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The Dark Enlightenment is a movement of people who think 'The Dark Enlightenment' is a good name for a movement.
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Oct 5, 2014 23:08
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Peel posted:The Dark Enlightenment is a movement of people who think 'The Dark Enlightenment' is a good name for a movement. This is the best explanation I've heard so far.
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Oct 5, 2014 23:50
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Nessus posted:The dark enlightenment is that whole thing which is basically, "Well, I grew up around shitheads, and now I am well educated; I will use my cleverness, and concepts from that education, to justify the poo poo-headery of my birth, more or less point for point. Except maybe some tiny bits, like God or marijuana." Right? Or is it just the racism? I think it's the opposite. Dark Enlightenment people seem to come from blue areas, generally. The actual underlying motivation generally seems to be contrarianism.
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Oct 6, 2014 00:26
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I officially petition the goons of something awful dot com to make a Dark Enlightenment mock thread somewhere in the forums please, thank you. I will read it and maybe post in it. Mencius Moldbug.
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Oct 6, 2014 02:38
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Swan Oat posted:I officially petition the goons of something awful dot com to make a Dark Enlightenment mock thread somewhere in the forums please, thank you. I will read it and maybe post in it. Enjoy.
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Oct 6, 2014 02:39
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Uh oh. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/10/03/amelia-artificial-intelligence-ipsoft_n_5920964.html quote:Algorithmically the results are likely to be extremely relevant to your query, but Google does not on a fundamental level 'understand' what you, or it said. It's of course a joke, but I look forward to some insanely panicked response from the LW community.
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Oct 6, 2014 07:28
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pentyne posted:Uh oh.
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Oct 6, 2014 08:54
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Yeah, this just looks like your average mixture of PR overhyping a product and journalists misunderstanding technology.
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Oct 6, 2014 15:47
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I'm pretty skeptical of the lack of an interactive demo, which I'm pretty sure would be the most effective way imaginable to market this kind of software.
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Oct 6, 2014 16:40
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Also that if someone created a generalized syntax-semantics interface, I feel like I probably wouldn't be hearing about it from the huffington post.
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Oct 6, 2014 16:49
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Pavlov posted:Also that if someone created a generalized syntax-semantics interface, I feel like I probably wouldn't be hearing about it from the huffington post. Not only does it probably not do anything impressive, but based on the marketing I think it's pretty unlikely it even looks like it's doing something impressive.
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Oct 6, 2014 16:56
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Pavlov posted:Also that if someone created a generalized syntax-semantics interface, I feel like I probably wouldn't be hearing about it from the huffington post.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:32
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Nessus posted:I certainly can't imagine how you could rig some kind of a demo using a person on Skype or something. Oh wait, yes I can. That was my first thought, too. Truly the Mechanical Turk for the modern age.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:40
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Today I learned from the Slatestarcodex post that quote:Nate/Benja/Eliezer are spending the rest of 2014 working on material for the FLI AI conference, and on introductory FAI material to send to Stuart Russell and other bigwigs. Anyone want to put odds on Russell and "other bigwigs" finding this at all interesting?
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Oct 8, 2014 03:45
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su3su2u1 posted:Anyone want to put odds on Russell and "other bigwigs" finding this at all interesting? Seems like a great way to make Russell and the "other bigwigs"'s secretaries serve as a conduit between Eliezer, et al, and a recycling bin.
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Oct 8, 2014 05:32
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su3su2u1 posted:Anyone want to put odds on Russell and "other bigwigs" finding this at all interesting? Are we allowed to use up-arrow notation in our answers?
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Oct 8, 2014 05:34
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Moddington posted:Are we allowed to use up-arrow notation in our answers? As long as you don't use 1 or 0.
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Oct 8, 2014 05:37
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I'd put it somewhere around 3↑↑↑-3 then.
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Oct 8, 2014 05:52
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su3su2u1 posted:
I thought his schedule for 2014 was all full up finishing his Harry Potter fanfiction in one of his cultists' vacation homes?
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Oct 8, 2014 07:10
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Night10194 posted:I thought his schedule for 2014 was all full up finishing his Harry Potter fanfiction in one of his cultists' vacation homes? That was only for September.
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Oct 8, 2014 07:34
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Spoilers Below posted:Seems like a great way to make Russell and the "other bigwigs"'s secretaries serve as a conduit between Eliezer, et al, and a recycling bin. In my department, we have a little newsstand in the lounge where we put up crazy hand bound editions of "Why Relativity Is Wrong" and the like. I imagine there's a home for this "introductory material" on similar bookshelves across the nation.
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Oct 8, 2014 07:35
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September's over, yet he still doesn't even have a first draft finished, nor has he posted anything new, nor does he intend to so much as comment on HPMOR for an entire month. Since HPMOR itself is dry on content, maybe it's worth checking out the short list of links it provides to other "rationalfics" that Yudkowsky likes, like Friendship is Optimal. quote:Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me by DataPacRat 115 chapters. Let's have a look at the first one. Oddly enough, the main character doesn't seem particularly "rational" in the sense that HPMOR, Friendship is Optimal, Luminosity, etc use the term. Chapter 1 posted:Stop me if you've heard this one before. The author is clearly a fan of HPMOR &c and is trying to mimic their style, but they don't quite know how to handle the narrator. HPMOR Harry, Luminosity Bella, and Celest-AI are all idiots who believe and do stupid things in the name of "rationality", but they at least seem to believe in something and have goals of some sort. Here, the narrator's rationality manifests by just being somewhat beep-boop about everything. When asked if they'd like to go to ponyland, a normal person would laugh off the question; a "normal" brony (oxymoron of the century) would leap with excitement; HPMOR Harry would begin ranting about how the relativistic Jacobian proves that ponies don't exist, then begin plotting to destroy the pony economy. Here, the narrator says  Hmmm well upon consideration it would seem that I would be amenable to thatHe's able to reference rationalist interests, of course: Chapter 1 posted:A reasonably short time later, I said, "Let me see if I can put all this together. Yes, the most important first thing to ask a herd of magical cows in cartoonland is whether they have invented cryonics.  The narrator's tone is perpetually bored. He name-drops things like "existential risk", but displays no particular interest or knowledge; he just knows that, as a rationalist, these are things he is meant to mention, so he mentions them and moves on. He refers to himself several times as insane, but comes across only as awkward. Where HPMOR Harry is an avatar of Yudkowsky, this is clearly an all-too-unintentionally-accurate avatar of the most braindead of Yud's followers. Just as the author is going through the motions of making a rational fic, the character is going through the motions of being "rational", which here apparently means emotionally dead. He wanders around looking to get a job, and several times in a row turns down people offering gifts to help him because it "wouldn't be right" to accept "welfare", which hopefully means this is going to turn into a conservative morality play because at least that would relieve the tedium god I'm bored. Despite explicitly trying to distinguish the story from other brony fanfics by having the protagonist turn into a cow instead of a pony, the author apparently couldn't come up with anything even vaguely original there, since he immediately has the narrator abandon the herd, move to the ponies' town, hang out with the ponies, and basically pretend the gimmick didn't exist. Being a cow only seems to have one purpose: Chapter 1 posted:And getting hooked up to the milking machine was a great relief, and even a physical pleasure, and that's all that I intend to say about that. ...this is the author's fetish isn't it. Somehow this is worse than Friendship is Optimal, which at least was sometimes awful in interesting ways. I can't be bothered to finish chapter 1 of this, let alone chapter 115. And yet, somehow, this is one of only six other rationalfics that Yudkowsky thinks are worthy of recommendation on his site. Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 08:18
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Lottery of Babylon posted:September's over, yet he still doesn't even have a first draft finished, nor has he posted anything new, nor does he intend to so much as comment on HPMOR for an entire month. I've forgiven HPMOR for almost all its dumbness solely because one of Yudkowsky's recommendations there introduced me to Worm, which is a tremendously good series of original fiction completely unrelated to LessWrong or 'rationalism'. I bring this up because for two years the author of Worm posted 2-3 full HPMOR-length chapters per week. That's somewhere like 15-20 novels worth altogether. Yud has several in 'second draft', which he says he won't release until next year.
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Oct 8, 2014 17:07
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Lottery of Babylon posted:...this is the author's fetish isn't it. I'm kind of surprised it took you that long to come to that conclusion. As soon as I saw the word "milk-cow" in the description that's the first thing that came to mind. Based on that I was kind of expecting it to be a lot more hilariously terrible than it turned out to, to be honest.
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Oct 8, 2014 17:44
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The same guy had a go at writing a rationalist comic. Its target audience, naturally, is furry libertarians so it combines  with giant tedious walls of preachy text that nobody in their right mind could actually force themselves to read.
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Oct 8, 2014 22:50
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Qwertycoatl posted:The same guy had a go at writing a rationalist comic. Jesus. quote:If you can get someone to change their mind about something important, then you can imagine doing whatever you want with me!
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Oct 9, 2014 00:22
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Qwertycoatl posted:The same guy had a go at writing a rationalist comic. Haha, holy poo poo, he even uses a well known Evangelical construct, the Bus Out Of loving Nowhere. Except here it's an asteroid and 'Even one more day of delaying our amazing space blossoming could mean DOOOOOOOM' rather than 'If you don't repent and accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior RIGHT THE gently caress NOW, what if you get hit by a bus!?'
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Oct 9, 2014 06:08
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I love the human survival argument from space fans because under any plausible asteroid impact it's still going to be far easier to survive on Earth than anywhere else in the solar system.
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Oct 9, 2014 12:15
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Peel posted:I love the human survival argument from space fans because under any plausible asteroid impact it's still going to be far easier to survive on Earth than anywhere else in the solar system. Sure, but I think the point is that if you have people living on Earth and on Mars, a catastrophe that leaves either one uninhabitable still doesn't completely wipe out humanity.
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Oct 9, 2014 12:25
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The point is that whatever you're doing to make Mars habitable in that scenario - building arcologies or what have you - is just an even harder, more expensive version of whatever you would need to do to survive on Earth post-calamity. So you can just build your crisis bunkers here instead, and build ten or a hundred times as many. The sentiment that we should prepare for the worst is an understandable one, but human spaceflight is a really inefficient way of doing it. It gets focus because it's really cool, so people, especially science fans and 'rationalists', cast about for justifications for it.
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Oct 9, 2014 12:52
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Peel posted:The point is that whatever you're doing to make Mars habitable in that scenario - building arcologies or what have you - is just an even harder, more expensive version of whatever you would need to do to survive on Earth post-calamity. So you can just build your crisis bunkers here instead, and build ten or a hundred times as many. Yeah, I've seen people argue in this very forum that climate change and population pressure necessitate us establishing colonies on Mars. Ignoring the fact that a) unless we figure out how to give Mars a magnetosphere again then even in pressurized dome cities Mars would be a whole lot less inhabitable than Earth ever will be while they both exist and b) this basically dooms most of humanity to death in order to save a select few (hundreds? thousands?) as avatars of the "species". It's exactly the sort of callous "big picture" reasoning that rationalists love to use to justify ignoring suffering, and always involves the person in question assuming that they would/will be one of the elect spirited away in the Martian rapture.
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Oct 9, 2014 13:18
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It's categorically better than letting humanity go extinct wholesale, but I agree with the practical concerns. Mars is solid, it has no core. By the time we have the technology to give it a magnetosphere, we're probably rather more than capable of just building orbital habitats or whatever.
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Oct 9, 2014 13:20
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Venusian aerostats are the coolest colony choice anyway. They even have the right gravity.
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Oct 9, 2014 13:27
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Cardiovorax posted:It's categorically better than letting humanity go extinct wholesale, but I agree with the practical concerns. Mars is solid, it has no core. By the time we have the technology to give it a magnetosphere, we're probably rather more than capable of just building orbital habitats or whatever. Building orbital habitats would be much, much easier than providing Mars with an atmosphere anyway.
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Oct 9, 2014 16:30
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Just from a general standpoint, going up and down a gravity well for any reason is the most hilariously inefficient thing imaginable. If you can create a sustainable food source on Mars, you can do it in space where water, fuel and materials float around in abundance, heavy lifting can be done in zero G, and there isn't intense conflict over a limited area of habitable land. Once you're in space, there's really no reason for widespread colonisation of a barren planet.
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Oct 9, 2014 17:20
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That's not really true. It's not as if you can just open up the fuel hatch in space and have fuel magically pop in, it takes advanced technology to find it and fuel and a shitload of time to reach it, space is almost incomprehensibly big. Planets (Earth at least) also provide atmospheric and magnetic projection from space debris and runaway radiation. Assuming the ultimate solution to the technological problems, space habitats are likely the (relatively) low price, high cost maintenance option and planets the very high price, very low maintenance option.
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Oct 9, 2014 17:44
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My point was more that the time horizon for some sort of human galactic panspermia is pretty disconnected from current political ideologies, and that instantly jumping to "but my ideology is what will preserve the species" is really just a way to avoid thinking about present day human suffering. If and when Earth is no longer the best option, humanity as we know it won't even exist. A species like us in some ways, different in others, may have emerged. Or we'll be extinct. But either way it will have very little to do with whether or not furries found a libertopia on an oil rig somewhere. Also, say what you want about Vinge, but I think he was probably right that human space exploration of the kind though of in most science fiction is probably going to require some level of cyborg existence to make it function. We're just to squishy to make a mass exodus really feasible, at least with current methods of getting into and staying in space. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Oct 9, 2014 |
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Oct 9, 2014 17:54
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Yeah, extensive space travel will probably require heavy artificial augmentation and genetic engineering to become feasible. We're just not made for zero-G environments.
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Oct 9, 2014 17:57
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If spreading earth life to the stars is some moral imperative, I don't see why it has to be human life. Other things would probably survive and adapt out there better. Maybe some extremophile archaea, or maybe ...an AI.
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Oct 9, 2014 18:13
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It's just sort of assumed, because human life is the most important and valuable kind.
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Oct 9, 2014 18:21
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