Having spent too much time listening to his shit, i don’t think it’s purely propagandistic, what he describes is too esoteric to work as effective propaganda, I think some of it is Nazi-being-drawn-to-the-occult type of shit.

We have:

No more sycophancy—now the AI tells you what it believes. […] We get common knowledge, which recently seems like an endangered species.

Followed by:

We could also have different versions of articles optimized for different audiences. The question is, how many audiences, but I think that for most articles, two good options would be “for a 12 years old child” and “standard encyclopedia article”. Maybe further split the adult audience to “layman” and “expert”?

You have got to love the consistency.

And the accidentally (or not so accidentally?) imperialistic:

The first idea is translation to languages other than English. Those languages often have fewer speakers, and consequently fewer Wikipedia volunteers. But for AI encyclopedia, volunteers are not a bottleneck. The easiest thing it could do is a 1:1 translation from the English version. But it could also add sources written in the other language, optimize the article for a different audience, etc.

And also a deep misunderstanding of translation, there is no such thing as 1:1 translation, it always requires re-interpretation.

Yay! some nice

Dont  Dead
Open Inside

Abundance Agenda horriffying strings of words.

How to save liberalism (without being boring)

Congratulations! You appear to be failing so far—on both counts!

I love that their stated “Pitch us!” suggestion box email address pitches@theargument.com doesn’t appear to have any registered MX records.

I wonder if this is an intentional shredder meme situation (I doubt it), and if not how long it will take them to notice. (I’m assuming that’s the domain they wanted but haven’t quite been able to buy it yet, not very serious.)

the oldest elements of TESCREAL appear to date back to cyberpunk science fiction in the 1980s

Nitpick: Cosmism was birthed in 19th century Russia, complete with “Death is the enemy” “Let’s ressurect everyone” (using science) “Let’s conquer the universe” and proto-eugnenics of the “common project of humanity as transforming all into great men”.

I attempted a point by point sneer, but there is a bit too much silliness and not enough cohesion to produce something readable.

So focusing on “Post-critique”:

OP misspels of some of his “enemy” authors, in a way directly cribbed from Wikipedia suggesting no real analysis.

[…], such texts included Ricouer’s Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and Kierkegaard’s works […]

Ricouer should be Ricœur or at the very least Ricoeur. (Incidentally OP also makes a very poor summary of his work)

Complete and arbitrary marriage of epistemic post-critique and literary post-critique, which as far as I can see have nothing to do with each other beyond sharing a name, and in fact even seem a bit at odds with each other in how they relate to recontextualisation.

I would say this is obviously bot vomit, but I have known humans to be this lazy and thickheaded.

I’m under the impression that he essentially stated as much, though i’m a bit too lazy to go quote mining.

Oof on the part of the author though:

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Nope.

Algernoq (the blogpost author): I assume this is a “Nope, because of secret author evidence that justifies a one-word rebuttal” or a “Nope, you’re wrong in several ways but I have higher-value things to do than retype the sequences”. (Also, it’s an honor; I share your goal but take a different road.) […]

Richard_Kennaway: What goal do you understand yourself to share with Eliezer, and what different road?

Algernoq: I don’t deserve to be arrogant here, not having done anything yet. The goal: I had a sister once, and will do what I can to end death. The road: I’m working as an engineer (and, on reflection, failing to optimize) instead of working on existential risk-reduction. My vision is to build realistic (non-nanotech) self-replicating robots to brute-force the problem of inadequate science funding. I know enough mechanical engineering but am a few years away from knowing enough computer science to do this.

Funnily enough it isn’t even required by their purported bayesian doctrine (which proves none of them do the math), you could simply “update forward” again based on the new evidence that the text is part-fictional.

This is obviously a math olympiad gold medal performance, Fields medal worthy even!

It can’t be that stupid, you haven’t read the sequences hard enough.

Ah but not everyone’s taste is the same, therefore the best conceible plate of nachos is made worse by existing, because it can then be confronted to people’s preferences instead of staying in the platonic realm!

I think for the Yud variety specifically a good summary is : “Taking all the wrong lessons from science fiction, and building a cult around it’s villains, and celebrating “Rational” villains + a belief in the inevitability of world changing technological progress”

Pre-millenarian specifically ^^.

I would say it goes further and that they have a (pseudo?)magical trust in their own intuitions, as if they are crystal clear revalations from the platonic realms.

And following the foregone conclusion of the author, someone who can never exist and therefore will remain forever hypothetical. (Unless the basilisk would also want to punish all you possible hypothetical children as extra incentive?).

PS- This is almost “A modest proposal” levels of bad, without being satire.

Reading about the hubris of young Yud is a bit sad, a proper Tragedy. Then I have to remind myself that he remains a manipulator, and that he should be old enough to stop believe—and promote—in magical thinking.

Don’t forget the:

• Vile dose of racist ranting.
• Simultanously complaining about the elite, but then saying it’s only because it’s been watered down by the plebs.
• Vile understanding of “poetry” as status marker.
• Not going back further in time than 19th century, and extremely suspiciously marking the “height” of peotry between 1920a to mid-1960s, not at all coinciding with the civil rights act.

Thank you for reminding me how vile Moldbug is ? ^^

The irony of crediting Moldbug with a potent explanation for bad poetry is rather amusing. It’s almost a shame that Scott here cops out with a “The margins are too small for my proof”, although maybe it is secret mercy.