Count Chocula posted:

Is there a place for general Silicon Valley weirdness that isn't DE? Coders getting harpoons as signing bonuses, that sort of thing? Or is that just YOSPOS?

Woolie Wool posted:

Earlier today, I posted this in the D&D version of this thread and it was ignored:

Woolie Wool posted:

Neoreaction/Dork Enlightenment and their cousins over at LessWrong and satellites hate and fear culture. Certainly, they like their commodified pop culture, but more for its signifiers than for its content--many, perhaps the majority of these works have themes and messages that run directly against the sort of thought that underpins these movements. Of course, most obviously and inescapably, Eliezer Yudkowsky's nerd fanfic opus pretty much negates every premise, every theme, every moral of the actual Harry Potter book series, which features an antagonist whose name is French for "flight from death", whose all-consuming lust for immortal life has destroyed his ability to understand or experience even the slightest joy or human attachment. His followers believe in the inherent superiority of a group of people with natural, inherited gifts, even though the actual events of the story show that these people are in character no better, and frequently worse, than "Muggles" without these gifts. He is ultimately defeated by someone who has the natural talent but was raised by those who do not, and successfully integrates the his magical and Muggle sides into a mature identity, accepts his own mortality, and is willing to fight and die even for--especially for--the Muggles that according to Voldemort, he should see himself as innately superior to.

Among these sorts of people (and, I suspect, by other fascist-minded movements of the past), culture and art are reduced to signifiers and bits of "cool" that they attach to themselves. Their own attempts at creating art end up as propagandistic self-promotion and/or fetishistic self-indulgence (see: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality). Art that cannot be put through this reductive process and left recognizable becomes the tools of the Enemy, a vehicle through which the Cathedral intends to infect virile Neoreactionary rationality with emotions and postmodernism and liberalism and nasty icky girly ~feelings~ because their cargo-cult rationality is so unimaginative and narrow that it leaves them unable to comprehend what it actually is, what it actually means, or why someone might actually like it.

It's kind of a tacit admission of the limits and weaknesses of their "rationality"--it falls apart if it tries to seriously examine culture, philosophy, or anything else that isn't some combination of data and facts. These all get shoved under the banner of the Cathedral, a massive part of the human experience that is now totally off-limits lest it infect you with its insidious mind viruses. It also means that their society would be, in my estimation, hellishly culturally sterile, endlessly recycling old signifiers without meaning in self-indulgent, flatulent spectacles created for the glorification of Neoreaction (see for comparison what happened to art, culture, and music under 1930s fascism). Artists, as inherently mysterious and threatening forces beyond the ken of the Neoreactionary nerd-kings, would be ruthlessly controlled and eliminated if they do anything the rulers feel threatened, insulted, or confused by. The masters of this realm would dream of their transhuman dreams coming to fruition so they can finally excise this troublesome culture from the human animal and we can exist as perfectly sociopathic beings of pure reason, unaffected by other humans' experiences and perspectives. There will be no homes, only sleeping modules; no food, only Soylent; no activities beyond maximizing production, efficiency, and power. For you, at least. Someone has to watch over the human ant farm of the future, hoarding the products of your labor as an immortal AI upload Smaug.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Nah, that's more or less on the money.

He thinks Dementors, which are one of the most bluntly obvious metaphors for depression ever put in fiction, are a metaphor for death.

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

There was a great ad for housemates wanted in the San-Fran area. It was this community house with shared food etc, but had requirements like "must have no tattoos, have never done drugs, be able to run a 3 minute mile, believe that Ayn Rand is the greatest visionary of our time".

Some gibbering goddamn lunatic posted:

I think the 'neoreactionaries' here are actually government plants / disinfo agents, be aware. Please see and save this before it's too late and gets removed.

ArchangeI posted:

Disqualified if you ever attended two protests or more? Jesus Christ those are some reactionary fuckers. Don't want no people with actual opinions here!

quote:

Have been prescribed anything by a psychiatrist more than once

The Vosgian Beast posted:

neonnoodle posted:

In the glorious libertarian future, the ADA will be repealed and all discrimination will be legal as freedom of association.

Zikan posted:

It was a place called startup castle and it was more insane then I remember

Zikan posted:

It was a place called startup castle and it was more insane then I remember

Zikan posted:

It was a place called startup castle and it was more insane then I remember

Zikan posted:

It was a place called startup castle and it was more insane then I remember

NoNotTheMindProbe posted:

So I take it that this is a honey pot run by the UN to gather all the most boring people in one place and gas them? I can't even image how a typical week would play out for someone who fit that bill.

quote:

We subsequently heard from several former residents of the Startup Castle, who described it as “a quasi-military situation” run by a former Chippendales dancer turned reality TV pirate, and compared it to “living in the Hotel California, except we can’t even drink wine here.”

ArchangeI posted:

Disqualified if you ever attended two protests or more? Jesus Christ those are some reactionary fuckers. Don't want no people with actual opinions here!

quote:

That's assuming that the word "disrupt" means something in this context other than "deregulate existing industries so that tech moguls can make more money."

quote:

I stayed at the House in September and October via Airbnb. Crazy doesn't even scratch the surface. Some of the residents are interesting, but the level of personal dysfunction in the folks running the show creates a hostile environment.

John hopes to create a quasi-military situation in the civilian world. Jam on technical stuff with a common mission. Okay, fair enough. But he has no mission. He clearly wanted to be a leader, but he demonstrated no vision and was prone to temper tantrums (actually throwing stuff throughout the house, many days 3:30-5p). His not-a-girlfriend who thinks she's his fiancee only added to the crazy.

I wish them no harm, but this house is not safe for women. It is best for 20-25 year old men who would dedicate their lives to fighting COBRA.

divabot posted:

As I just noted on the HPMOR thread: See this summary from Christopher Hallquist of Yudkowsky's explicitly anti-scientific stance, and Scott's blustering reply. Let none call Scott's reply utterly mindkilled or "my ingroup is good no matter what, you filthy apostate." Both of these guys actually studied philosophy; one uses it.

Woolie Wool posted:

Everyone who says "cultural Marxism" should be forced at gunpoint to read Das Kapital and give a book report on it.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Aurini obviously has read Capital. How else would he have found the line about how we need to rape wives and kill children to achieve communism? Duh!

divabot posted:

Ah, here is good old su2su2u1 (Actual loving Scientist, Thank You Very Much) knocking it out of the park in backing up Hallquist's point with cites.

Scott's arguments in favour of LessWrong are always equivocation (or "motte and bailey", to use his preferred neologism), but su3su2u1 doesn't put up with that poo poo: " the best of Yudkowsky’s writing repudiates the median Yudkowsky writing. (I don’t want to spend time on this, but I’ve previously written that carefully laying out map-vs-territory would completely undercut the quantum sequence)."

quote:

Science is what hands us an unusually well-conducted meta-analysis proving that psi exists with p < 1.2 * 10^-10, crowning fifty years of parapsychological research that finds positive results about as often as not. Bayes is what tells us that parapsychology makes no sense, has an ungodly level of Kolmogorov complexity, and is going to require a heck of a lot more than a good meta-analysis before we accept it.

quote:

When this has happened in the rationality community, I have tried again and again to politely but firmly correct these people.

Tiberius Thyben posted:

I'm confused... I thought he was pro wives being sex slaves and murdering children, as long as the are the right ones.

twistedmentat posted:

Oh btw, does Ariuni have one of those magic cards? We are discussing this in a facebook group and people want to see it.

DarklyDreaming posted:

Aurini is seen as a bit of a poser in the Neoreactionary community, like they think he tries too hard to be one of them.
And when a group composed of Yudkowsky, Moldbug, Anissimov, Ted Beale and the like thinks you're trying too hard to be cool, you have truly reached the bottom of the poo poo-well.

divabot posted:

Anissimov did demand a RationalWiki article of his own.

DarklyDreaming posted:

Aurini is seen as a bit of a poser in the Neoreactionary community, like they think he tries too hard to be one of them.

And when a group composed of Yudkowsky, Moldbug, Anissimov, Ted Beale and the like thinks you're trying too hard to be cool, you have truly reached the bottom of the poo poo-well.

divabot posted:

Ah, here is good old su2su2u1 (Actual loving Scientist, Thank You Very Much) knocking it out of the park in backing up Hallquist's point with cites.

quote:

A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis—perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration—by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass.