PYF Dark Enlightenment Thinker

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darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

bartlebyshop posted:

Stupid people are outbreeding highly educated, conscientious high IQ people! Despite the fact that rich white people have been whining about this for 100 years and yet average IQ scores keep going up, society is about to collapse into an Idiocracy-style hellhole.

The thing about this attitude that always gets me is that nobody ever suggests fixing people, they just leap towards killing or sterilizing them. You want more educated people in the world, and fewer stupid people? Why not try educating them? I mean, durr. But I suppose that might mean confronting certain notions about the justness of the world and one's own superiority within it.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2015 20:54

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 13:48

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Antivehicular posted:

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you lesswrong.txt

Why is it always catgirls with these assholes?

I'm more amused by the rest of that sentence, because, well, duh. Did he not realize that to maximize the effectiveness of a grand eugenics program, as any good rationalist should seek to do, it'd have to be pretty drat intrusive, between determining and forcing you to breed with your optimal mate? Never mind any of the other effects that would be necessary for a proper eugenics program, including paying for it?

quote:

Also, I like how searching for "birth control" gets exactly one result, in the context of mandatory birth control/opt-in reproduction, and instead we get a ton of talk about how to make sure that poor people (because why even pretend that the poors aren't genetically inferior, right?) never even have sex. I guess the concept of high birth rates among low-income populations largely being a product of insufficient access to reliable birth control and family planning support, not the proles being screaming Morlocks who demand MORE BAYBEES, is foreign to these guys. (Much like how the concept that a real, effective "eugenics" program focused on ensuring that a more society-positive outcome for each generation would do way better by investments in education and social/health services to help parents and children towards positive outcomes than cultish worship of the PRECIOUS ESSENCES of the rich, but y'know.)

Aside from that you'd also need to do some major leveling in order to distinguish socio-economic class from genetic quality, "rich because your parents are rich" as opposed to "rich because you're an ubermensch". Because a real eugenics program shouldn't give a poo poo who your parents are, what matters is your genetics and fitness to breed.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2015 09:29

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

GIANT OUIJA BOARD posted:

Excuse me, but I read the funny papers as a child, therefore I am a genius.

And I read Encyclopedia Brown, which frankly may have made me stupider. I still recall one case that hinged on "no real hot dog enthusiast would spread those condiments that way", and apparently I'm not the only one with fond memories of Encyclopedia.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 07:53

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

ol qwerty bastard posted:

It's weird how they imagine that "intelligence" can be essentially an unbounded process (which is the only way you can invoke "sufficiently advanced AI" to solve every conceivable problem). We know nothing about intelligence beyond our own, so why do they think that they can say anything meaningful about it?

I've figured it would be so, simply by analogy with computers; with sufficient processing power, you can simulate every conceivable scenario to find one that would lead to either the desired end or the current state of affairs. On the other hand, as we have discussed in this thread, "sufficient" is a weasely loving word, and you also need sufficient information to construct sufficiently accurate simulations.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2015 18:22

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

LordSaturn posted:

I want a word filter that replaces "politically correct" with "actually correct".

Will this do?

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 17:02

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Pierson posted:

What I feel about the singularity can be summed up by that one Pictures for Sad Children comic asking what happens to the rest of the world without running water when the techno-rapture arrives.

Also I didn't know anything about Effective Altruism but holy poo poo those articles. There's probably a metaphor somewhere here about how the lives of people like this are reflections of the buildings they work in. The ones that have glass walkways above street-level so they never need to touch the ground: From school to college to STEM fields to silicon valley and never interacting with real life.

EDIT: Reading the article comments made me feel a little better, which is probably a first for internet comments.

As long as we're making GBS threads all over Effective Altruism, my biggest beef is the way it feels like just shameful rationalization for things EA's would do anyway. Maximizing lives saved per dollar is pretty cool, but deciding that the best way to save the world is by either becoming rich or working on a cool computer science problem rather than actually helping people is less so. 'Sides which, it seems to me that fixing global poverty would be a necessary step to fixing any higher problems; more people trying to avert an AI apocalypse or build space stations can only help, and by some fortunate coincidence there are several billion people looking for paying work.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2015 18:37

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Woolie Wool posted:

I'd like to read it. I want to know why fans are so obsessed with leeching the soul and vitality out of the things they love.

I'd partly blame the whole "nerds focus on signifiers over actual culture" piece somebody did earlier in this thread. The original authors of 40K wrote about grimdark badasses which represent biting satire of the Thatcher administration, while the fans-that-became-new-authors just write grimdark badasses. There might also be the classic "old stuff is cooler than new stuff", but I expect that's less responsible.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2015 04:01

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Woolie Wool posted:

Actually that was me who wrote that post, but fandom is a bit broader and more general than ubernerd types, even though they certainly include plenty of them. And I'm not sure where you could make the case for early 40k being a satire of Thatcherism, though I could certainly see it being a satire, or at least a parody, of space opera, the often razor-thin line between it and heroic fantasy, and the nastier elements of both genres.

I liked both of those posts, personally. I'm not sure if I'd agree that fandom is broader, but it definitely seems to me that the overly-serious nerds are more vocal than the non-nerdlingers, and more likely to try exerting their will on the fandom/IP.

Most of the "40K is satire" argument comes from the fact that one of the villains is named Mag Uruk Thraka, a dozen other arguments I've seen but poorly remember, and the fact that it didn't take itself so seriously back in the day.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2015 04:45

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Woolie Wool posted:

I didn't say they don't value people at all, just that they put whatever things they're attached to above human concerns. That's the root of things like Hard Men Making Hard Decisions. You don't have to be a sociopath for an attachment to things to blind you to the concerns of other people.

See also GamerGate, where legions of turbodorks sided with their beloved video games in the face of feminist criticism, or any of a hundred other groups that can't accept criticism of their fandom.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2015 06:10

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Jack Gladney posted:

I hope all those nerds are laughing at the takedown of evopsych and not just because they recognize physics words.

They may not be laughing at the satire of :biotruths:

but they're almost certainly laughing at the general satire of absurd :pseudo:

, like catapulting babies, the real reason for the middle-aged man's spare tire, why babies cry and their use in warfare, and why mammals sleep.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2015 02:35

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

coyo7e posted:

I'd be fascinated to see how "number of different jobs held at same time" holds up instead of "number of hours officially on the time-clock". I have had several employers who regularly penciled-out my hours to make sure I didn't go over a certain cusp (which would cost them more). Also some amazing pre-hire packets which involved stuff like "you don't get paid at all for the first 30 days if you do not finish all training without any absences, lateness, etc".

On the other hand, I expect that metric to be skewed by 1%ers who hold and work 3+ jobs at once (on various boards of directors that meet for two hours each month).

# ¿ Sep 29, 2015 01:36

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Stumiester posted:

Aren't dwarves the jews? I thought elves were like super-old money aristocracy.

Same. Dwarves are an insular group, with funny beards, a fondness if not obsession for gold and wealth, and a strange guttural language. I think they were also an older but lesser people of God, but I haven't read the Silmarillion in forever. Super easy to draw Jewish parallels.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2015 19:20

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

SatansOnion posted:

What about Confederates? Zombie Rebs, techno-Rebs, whatever--I feel like there's an untapped vein of potential in this idea, but I suppose it could be considered too local to the U.S.

And even there, it'd probably be shut down as too political and criticizing a substantial portion of the US. Leaving aside the fact that the Confederacy were traitors and slavers, and pretty much tailor-made for videogame villains.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2015 04:00

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Cingulate posted:

True, but that goes for everything. Even people who're fanatical about really good causes become annoying - and "let's focus on STEM" is not even a bad cause.

Yeah, but then you're right back to PP's point about STEMlords being shitheads.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2016 21:33

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Nessus posted:

This seems intensely nerdy but Orwell said he thought a lot of pretentious idiot writers used big heaps of Latin/Greek terminology to conceal that their ideas were lovely, stupid, or trying to trick the reader. So I don't think it's necessarily some kind of super-racist project of doom, given how much of a Red Orwell was.

Not necessarily racist, but their stated goal of reclaiming the English language for the English people is a big red flag IMO.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2016 23:53

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Cingulate posted:

Really? With me, it's the hatred and the fascism.

Not taking things so seriously always seemed like an admirable quality to me.

Yeah, but they're going to be hateful fascists anyway. The fact that they're joking and ironic about it makes it so much harder to argue against them because it's the ultimate escape hatch. "Can't you take a joke? LOL".

# ¿ Mar 3, 2016 02:21

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Nessus posted:

So like when the manhats decide to get angry about American Hero "Mad" Max Rockatansky taking orders from some broad? Or is it more like when people get outraged over that hippity-hop music and looking like a fool with your pants on the ground?

More the first than the second, but when people talk about it, it's mostly because Tumblr gets angry because some dude suggests eugenics might be a good idea, I mean it's only ~rational~ to sterilize blacks and poors.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2016 00:25

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Edit: Yeah alright let's end it here.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2016 05:30

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

I hope Chuck Tingle writes something about the Hugo awards punishing his butt in some way

Way ahead of you. Man's a national treasure and/or final proof of the decadence of late-stage capitalism.

# ¿ May 2, 2016 05:20

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

A White Guy posted:

Lemme get this straight: Basically, Roko's Basilisk is the Old Hebrew God, except now he's real and is going to punish you forever because he loves you.

More or less. Except it's not going to punish you, it's going to punish a simulation of you, because you'll have been dead for years/decades/centuries by the time all this happens. And it's only going to punish (simulated) you forever if you knowingly turned from the path of hastening the arrival of friendly AI; if you didn't know it mattered, you're safe, but if you know that FAI will save billions of future lives and do not do everything you can to make it happen, you're condemning millions of future people to suffering and death because you wanted to spend that money on hookers and blow instead.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2016 19:52

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Joshmo posted:

According to the incredibly biased website the religion of peace.org, excluding 9/11, Muslim extremists have killed less than 200 Americans since 1972. (Cynical contrast: According to the signs on Interstate 71 south of Cleveland, Ohio, over 1,000 god fearing Muricans are on track to kill themselves or each other in their cars on Ohio interstates this year.)

Likewise, 9/11 aside, right-wing American terrorists have killed more Americans than Muslims since 2001, 45 to 48. Clearly, Mister Edgy advocates purging everybody right of Al Gore.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2016 22:53

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Dapper_Swindler posted:

Arnt there still relatives of hitler in Long Island?

Not sure about "still", but there were in 2015.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2016 21:46

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Okay but none of these guys actually are at the top

No, because they're being held back by SJWs and Marxists and the Cathedral. :argh:

# ¿ Aug 10, 2016 17:51

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Antivehicular posted:

It's a counterargument to the creationist argument that there are too many gaps in the fossil record for it to be plausible evidence for evolution. Imagine two glasses of water on a table (or any object, really; feel free to imagine balls on the edge of a cliff for maximum goon). There's a gap between them, and you fill it in with a third glass; now there are two gaps, one between the first and second glass and one between the second and third. Fill those in, and you have five glasses and four gaps between them. Fill those, and you have nine glasses with eight gaps... and so it goes. No matter how many objects you have in the chain, there will always be gaps, because they're discrete objects. It is literally impossible for us to create a gap-free fossil record, because fossils don't record a continuum, just discrete organisms.

Basically the argument from Futurama, then?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTOla3TyfqQ

# ¿ Aug 12, 2016 18:38

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Dapper_Swindler posted:

what books won and who did the puppies nominate. i weirdly never followed the hugos or their various drama.

Finalists and winners, from TheHugoAwards.com
Sad and Rabid Puppies slates vs actual finalists.
ETA: Really, all you need is that second link; Puppies dominated the finalists again, but non-Puppy nominees won in every category apart from Best Graphic Story, Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), Fanzine, and New Writer, and even then, I suspect they won those categories just because of support from non-Puppy voters.

MizPiz posted:

I can tell you who lost.

https://twitter.com/ChuckTingle/status/767422003309449216

He was robbed. :arghfist:

No, actually I'm on Phil Sandifer's side here, while Chuck Tingle probably does deserve a Hugo, this isn't his best work.

darthbob88 has a new favorite as of 00:32 on Aug 22, 2016

# ¿ Aug 22, 2016 00:20

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Dapper_Swindler posted:

whats the difference between sad or rabid? also sad because i would take witcher and mad max over the loving martian. that book/movie was boring as poo poo

I'm not as steeped as some others, and I'm pretty sure we've mentioned it previously in this thread, but AFAIK the difference is "sad" vs "rabid". Larry Correia started the Sad Puppies to push good ol' two fisted action pulp stories, as a counter to what he saw as overly literary nominees with heavy-handed progressive messages, and also stories that he didn't write. Vox Day, who I'm pretty sure has come up in this thread just because he's such a shithead, split off the Rabid Puppies because he was angry that the Science Fiction Writers of America treat black author NK Jemisin like she's a person.
EFB. I'd also say that Sad Puppies pretend to be reasonable, Rabid Puppies don't.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2016 00:42

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Jack Gladney posted:

Why do so many people think BLM has engaged in violence? Is the joke answer also the real answer (because they are black)?

Because they blame BLM for riots and violence that other black people do.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2016 00:49

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

A White Guy posted:

Who is Douglas Crockford, and why do people hate him suddenly? I know virtually nothing about the great big world of software development, but from what a very cursory google search showed me, he didn't seem to be anything like Curtis Yarvin.

He's heavily involved in Javascript development, really influential in that regard, so absolutely the sort of person you'd want to have on your conference, and so far as I can tell he's just a standard white guy who made a few inadequately-PC comments, or possibly a history of being kind of an rear end in a top hat to one of the presenters. Personally I think they're overreacting, but their conference, their rules.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2016 05:49

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

pookel posted:

Those comments he made do seem pretty mild. I wonder if he's just an unpleasant person, or if he said more stuff that didn't get reported. I'm guessing they wouldn't have made this decision unless they got private complaints from other people, too.

Almost certainly, since the conference's statement is that due to private feedback, Crockford's presence would make some other presenters too uncomfortable to speak or even attend.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2016 16:23

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

I've wondered whether there's a psychological boundary outside which people tend to stop identifying others as part of their race or if it's entirely culture. Like I remember a study a while ago where they showed white people a video of a white hand getting stabbed, and the people winced since they felt the same pain in their own hand while watching. Then they did it with a black hand and the wince didn't happen. Then they tried it with a blue hand and people did get the wince, so apparently the aliens from Avatar are more human than black people?

Purple hand, actually. To be entirely fair, the study also found that black volunteers reacted less strongly to the white hand getting prodded with a needle, so this lack of cross-racial empathy isn't just a white problem.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2016 07:41

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Jack Gladney posted:

Didn't that twitter bot from a while back turn fascist from reading tweets? I totally believe that a machine that learns about the world from its cultural productions would come up with beliefs that reflect the features of that culture. It's the same way that human intelligences become racist.

Tay, yeah, and that's more or less it. She heard a lot of responses from fascists, so she started sending her own fascist tweets.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2016 22:05

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

ate all the Oreos posted:

I read a study or article or something somewhere that pointed out that blacks and latinos tend to match up with republicans value-wise and the only thing keeping them from aligning themselves with the GOP is the GOP's own masturbatory hatred of The Other.

To be clear this was talking about claimed values, not the republicans' actual values of "starve the poor and make them pay for the privilege"

Yeah, there was an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates where he specifically noted that there are a shitload of black conservatives who love the bootstraps narrative and small government, but want nothing to do with the party of the Klan.
E: This one.

quote:

When political strategists argue that the Republican Party is missing a huge chance to court the black community, they are thinking of this mostly male bloc�the old guy in the barbershop, the grizzled Pop Warner coach, the retired Vietnam vet, the drunk uncle at the family reunion. He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels�in fact, he knows�that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him. This is the audience that flocks to Cosby: culturally conservative black Americans who are convinced that integration, and to some extent the entire liberal dream, robbed them of their natural defenses.

darthbob88 has a new favorite as of 23:15 on Oct 18, 2016

# ¿ Oct 18, 2016 23:11

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

ate all the Oreos posted:

I would like to know how you came to the conclusion that rural whites of all people don't care about bigotry one way or the other.

They're not invested in bigotry, and would probably have voted for Anti-Bigot Bernie if he'd also promised to bring back jobs to the Rust Belt. Still, though, given the choice between a Democrat and a bigot, they chose the bigot, and there goes a lot of sympathy for them.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2016 23:09

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

divabot posted:

Spreading this everywhere right now.

I started a garbage fire on my Facebook by stating that literally everyone who voted Trump, knowing who and what Trump was, is functionally a racist and deserves to be called one. Helped clean up the "friends" list nicely. The celebs in the "likes" section were pretty good too.

I like Scalzi's Cinemax theory of racism; these people didn't ask for a bigoted president, they asked for a president who'd bring back jobs and got bigotry as part of the package deal. This is a reasonable decision for them to make, given their situation, and a vital distinction to make if we're going to convince these people to vote Democrat ever again, but as far as Latinx/Muslim/Black/LGBT Americans are concerned, they are all racists.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2016 04:59

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

ate all the Oreos posted:

LoB this list includes an admittedly funny-sounding variant of the n-word and i don't want you to get probed again because you keep this thread good

What, niggardly? That's actually an acceptable word, meaning "stingy" or "miserly", but admittedly its main use these days is inciting controversy.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2016 05:02

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Improbable Lobster posted:

Not anymore,

How so, beyond the fact that anybody who uses it is probably a colossal bigot trying to look clever?

# ¿ Dec 2, 2016 08:02

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

DeusExMachinima posted:

wait but I thought if the jew doesn't have children that'd be better for the white race?

On the other hand, if they don't have kids, they have more time to spend spreading terrible leftist ideas, and they'll still support those leftist notions because they haven't been converted to good sensible conservatism by the process of childrearing.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2016 00:42

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

ate all the Oreos posted:

I haven't heard that specifically but I don't think they quite grasp how plantations worked

Oh I've heard it so often. It's usually some variation on bread and circuses, where black people are enslaved by the party for their votes, and where they're kept on the plantation because a) the support of Democrats are the only way black people can get ahead and b) the Republicans are racists who hate black people, or simply are going to ask black people to actually work instead of just giving them welfare.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2017 00:11

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

90s Cringe Rock posted:

I'm sure the oath keepers will resist any unconstitutional orders.

Some of them probably would; wasn't it the Oath Keepers who had that schism over whether or not to support and arm the good (black) citizens of Ferguson against the plundering police?

# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 22:46

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 13:48

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

The Vosgian Beast posted:

He's a kook who isn't NRx, but is beloved by a significant amount of them and he writes terrible Harry Potter fanfiction which will somehow save us all from being killed by future robots

Pope Guilty posted:

Neoreaction A Basilisk goes into how Yudkowsky's website served as a sort of Petri dish in which neoreaction partially evolved.

I'll just go with Phil Sandifer's description on the subject:

quote:

So allow me to say with absolute explicitness: Eliezer Yudkowsky is not a neoreactionary. He repudiates the philosophy in explicit terms. He has shown no sympathy for and ative hostility to its most noxious beliefs. If I have ever suggested otherwise, I apologize profusely for the infelicity of writing, and if it is possible to edit the text in question I will do so.

[...]

For what it's worth, though, the reason I needed Eliezer Yudkowsky in the book was that I needed someone who wasn't evil. Mencius Moldbug's philosophy is indefensible, and Nick Land is ostentatiously playing a super-villain, which is delightfully evil, but nevertheless evil. And Yudkowsky is wrong, and sometimes wrong in ways that genuinely deserve a bit of condemnation, but at least he's a fun crackpot, and that counts for an awful lot in my world. And while Neoreaction a Basilisk does not offer anything that might be mistaken for hope, it has a sense of good guys and bad guys, and Yudkowsky's one of the good guys.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2017 02:23

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