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Curvature of Earth posted:I'll link to at least one for posterity. This review sucks, but in the process of sucking it makes one good point: the beginning of NRxAB says Let Us Assume We Are hosed. I think you could write a review of the book arguing against that, and therefore against the whole book. Maybe this isn't a book for me, because I really don't think we are hosed. The eschatons of Yudkowsky and Moldbug and the SV technofetishists are insane on their face, but so is the dispensationalist Christian eschaton, and that of the fringe groups who claimed apocalypse was coming in 2015, 2013, 1988, whenever Jonestown was... I bet if you included really fringe groups you could go back hundreds of years. And certainly disasters have happened, but nothing that counts as the end of the world, surely. So there's a well-documented phenomenon of people claiming the end is nigh when the end was clearly not nigh. In that light it seems like just assuming that the end is in fact nigh this time would require a lot of justification, a lot of This Time Is Different stuff. Does anyone (maybe someone with a preview copy?) understand the basis of the assumption at the core of the book?
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May 11, 2016 04:02
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eatenmyeyes posted:He actually has a post called "debates with my father" Both a hateful bigot and stuck up his own rear end! A winning combination! Peppermint posted:Liberals used to call fascism unfree and uncivilized, and now they have no free speech and mass rapes. Where free speech means "ability to shout slurs at anyone I don't like without suffering any consequences" and rape means "brown people share the same country as white women". Peppermint posted:it would obviously have been good for the US if the urban areas had been cleansed with nuclear fire in the late ’80s Hate to break it to him, but even post-White Flight, even the dumpiest, shittiest urban areas still produced more tax revenue per acre than even the shiniest, whitest suburb. If they'd been nuked, state and county governments would've imploded from the lack of funds. Peppermint posted:the Laws of God, the sayings of Christ, and the de-Godified cuckstainty that is utilitarianism, in which the Will of God is mechanized into the maximization of utility, and the sayings of Christ are reinterpreted as allegories about maximizing utility I'm a Jewish atheist, so any claim of the superiority of Jesus fails for me on two different levels. I mean, I can draw from two entirely different textual traditions here, and both find "traditional" Christian morality pretty lacking. But I'll do my best to meet him on his own terms: to quote Fred Clark from Slacktivist, there isn't a lot of Christ in this man's Christianity.
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May 11, 2016 04:06
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SolTerrasa posted:This review sucks, but in the process of sucking it makes one good point: the beginning of NRxAB says Let Us Assume We Are hosed. I think you could write a review of the book arguing against that, and therefore against the whole book. Phil's view is that global warming and environmental collapse are an apocalypse-level disaster that civilization has no hope of enduring.
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May 11, 2016 04:09
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eatenmyeyes posted:He actually has a post called "debates with my father" a racist rear end in a top hat posted:I replied ... that it was funny when the Bomb Brothers carjacked that human being with a coexist bumper sticker but I wish they had succeeded at hitting MIT; that the Paris attacks are great because they allow us to scapegoat the rapugees [sic] as terrorists even though the actual problem with them is that they are in our countries taking our women; and asked him about, while it would obviously have been good for the US if the urban areas had been cleansed with nuclear fire in the late ’80s, whether it was necessary for the USSR to collapse on its own terms rather than through a nuclear exchange with the US to demonstrate to people that communism is a bad idea. That certainly is the end of any possible meaningful debate.
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May 11, 2016 04:13
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Curvature of Earth posted:I'm a Jewish atheist, so any claim of the superiority of Jesus fails for me on two different levels. I mean, I can draw from two entirely different textual traditions here, and both find "traditional" Christian morality pretty lacking. But I'll do my best to meet him on his own terms: to quote Fred Clark from Slacktivist, there isn't a lot of Christ in this man's Christianity. I think this guy is one of those fascists who thinks Christianity is an egalitarian Jewish cult that ruined the world by turning masculine pagans into feminine wimps, but I could be wrong because he can't write a single sentence without at least three alt-right neologisms.
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May 11, 2016 04:13
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The Vosgian Beast posted:I think this guy is one of those fascists who thinks Christianity is an egalitarian Jewish cult that ruined the world by turning masculine pagans into feminine wimps, but I could be wrong because he can't write a single sentence without at least three alt-right neologisms. That's what I get for skimming a bigot.
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May 11, 2016 04:26
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He's really disgusting. I'm torn on blaming the father for him and imagining a We Need to Talk About Kevin situation.
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May 11, 2016 04:32
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The Vosgian Beast posted:I think this guy is one of those fascists who thinks Christianity is an egalitarian Jewish cult that ruined the world by turning masculine pagans into feminine wimps, but I could be wrong because he can't write a single sentence without at least three alt-right neologisms.
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May 11, 2016 04:41
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Curvature of Earth posted:Phil's view is that global warming and environmental collapse are an apocalypse-level disaster that civilization has no hope of enduring. Huh. Is that a widely-held belief among experts, is Phil an expert himself, or should I be drawing parallels to Yudkowsky?
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May 11, 2016 05:02
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SolTerrasa posted:Huh. Is that a widely-held belief among experts, is Phil an expert himself, or should I be drawing parallels to Yudkowsky? Is this something that really matters in the area of "gee, those DE fellers sure are strange"?
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May 11, 2016 05:06
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SolTerrasa posted:Huh. Is that a widely-held belief among experts, is Phil an expert himself, or should I be drawing parallels to Yudkowsky? Are there experts in the field of assessing how robust human civilization is when faced with extreme planet-wide environmental dysfunction?
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May 11, 2016 05:13
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Puppy Time posted:Is this something that really matters in the area of "gee, those DE fellers sure are strange"? I considered that, and I think the answer is yes, but only sort of. For the DE / NRx proper, not really. But for Yudkowsky, I really do think it matters. If the tone of the book is "look at this fool trying to escape his inevitable demise with cryonics and mind uploading", I'd agree. I've written on that before with regard to Yudkowsky's unshakeable belief in eternal life. But if the author then substitutes "of course, we'll all be dead of civilizational collapse before they even get the chance to die of natural causes", it seems to me that it sets a pretty different tone. I'll buy the book anyway and give it a shot, but I'm getting the same feeling I got from Dan Lyons' Disrupted, where the book mocks a target ripe for and deserving of mockery, but the author's weird quirks make it hard to really land any solid punches. Or maybe his position will turn out to be well-supported by experts, or maybe it won't turn out to impact the book much, aside from that first page which we've all read by now. E: GunnerJ posted:Are there experts in the field of assessing how robust human civilization is when faced with extreme planet-wide environmental dysfunction? I'm not sure. At a guess I'd say probably yes; there are experts in all sorts of really niche fields. I would imagine that historians can talk about local environmental collapses, at a minimum, right? E2: Yep, those people exist. Dr. Jason Ur from Harvard is an example. He says that climate change is speculated to be partially to blame for a few collapsed civilizations. He doesn't solely blame the climate, though, and his message is a relatively hopeful one, considering. quote:When we excavate the remains of past civilizations, we rarely find any evidence that they made any attempts to adapt in the face of a changing climate. I view this inflexibility as the real reason for collapse. Which is a pretty far cry from "This will happen to us, soon, and we will not survive". I guess we'll see when the book comes out. SolTerrasa has a new favorite as of 05:31 on May 11, 2016 |
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May 11, 2016 05:20
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SolTerrasa posted:Huh. Is that a widely-held belief among experts, is Phil an expert himself, or should I be drawing parallels to Yudkowsky? It is not even close to widely held, at least with respect to the economic impact of global warming. Basically though, consensus seems to be that if we don't do something, it's gonna get ugly but we'll survive. It's the things that aren't humans that are really gonna feel it. Hate Fibration has a new favorite as of 06:13 on May 11, 2016 |
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May 11, 2016 06:07
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SolTerrasa posted:I'm not sure. At a guess I'd say probably yes; there are experts in all sorts of really niche fields. I would imagine that historians can talk about local environmental collapses, at a minimum, right? Historians also know better than to assume that they can make reliable predictions based on precedent. For all that we would like to avoid being doomed to repeat past mistakes, we actually have a pretty poor track record for saying how things will turn out in the future. The reasons why are that we don't have a comprehensive enough understanding of the present to make really reliable comparisons to the past (and the larger the scale of the issue, the worse it gets), there always unforeseen developments, and future circumstances may be so different from anything in the past as to render precedent useless. In this case, specifically, past collapses possibly partially due to climate change were "a few civilizations," not all of industrial modernity on Earth. That's because we have not seen a worldwide threat to the environment on the scale of global climate change before. So, past precedents like Dr. Ur's are not necessarily good guides. The problem is that while there are many fields in which expertise can provide insights and information for making speculation on whether global climate change will lead to mass die-offs and universal de-industrialization, there is no one field that actually has enough of a claim to credibility on the subject of an unprecedented process like global climate change to actually make authoritative statements about whether everything will be OK or not. This goes both ways, of course, and we should be skeptical of predictions of certain total doom. Just, not solely because someone is out of step with expert opinion. GunnerJ has a new favorite as of 06:50 on May 11, 2016 |
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May 11, 2016 06:42
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I just want to point out that if you were immortal and wanted to hide in plain sight, Dr. Ur of the surviving the collapse of civilizations program would be the exact way to do so.
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May 11, 2016 06:47
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Lottery of Babylon posted:White women are particularly beautiful. Everyone knows this; since some people pretend not to, let’s look at what nips draw when they want to draw the most beautiful woman possible: Wait is 'nips' a racial slur for the japanese now? gently caress i'm a weeaboo and i've never heard that one, i assume they're going for 'Nippon' but it just makes me think of nipples.
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May 11, 2016 07:14
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Post Your Favorite (or Request) › The Laws of God, the Sayings of Christ, and the de-Godified Cuckstainty that is Utilitarianism Actually now that I look at it it sounds more like a D&D thread name 
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May 11, 2016 07:21
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Wait is 'nips' a racial slur for the japanese now? gently caress i'm a weeaboo and i've never heard that one, i assume they're going for 'Nippon' but it just makes me think of nipples. Got it in one. Welcome to 1940s-era slurs.
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May 11, 2016 07:25
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Somfin posted:Got it in one. Welcome to 1940s-era slurs. But my grandpa who fought them in WWII called them Japs and/or Tojos though  I just learned recently that it's even on his discharge papers, "took shrapnel while disarming a Jap detonator." I didn't realize that was the official military term
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May 11, 2016 07:27
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:But my grandpa who fought them in WWII called them Japs and/or Tojos though Turns out you can use more than one slur per racial group. Who'da thunk it?
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May 11, 2016 07:38
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:But my grandpa who fought them in WWII called them Japs and/or Tojos though
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May 11, 2016 08:20
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Japanophile white nationalists never cease to be amazing. Gotta keep that axis powers pact hope alive. 
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May 11, 2016 08:44
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Polybius91 posted:The term was well-known enough to feature in the title of a prominent cartoon. Well okay  Cardboard Box A posted:Japanophile white nationalists never cease to be amazing. Gotta keep that axis powers pact hope alive. But in Hetalia the bishies get along so well 
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May 11, 2016 08:48
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Cardboard Box A posted:Japanophile white nationalists never cease to be amazing. Gotta keep that axis powers pact hope alive. Imagine a Venn diagram with three circles, labled 'Has an extensive knife "collection"', 'Has a schoolgirl fetish', and 'Racist Shithead'. These guys are in the overlap.
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May 11, 2016 09:13
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Wait is 'nips' a racial slur for the japanese now? gently caress i'm a weeaboo and i've never heard that one, i assume they're going for 'Nippon' but it just makes me think of nipples. There's at least one translation of JoJos where JoJo II refers to the Japanese this way during his stay. And yeah it's just a disrespectful shortening in the same way as 'Jap' or 'Paki'
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May 11, 2016 09:30
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Tesseraction posted:There's at least one translation of JoJos where JoJo II refers to the Japanese this way during his stay. And yeah it's just a disrespectful shortening in the same way as 'Jap' or 'Paki' I've always thought it was strange that paki is a slur. The -stan suffixe that a lot of middle eastern countries have literally just means "place", and the first part of the country's name refers to the people who live there. Kazakhstan is the place of the Kazakhs, Turkmenistan is the place of the Turkmens, Uzbekistan is the place of the Uzbeks, Kyrgyzstan is the place of the Kyrgyzs, but Pakistan? Well, that's where the Pakistanis live. Looking it up I guess the country didn't exist until 1947, so I guess that has something to do with it.
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May 11, 2016 11:14
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It's mostly because Britain (where the insult originated) had a large immigrant population from Pakistan (from Greater India) whereas we had very few from the other -stans. Bear in mind as well that part of the racism behind it is that anyone from that part of Asia would be described as a 'Paki' regardless of their actual ethnicity - my family's from the Catholic part of India but I've had the insult thrown at me. It's similarly why America has insults for Korean ('gook', from Hanguk, the Korean name for Korea) which, in true racist fashion, they then carried over to Vietnamese and Japanese ('Jap' and 'Nip' from the English/Japanese names respectively). Note that these are all the countries America has been at war with. Shortening the name to show diminutive status or lack of respect is a common one (and easier to yell quickly in a firefight). Kinda hard to shorten Afghanistan or Iraq to insultingly-shortened forms, though, so it's just 'ragheads / towelheads' etc.
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May 11, 2016 11:28
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Wanamingo posted:I've always thought it was strange that paki is a slur. The -stan suffixe that a lot of middle eastern countries have literally just means "place", and the first part of the country's name refers to the people who live there. Kazakhstan is the place of the Kazakhs, Turkmenistan is the place of the Turkmens, Uzbekistan is the place of the Uzbeks, Kyrgyzstan is the place of the Kyrgyzs, but Pakistan? Well, that's where the Pakistanis live. Well, it's because 'Pakistan' is an acronym formed from the names of the regions that constituted the country when it broke away from India. It's not related to a specific ethnonym the way the other -istan countries are.
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May 11, 2016 14:11
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Tesseraction posted:It's mostly because Britain (where the insult originated) had a large immigrant population from Pakistan (from Greater India) whereas we had very few from the other -stans. Bear in mind as well that part of the racism behind it is that anyone from that part of Asia would be described as a 'Paki' regardless of their actual ethnicity - my family's from the Catholic part of India but I've had the insult thrown at me. They call them "hajis".
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May 11, 2016 19:48
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Dmitri-9 posted:They call them "hajis".
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May 11, 2016 20:12
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I thought 'Charlie' was meant to be phonetic alphabet, for the 'C' in 'combatant'?
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May 11, 2016 21:59
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I love how half of the rationalist reviews of Sandifer's book seem to be entirely about patting the "rationalist community" on the back for how brave and special and ~intellectually honest~ they are for arguing with their critics. I just saw a post where one of them is applauding the rest for not engaging in "ad hominem" (because rationalists never got beyond their freshman Intro to Rhetoric classes) and then one or two posts after that is another rationalist ranting about what an evil fuckhead Sandifer is.
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May 11, 2016 22:41
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Criticising my philosophy is literally what Hitler did to the Jews.
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May 11, 2016 22:44
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Tesseraction posted:I thought 'Charlie' was meant to be phonetic alphabet, for the 'C' in 'combatant'? "Communist", actually. Thought it could also be used as shorthand for "Victor Charlie", which was the NATO alphabet reference for VC, or "Viet Cong".
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May 11, 2016 22:54
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Tesseraction posted:I thought 'Charlie' was meant to be phonetic alphabet, for the 'C' in 'combatant'? Yes there is autism in my family, why do you ask?
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May 11, 2016 23:03
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I'm just enjoying that all the rationalist reviews of Sandifer's book have largely vindicated my a priori dismissal of LW'ers as being of the same sort of pseudo intellectual who ten years ago would have been objectivists on livejournal.
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May 11, 2016 23:06
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Hellequin posted:I'm just enjoying that all the rationalist reviews of Sandifer's book have largely vindicated my a priori dismissal of LW'ers as being of the same sort of pseudo intellectual who ten years ago would have been objectivists on livejournal. Is there really any difference between LWers and objectivists? It seems like it's pretty much the same poo poo: beep boop I am a perfectly logical Vulcan, everyone who disagrees with me is clouded by foolish hoo-man emotions. They've just replaced capitalism and trains with the Singularity and computers. Actually, they're even closer than I thought. Compare the methods of the Austrian school of economics with how rationalists (and MIRI specifically) approach their topics. Austrians don't want to use statistics or anything like that in studying economics. The Objectivist way is to just think real good and the solutions to economics will come. That's the same way Yudkowsky approaches science. He's never done any actual scientific research and I don't think he would even have the ability to. You can see it in action with his fake AI research group. What actual research or concrete strides towards their goals has MIRI actually accomplished? So far, it seems like their primary purpose is to keep stringing along the donors who believe in evil robot gods.
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May 11, 2016 23:17
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The Austrian school only exists because rich people need to be able to pay someone who sounds vaguely authoritative to write articles about why taxes are bad. It's climate denial but about money instead; the science and math don't work because they don't have to work in order to achieve the goals at hand. This is the heart of modern American "capitalism", really. As long as you are making money for the right people, delivering a functional product is completely incidental. The best examples of this are private health insurance (where not giving people what they pay for is the core business model for the majority of companies), large parts of the tech industry (where you can make millions off of startups that never actually ship anything), and investment firms (where you still get paid when you lose your client's money and/or near-fatally wound the world's economy). Objectivists (and by extension some of the Rationalists) are not in on the secret. They see people getting paid for bullshit and think that the bullshit must be worth something.
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May 11, 2016 23:43
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Objectivism and Austrian Economics are why, when someone abbreviates Neoreaction A Basilisk as NAB, I mentally replace it with Non-Aggression Basilisk
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May 12, 2016 00:16
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Hermetic posted:"Communist", actually. Thought it could also be used as shorthand for "Victor Charlie", which was the NATO alphabet reference for VC, or "Viet Cong". pookel posted:I thought it was for "Victor Charlie" as in Viet Cong, but that's not really related to what I meant. I meant that they'd refer to the enemy combatants collectively as "Charlie" rather than calling an individual VC fighter "a Charlie." I've seen "Hajji" used in a similar way, to refer to a group of people and not as a singular noun. Ah cheers - both of you, the more I know! And pookel there's nothing 'autistic' about sharing interesting information, even if you're worrying about your presentation of it. Relax and like who you are.  Hellequin posted:I'm just enjoying that all the rationalist reviews of Sandifer's book have largely vindicated my a priori dismissal of LW'ers as being of the same sort of pseudo intellectual who ten years ago would have been objectivists on livejournal. Wordpress adds a veneer of respectability they do not deserve. Heresiarch posted:The Austrian school only exists because rich people need to be able to pay someone who sounds vaguely authoritative to write articles about why taxes are bad. It's climate denial but about money instead; the science and math don't work because they don't have to work in order to achieve the goals at hand. I still cannot believe supposedly intelligent people read the definition of praxeology and went "why yes, perfect."
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May 12, 2016 00:18
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