neonnoodle posted:

Who the heck is this guy?

A White Guy posted:

Gawddamn, look at that face .

Cingulate posted:

I'm gonna defer to the APA ......

Cingulate posted:

I'm gonna defer to the APA 1996 Intelligence Task Force Report. I'd personally be a bit more pessimistic wherever IQ is applied to anybody but WEIRD people in general, and possibly in general for standard methodological concerns, but while I'd draw a somewhat larger uncertainty region, I'd draw it around this expert consensus.

E.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unknowns
https://www.mensa.ch/sites/default/files/Intelligence_Neisser1996.pdf
http://www.intelltheory.com/apa96.shtml
http://web.archive.org/web/19970102210846/http://www.apa.org/releases/intell.html

No no no. That's way too vague. "They relate to people for example in that people argue about them." What do you mean?

The Vosgian Beast posted:

He hangs out on the edges of NRx and runs a book press that prints Peter Sotos books and the memoirs of Holocaust Denialists.

Here he is giving the worst interview ever

Merdifex posted:

You would refer to the massively outdated report cobbled together when GWAS was not even a thing?

APA task force posted:

Differences in genetic endowment contribute substantially to individual differences in (psychometric) intelligence, but the pathway by which genes produce their effects is still unknown. The impact of genetic differences appears to increase with age, but we do not know why.

JigglyPuff posted:

To explain my personal view of iQ I'm going to post a link to the Wikipedia page for the film 'Princess bride'. It doesn't help but it is a source.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_Bride_(film)

Cingulate is not my favourite dark enlightenment thinker.

MC Nietzche posted:

From a couple pages back but you'll never, EVER guess where Roosh V actually lives (hint: it ain't Poland)

http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2016/02/05/the-daily-mail-tracks-roosh-v-to-his-mothers-basement-where-he-lives-no-really/

Kay Kessler posted:

Just so you know, a lot of people in other threads have been saying that's fake. Your first hint should have been the words "Daily Mail".

Kay Kessler posted:

Honestly, I hope it isn't true because that would mean the Daily Mail may have been stalking his mom, and that is really lovely.

Patrick Spens posted:

Well we can worry about that when it happens. I'd prefer if we could just point and laugh at the morons without people tripping over themselves in righteousness. But as that is clearly impossible, it's nice to have him keeping y'all honest.

MC Nietzche posted:

Depends on why. If they had info that he was living at home then they were just running down a lead. If they were staking her out just because that is indeed lovely.

Kay Kessler posted:

Honestly, I hope it isn't true because that would mean the Daily Mail may have been stalking his mom, and that is really lovely.

Cingulate posted:

I don't know, what were you expecting? I have no particular opinion on IQ. Especially nothing extraordinary or well fleshed out.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

This is him when he was young and fresh-faced apparently. Now he looks like this

quote:

In an important sense, I think revisionism simply refers to the ongoing process of investigating and interpreting history. It’s like when we were kids and we learned that Pluto was the ninth planet from the sun. Now it’s just a rock, or a proto-planet, or whatever. Only I just read where they’ve discovered that Pluto has moons. Does that mean it will be promoted to planet status again? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Antivehicular posted:

I really kind of hope that Roosh V sics his dudes on the Daily Mail, because the resulting comments-section war may finally convince holdouts of the fundamental toxicity and uselessness of Internet comments sections. If Roosh can somehow slay that particular Hydra, I will think well of him for exactly ten earnest seconds before returning to my default attitude of disgusted scorn for him.

Merdifex posted:

Goddamn, I remember reading this "interview" before, and just as I remember, it got really sexist and really creepy real quick. The main point that's brought up over and over is about how HBD chick is a female and a scientific racist, which the science of scientific racism explicitly disallows. And along all the other pseudoscience in the interview, she has to provide an evo-psych based explanation for why most women aren't scientific racists.

Chip Smith posted:

Though I know her only through email correspondence, I am more than reasonably convinced – by firsthand eyewitness accounts, among other nuances – that, contrary to one tenacious strand of web lore, HBD Chick really is a female representative of the species, complete with ovaries, appropriate estrogen levels, an emoticon-dense writing style, and, I like to imagine, a menagerie of stuffed animals adorably huddled on her bedroom dresser.

Phil Sandifer posted:

Mainly for the sake of practicing describing the book as something other than a 50,000 word shitpost (which, don’t worry, it still totally is, but everyone who’s going to buy it because of that will buy it anyway, so it’s not the final description)…

Neoreaction: A Basilisk began life as a piece with the working title “Turing avec Ligotti,” the title an homage to Lacan’s “Kant avec Sade.” The basic idea was to try to connect my argument about the Turing Test really being about empathy and not language with Ligotti’s use of the supernatural to contain any inadvertent optimism his argument generates.

This proved harder than I’d anticipated, not because the ideas don’t go well together, but because they formed a solution in search of a problem. So that flopped around a bit until Kieron Gillen linked Park MacDougald’s phenomenal “The Darkness Before the Right” on Twitter (he cited it as great research for writing supervillains) and I discovered the insane intellectual rabbit hole that is Nick Land, who has totally supplanted Vox Day as my secret fascist boyfriend at this point. Land, if you’re not familiar with him, is a minor British philosopher of the 80s and 90s who was one of the forefathers of accelerationism, but who, following a breakdown fueled by way, way too many amphetamines moved to China and became a neoreactionary without ever actually renouncing any of his views or changing any of his opinions. His novella Chasm will be on my Hugo ballot, despite being more racist than anything that’s going to be on Vox Day’s.

Anyway, Land’s right-wing postmodern nihilism neatly provided the question to which my weird Turing-Ligotti construct was the answer. And for a variety of reasons, if I was going to tackle Land I was going to have to tackle Mencius Moldbug and Eliezer Yudkowsky as well.

Initially I assumed they would serve as a sort of rhetorical feint - a trio of writers I’d critique and then move on from. But between the sheer volume of work that all three have produced and the fact that Land really is a brilliant little monster they proved harder to escape than I thought. On top of that, I became increasingly aware of the need to do something that wasn’t vulnerable to my own critiques. If I was blasting Moldbug and Yudkowsky (and to a lesser extent Land) for offering easy and half-baked answers I couldn’t exactly just propose a new model for socialist utopia in response. And so my question ended up becoming, roughly, “what can leftist thought do about the eschaton besides declare it good/bad and suggest how to prevent/cause it?” (The first sentence of the book is “Let us assume that we are hosed.” The last will probably be “Bioterrorist, infect thyself.”)

Meanwhile, a recurring trope was emerging as I started blazing my trails of devastation across large swaths of Moldbug/Yudkowsky/Land - the idea of lines of thought that unexpectedly end in monstrous and horrifying places. (Roko’s Basilisk is obviously a big one here; a philosophical idea that led its originator to publicly declare, “I wish I had never learned about any of these ideas.”) So the book’s structure began to warp around that - a sort of slaloming run back and forth the core of ideas, tracing a labyrinthine path that at any given moment has a thing it’s trying to do, but that never really threatens an end goal beyond its own inevitable monstrosity.

The idea I had at this point was a book that would self-consciously “go mad,” invisibly crossing some threshold of sense and proceeding methodically to an ostentatiously ridiculous conclusion that would leave the reader with the puzzle of figuring out where it went off the rails. My initial ideas here were pretty outlandish - at one point it was going to slowly morph to Burroughsian cut-ups until the book gradually stopped parsing as English. At another it was going to end in an elaborate metaphysical conspiracy theory about light being an alien invader from another universe. These were mercifully abandoned, albeit not without regret.

And basically all I have left to do is to write the bit that’s what I’m doing instead of those, which is much more predictably and typically me, although it goes much further in its particular direction than anything else I’ve done.

Honestly not sure what follows from this, in terms of my work. I mean, obviously I’ve got to finish it off, Kickstarter it, hopefully write at least two long essays to bundle with it (”The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate” and “Theses on Trump”), edit Last War in Albion Volume 1 and write Volume 2, as well as wrap up the Super Nintendo Project and probably do Season Four of Brief Treatise in 2016, so I have a bit of time. But it feels like it advances a huge amount of what I’ve been doing lately to its endpoint.

Actually, maybe that’ll be my tagline for it. “The last word on western civilization.”

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

I would like to read a book about light being an alien invader from another universe.

quote:

I've just gotten to the final section of the book I'm now calling Neoreaction: A Basilisk. Plans for release exist, and it'll be out sooner than you think. Indeed, probably sooner than Last War in Albion Book One, though I got the first set of pages for that off to Jane this week as well. Now to confront the horror that is "Fearful Symmetry."

Anyone done their Hugo ballots yet? Post what you've got in comments.

Oh, fine, three shorter-than-a-sentence excerpts from Neoreaction: A Basilisk:

Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is what nerdy teenagers in the 1980s read instead of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, largely to their credit.

the contemporary pagan community, which includes a white nationalist strain in the Nazi occultist tradition, of turning to European folklore to escape the corruption of Jew-tainted Christianity in amidst the NPR-listening Wiccans with artisan granola businesses

what other terms can Satan’s rebellion be described in besides “dude took the red pill hard?”

Peztopiary posted:

None of these dudes try to make themselves gay. The MGTOW have given up on relationships with women, in the same way that an Eskimo has given up trying to get an all over tan.

divabot posted:

Davis Aurini wrote something stupendously inane on Return of Kings. I would take it to pieces, but David Futrelle has already done so superlatively.

Jack Gladney posted:

What a weird piece of projection. Like 90% of it is him literally calling women inhuman monsters and then at the end he blames them for not wanting to date him.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

RagnarokAngel posted:

Yeah I think most of them just like, swear to celibacy.

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

The bitcoin thread has me reading that as "Magic the Gathering: Online eWchange"