge of a “cultural mass extinction.” This will dramatically increase the homogeneity of our species and as such lower the prevalence of orthanganal perspectives that could generate solutions to social problems which are not apparent to surviving cultures.

zoom and enhance

orthanganal

I shouldn’t make fun of uncorrected typos. But I will.

Borrowing bits of Christian iconography and such was a thing in anime going back to the '80s, as I understand it, to get that creepy/exotic flavor. In Evangelion, I don’t think it’s entirely clear how much of the esoteric religious references are supposed to be taken literally and how many are more like in-universe code names (in the vein of Trinity test). Like, maybe the “Dead Sea Scrolls” they keep talking about really are the Dead Sea Scrolls, but NERV named their supercomputers the “Magi” just because they’re pompous weirdos.

They’re a supranational organization that nominally reports to the UN while actually being directed by an ancient conspiracy that is being subverted from within by a modern conspiracy. They build WMDs that are piloted by child soldiers. One of these child soldiers is the son of the commander. Another is a clone of the commander’s dead wife (maybe). NERV are the only ones who can stop the annihilation of all life on Earth by the lovecraftian kaiju, because they are the sole possessors of forcefields that run on loneliness.

… But there is a penguin!

Over the course of my research, it has come to my attention that Jordan Lasker was invited to give a talk titled “The Academic and Career Trajectories of Underqualified College Admits” at Stanford University’s Classical Liberalism Initiative seminar series. The series of talks, run by Iván Marinovic out of the School of Business whose goal is to invite professors to “debate ideas and policy issues with rigor, even when doing so may challenge orthodoxy”.

These challenges to “orthodoxy” never seem to include ideas like paying reparations for slavery. (Deadpan Daria voice) It’s so strange.

PolygenX’s Chief Science Officer Steven Wolfram’s

(double-take)

I think that should be Tobias Wolfram. Per RationalWiki and Hope Not Hate, anyway.

A relevant earlier thread

It’s true: The sneerclub mod interface is a replica of the mummification machine from Young Sherlock Holmes, and when we ban people, we actually drown them in wax.

It only works with the chanting, of course.

Given the … calibre of thinking on display in his other tweets (xharts?), I wouldn’t be surprised if he just typed “Zizians” into Reddit’s search box; /r/sneerclub currently comes up a few times near the top of results there.