quote:

The Professor rolled his eyes. "Dear, I understand that you're not familiar with the sceptical literature. You may not realise how easy it is for a trained magician to fake the seemingly impossible. Remember how I taught Harry to bend spoons? If it seemed like they could always guess what you were thinking, that's called cold reading -"

"It wasn't bending spoons -"

"What was it, then?"

Petunia bit her lip. "I can't just tell you. You'll think I'm -" She swallowed. "Listen. Michael. I wasn't - always like this -" She gestured at herself, as though to indicate her lithe form. "Lily did this. Because I - because I begged her. For years, I begged her. Lily had always been prettier than me, and I'd... been mean to her, because of that, and then she got magic, can you imagine how I felt? And I begged her to use some of that magic on me so that I could be pretty too, even if I couldn't have her magic, at least I could be pretty."

Tears were gathering in Petunia's eyes.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

http://imgur.com/Atluu0E

Cingulate posted:

Decided to check out Harry Potter And The Misunderstanding Of Bayesian Reasoning for myself. Here's from the 9th paragraph onwards (although most of the paragraphs are single-line):
So literally the first thing that happens is a by the book demonstration of mansplaining, followed by a woman being overly, and exclusively, concerned with her looks, and then being emotional?

Is this followed by an ironic inversion or is this how self-unaware the thing keeps on being throughout?

ArchangeI posted:

What does your heart tell you?

Wait, no, wrong user.

What does your cold, hard intellect tell you?

Cingulate posted:

My heart tells me speedrunning Super Mario Bros, masturbating, or masturbating to speedruns of Super Mario Bros would be a much better use of my time than reading one more line of that piece.

quote:

You'd need to have lived the lives of Newton, Lavoisier, Einstein, Fermi, and Kahneman all put together to be proven wrong about as many facts as a programmer unlearns in one year of debugging, though admittedly they'd be deeper and more emotionally significant facts. How could academia possibly let an average practitioner do that?

quote:

Mathematics gives you a false picture of the simplicity of reality, most forms of science and programming will quickly disabuse you of this

The Vosgian Beast posted:

I think maybe this derail has gone on too long. Here's the most irritating thing ever

this stupid article posted:

The reactionary hipster movement is winning.

Woolie Wool posted:

Wait, what the gently caress is this blog? "National anarchist"? Some kind of anarchist Nazi poo poo?

Cingulate posted:

In further can't-stop-looking-at-the-car-wreck news, I've, against better judgement, skimmed over another chapter of Harry Potter Likes Reading D&D Rulebooks But Not Play D&D With His "Friends". Specifically the parts about brain evolution. Turns out Yud is not an evolutionary neurobiologist!
Considering that's actually within my area of expertise, does anyone even remotely care about what I think is dumb about Yud's take on this?

Cingulate posted:

In further can't-stop-looking-at-the-car-wreck news, I've, against better judgement, skimmed over another chapter of Harry Potter Likes Reading D&D Rulebooks But Not Play D&D With His "Friends". Specifically the parts about brain evolution. Turns out Yud is not an evolutionary neurobiologist!
Considering that's actually within my area of expertise, does anyone even remotely care about what I think is dumb about Yud's take on this?

Woolie Wool posted:

To Yud, there is no learning, only the memorization of facts. Data and facts. Data and facts. They are all that exists in the world of nerds.


Is he serious? Their mere existence reveals the weakening position of the right in the culture war.

Wait, what the gently caress is this blog? "National anarchist"? Some kind of anarchist Nazi poo poo?

This site's mission statement is amazing. It's like if you cut up a bunch of communist, anarchist, and fascist screeds into pieces and taped them back together at random. Some sort of bizarre intersection of Mao, Zerzan, and William Pierce. Either that or the William Pierce part cut up Mao and Zerzan and is now wearing their skins like an ideological Buffalo Bill. I'm not sure which is more hosed up.

Night10194 posted:

I am always up for hearing about the dumb poo poo Yud writes. Dude is fascinatingly stupid to me.

quote:

And beside Draco, Harry walked along with a smile on his face, thinking about the evolutionary origins of human intelligence.

In the beginning, before people had quite understood how evolution worked, they'd gone around thinking crazy ideas like human intelligence evolved so that we could invent better tools.

The reason why this was crazy was that only one person in the tribe had to invent a tool, and then everyone else would use it, and it would spread to other tribes, and still be used by their descendants a hundred years later. That was great from the perspective of scientific progress, but in evolutionary terms, it meant that the person who invented something didn't have much of a fitness advantage, didn't have all that many more children than everyone else. Only relative fitness advantages could increase the relative frequency of a gene in the population, and drive some lonely mutation to the point where it was universal and everyone had it. And brilliant inventions just weren't common enough to provide the sort of consistent selection pressure it took to promote a mutation. It was a natural guess, if you looked at humans with their guns and tanks and nuclear weapons and compared them to chimpanzees, that the intelligence was there to make the technology. A natural guess, but wrong.

Before people had quite understood how evolution worked, they'd gone around thinking crazy ideas like the climate changed, and tribes had to migrate, and people had to become smarter in order to solve all the novel problems.

quote:

But human beings had four times the brain size of a chimpanzee. 20% of a human's metabolic energy went into feeding the brain. Humans were ridiculously smarter than any other species. That sort of thing didn't happen because the environment stepped up the difficulty of its problems a little. Then the organisms would just get a little smarter to solve them. Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.

And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.

Harry had once read a famous book called Chimpanzee Politics. The book had described how an adult chimpanzee named Luit had confronted the aging alpha, Yeroen, with the help of a young, recently matured chimpanzee named Nikkie. Nikkie had not intervened directly in the fights between Luit and Yeroen, but had prevented Yeroen's other supporters in the tribe from coming to his aid, distracting them whenever a confrontation developed between Luit and Yeroen. And in time Luit had won, and become the new alpha, with Nikkie as the second most powerful...

...though it hadn't taken very long after that for Nikkie to form an alliance with the defeated Yeroen, overthrow Luit, and become the new new alpha.

It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity.

'Cause, y'know, a human would have totally seen that one coming.

ArchangeI posted:

A lot of it starts making more sense when you assume that Yud believes intelligence to be very much like the DnD stat.

Laserjet 4P posted:

Perhaps I'm missing something here but criticizing as in "I am seriously reading all this poo poo" Harry Potter fanfic written by a stunted manchild whose main talent is sucking sociopath venture capitalist dick

why the gently caress is this different from other poo poo fanfic

Cingulate posted:

if we only look at the component coming from higher cognition, the primary driver seems to be collaboration and cooperation - peacefully managing large, complex groups. There is an interesting observation (you may have heard of Dunbar's number) that within mammals, the encephalization quotient correlates nicely with group size, and with grooming times, that is, how much time your average ape spends every day just grooming - apes groom each other to coordinate their societies, just to diffuse stress and uphold social harmony. In simple terms: coordinating more complex groups means bigger brains.
So what Yud says is not actually false - surely a part of this maneuvering within larger, more complex groups means competition and possibly even some battle of the wits stuff. But the tone in the primary scientific literature is typically very much about cooperation than competition. IMO the most interesting thing about this is not that Yud has a very idiosyncratic take on the literature, but in which way he is idiosyncratic; he takes a story about cooperation driving brain size, and makes it into one where brains grow in order to subjugate your fellow pre-human.

I'd say winning over others via your nerd smarts to establish a philosopher king hierarchy is a typical nerd dream. Contrast with the "feminine", soft and mushy and un-cool cooperation, coexistence, and harmony.

Cingulate posted:

In further can't-stop-looking-at-the-car-wreck news, I've, against better judgement, skimmed over another chapter of Harry Potter Likes Reading D&D Rulebooks But Not Play D&D With His "Friends". Specifically the parts about brain evolution. Turns out Yud is not an evolutionary neurobiologist!
Considering that's actually within my area of expertise, does anyone even remotely care about what I think is dumb about Yud's take on this?

Laserjet 4P posted:

Perhaps I'm missing something here but criticizing as in "I am seriously reading all this poo poo" Harry Potter fanfic written by a stunted manchild whose main talent is sucking sociopath venture capitalist dick
why the gently caress is this different from other poo poo fanfic

Night10194 posted:

Because it's one of the main tools of spreading his cult. He wrote it specifically to try to attract its audience to his weird singularity cult.

As a result, it's also a fascinating window into his weird beliefs.

Cingulate posted:

Big Yud has never read The Selfish Gene

The Vosgian Beast posted:

She, and yes, as far as I can tell.

Nydwracu, Scott Alexander's favorite fascist friend used to call himself an anarcho-fascist, but he changed his political beliefs to another nonsensical neologism every other week, so take that with a grain of salt.

Cingulate posted:

Merdifex posted:

But hey, Scott thinks that his concepts of "fnords" and "thedes and phyles" are great, so who am I to argue.

Heresiarch posted:

Okay, I've read Illuminatus! and its sister materials, I used to playtest for Steve Jackson Games in the 80's, and I am familiar with most of the related mythology. What terrible thing has he stolen the word "fnord" for?

Merdifex posted:

He was countersignaling, that is, being glib in order to "throw people" off and keep them from realizing what a racist, sexist moron Wesley is. This is the same guy, by the way, who thinks that the 70s was the last time things were good in the west, because you won't be able to have a character like Archie Bunker on T.V. today, apparently.

But hey, Scott thinks that his concepts of "fnords" and "thedes and phyles" are great, so who am I to argue.

Merdifex posted:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/24/nydwracus-fnords/

Which might be a useful concept, except to Nydwracu it is used to the effect of something like "no detractors have valid arguments against neoreaction" which is a lovely argument. On tumblr, Nostalgebraist for one made several arguments against neoreactionary crap, Moldbug, and such like. Nydwracu had no answer that wasn't full of "fnords." In fact, none of his writing is not full of fnords.

Heresiarch posted:

Cingulate, you're sometimes confusing the words "empathetic"/"empathic" (which are almost interchangeable) and the word "emphatic", or possibly your spell checker is. I'm not trying to call you an idiot here, it's a very common mistake and I make it myself if I'm not paying attention.


Based on the time I've spent involved in liberal arts departments (mostly relating to culture and languages), it actually does. Not all the time, of course, but as a general guideline it tends to.

Now what?

The Vosgian Beast posted:

You are not being fair to neoreaction unless you assume that you share all the same basic motives, morals, and end goals, and simply have different interpretations and knowledge of empirical data. When we say "maybe slavery was good" it is obviously coming from a place of deep compassion and intellectual honesty.

Merdifex posted:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/24/nydwracus-fnords/

Which might be a useful concept, except to Nydwracu it is used to the effect of something like "no detractors have valid arguments against neoreaction" which is a lovely argument. On tumblr, Nostalgebraist for one made several arguments against neoreactionary crap, Moldbug, and such like. Nydwracu had no answer that wasn't full of "fnords." In fact, none of his writing is not full of fnords.

Pope Guilty posted:

Garbage people taking Discordian ideas for their own sucks.

Heresiarch posted:

I miss my bright yellow Loopmanics edition. I loaned it to a friend and he never gave it back.

quote:

What the gently caress did you just loving say about me, you little commie? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Phalanx, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on twitter, and I have over 300 confirmed followers. I am trained in shitpost warfare and I’m the top Soapjackal in the entire /duck/. You are nothing to me but just another progressive. I will wipe you the gently caress out with obnoxiously long blog posts the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my loving words. You think you can get away with saying that poo poo to me over the h8chan? Think again, demotist. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of Phalanx across the Reactosphere and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, entryist. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your blog. You’re loving dead, human being. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can check your phenotype you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in advanced cuckoldry, but I have access to over 48 Phalanx training camps and I will use them to their full extent to wipe your miserable rear end off the face of the continent, you little voter. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your loving tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn tranny. I will poo poo fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re loving dead, comrade.