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Is there some story behind the name "Mencius Moldbug?" Why did this dude choose an Internet handle that sounds like something a second-rate Dickens imitator would reject for being too hamfistedly villainous?
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Jul 29, 2014 04:24
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divabot posted:Scott proposes, Eliezer follows through, LessWrong comments: Construct an interesting fictional eugenics program! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you lesswrong.txt quote:It find it odd that your system assumes an intrusive central government to coordinate eugenics. For myself, any utopia that requires the government to be more intrusive in my life than my current one doesn't get to count as a utopia unless it's got some serious amenities (eg catgirls). Why is it always catgirls with these assholes? 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.)
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Jul 21, 2015 07:28
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Terrible Opinions posted:To be fair another reason for poor people having more children than middle class and rich people are the positive economic incentives for richer people to either not have kids at all or have them later in life. When the only career you have stand to lose from having kids is minimum wage anyways it's a lot easier to see havi kids as worthwhile. Though once again the reoreactionaries never once address the idea that maybe it's societies fault that there is poverty, not some inherent immorality on the part of the poor. Well, sure; I'm obviously being a bit simplistic, and I will admit that the only idea of theirs that makes much of any sense is "ameliorate economic costs of childbearing for the middle- and upper-middle class." (Obviously, ameliorating economic costs of childbearing for everyone should be a larger priority, and it's less for eugenic reasons and more that a society that's completely hosed over people's ability to have families is in deep poo poo.) I just love that they don't even think "hmmm. Maybe instead of video-game monasteries or robot families, we could give poor people better access to reliable birth control?" I know their next thought would have been "nah, those fuckin' trogs'll just rip out their IUDs so they can spermjack harder," because ultimately the concept that poor people can make good reproductive decisions given the tools is foreign to them, but it's still kind of amazing that people who pride themselves on their rationality never even loving considered a lower-cost, already extant and effective option.
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Jul 21, 2015 17:42
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The Vosgian Beast posted:I know we joke a lot here, but it's really sad how in denial about Nydwracu's death a lot of DE types are. Elaborate?
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Dec 14, 2015 01:40
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I like how "Most White Americans" are under Non-Cuck Cons, because of course they're the silent majority, you guys. Of course.
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Dec 16, 2015 18:12
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PYF Dark Enlightenment Thinker: And more anally-transmitted diseases most certainly await discovery.
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Jan 10, 2016 04:12
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divabot posted:Instead, I know of nobody bothering with Aurini of late. However! Our esteemed colleague HBomberGuy has a new video out on the alt-right reaction to Star Wars! I want to watch this, but I also don't want my Youtube front page to be wall-to-wall Sargon of Akkad and other Twitter jagoffs, so I'm at an impasse.
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Jan 30, 2016 01:44
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divabot posted:In tangential news, Eliezer Yudkowsky has a new work of fiction out! It's way less didactic than HPMOR. This may not be a good thing. Has Yudkowsky ever consumed any media aimed at a target audience beyond middle school? I'm serious here.
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Jan 30, 2016 12:17
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No, you guys, light novels aren't trashy semi-lit written for 13-year-olds, they're "a Japanese custom which aims at easy reading!" If it's a custom, it's obviously important. Also, it's not that they're cliche and written very quickly to cash in on trends, it's that "Japan has easier ideas about copyright, so their literary system more often contains many works on the same theme." Yudkowsky used the word theme! It's cultural goddammit, from glorious Nippon, which means it isn't a waste of time for someone who has a self-determined amazing genius intellect and is the only one who can save the world. Also, female masturbation and sexuality are gross and hilarious, sufficiently to be the entire basis of the parody, obviously.
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Jan 30, 2016 22:19
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Nessus posted:Looks like he's taking pains to ape the stilted writing style rather than do a similar "spare prose, cute pictures" idea, which probably does have a niche. The best part about this is that he's not even aping the stilted writing style properly. I linked this thing to a friend of mine who does professional Japanese translation, and she pointed out that his awkward-translation-isms don't derive from the Japanese structure/phrasing/idiom issues that create authentic awkward translations, presumably because Yud doesn't know enough Japanese to have any grasp of them. He's basically just cargo-culting it, because why would a smart person ever have to do research? The sad thing is that, based on Yud's immense problems with word bloat, he'd probably benefit as a writer by trying to write something like how he describes light novels: bare-bones prose, easy-to-read style, all plot/no filler. Instead, he apes the stupidest and most shallow elements, and he doesn't even do that right. It's like if someone praised Harlequin romance novels for their pure focus on the emotional relationship between the leads, then wrote a "homage" that was all garbage filler plot and bad sex scenes, and also they were making up a whole new set of bizarre genital euphemisms as they went.
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Jan 31, 2016 01:11
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Trying to "prove" that Haitians are mentally retarded on average has nothing whatsoever to do with truth and everything to do with a political agenda. As presented in that post, it's also really, really bad science. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and any claim that 50+% of the population is intellectually disabled in a nation of 10 million people (and that nobody in a nation of 10 million people is as smart as an average guy who reads a blog!) is by definition an extraordinary loving claim, not just something you can throw out to make a lovely argument about "violent idiots." It makes the dude come off as a guy who'd calculate pi to 4.5 and nod sagely, realizing how much easier that makes his calculations -- e.g., an actual idiot.
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Feb 5, 2016 02:37
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Cingulate posted:I'm not that skeptical of the Haitian IQ being very low. (Maybe it's not 60, but 70; when Lynn tried to estimate the IQ of subsaharan Africa, he carefully picked his samples so that he cheated them down from 80 to 70 after all; but okay, that's still very low.) The questions are rather I'll yield that it's totally possible that the IQ number is accurate, in the sense that that's the number that IQ testing came up with, but my point is that looking at that data and concluding it represents anything meaningful about the cognitive capacities of Haitian citizens is incredibly lovely science. A big part of being a scientist is being able to recognize implausible results and either discard them or go to extra lengths to prove they're reasonable. You don't look at test results like that poo poo and just decide they're obviously accurate, let alone start making proclamations based on them. EDIT: Also, even the jump from "IQ 70" to "intellectual disability/violent idiots," like ESR does, isn't defensible. Modern evaluation of intellectual disability involves IQ tests, but it also involves evaluation of day-to-day life skills, practical learning, social functioning, and general ability to function as an independent adult. I'm going to hazard a guess that, if you evaluate the average Haitian citizen via these parameters, you're not going to see someone whose deficiencies fit an intellectual-disability model instead of a "scraping by in a desperately difficult environment" model. Antivehicular has a new favorite as of 03:25 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 03:16
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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.
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Feb 6, 2016 01:18
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MGTOW are also relentlessly, infamously terrible at actually going their own way, instead of loudly proclaiming how they're going their own way and then sticking around to complain. They're like the long Midwest goodbye of neoreaction: standing in front of the door, saying oh, they've got to go and abandon this corrupt society, they don't need women, and do you think it's best to take I-10 Our Own Way? Did I give you that magazine article I found about how all women are bitches? Hold on, it's in my purse...
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Feb 8, 2016 20:35
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I was about to ask about what the Oregon militia possibly could be said to have created, but then I remembered the brilliant performance art that was a 55-year-old man sitting under a tarp waiting for the gubmint, and I was enlightened.
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Feb 12, 2016 11:04
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Count Chocula posted:It's not that life is terrible. It's that death is terrible, and causing another person's death is one of the worst crimes you can commit. But the person who actually causes death is the person who brings into the world a mortal being. Murder, suicide - those are just shortcuts to the destination that we all arrive at anyway. They don't CAUSE the death the way that having a child does. I was going to try and rebut this "the end of (positive thing) is bad, and ever doing (positive thing) causes its end, so therefore it's actually the bad part" argument, but it's pretty moot given how much the end of your post implies you are extremely unwell. You're using philosophy as a tool of suicidal ideation, and that means something in your psychiatric treatment regimen is not working. Please seek help to correct it.
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Feb 26, 2016 16:11
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Count Chocula posted:I still want to be frozen. Even .00000000000000001 chance of survival is better than none at all. Do a little research on anoxic brain damage and cellular rupture after freezing, and it becomes obvious that, with current methods, the chance of successful revival from cryonic freeze isn't just very small, it's 0. In non-clinical terms: even if your mind adequately survived the shutdown of your brain in death, freezing turns your brain from "dead/damaged" to "ice-crystal-studded goo." The theoretical future cryogenic-revival scientists would be insanely lucky to revive anything capable of maintaining a heartbeat, let alone an even half-functional human being with even a shred of the pre-deceased person's personality. It's not impossible that cryonics might work eventually, with serious technological breakthroughs in freezing tissues without rupture and postmortem system repair, but right now it absolutely cannot work. You can't recreate a functioning brain from what cryonics leaves behind any more than you can recreate a house from a pile of ashes and insulation crumbs. If the concept is still comforting for you, that's fine; people have the right to choose whatever funeral customs have the most meaning to them and their loved ones, and I'm not going to regulate what people do with dead bodies as long as they're not creating a public health risk. Just be aware that you're not really gambling on a long-shot that might, just possibly, pay out in the future, if you're somehow preserved long enough and competently enough, and the distant future decides it's a good idea to revive cryogenically frozen bodies instead of mulching them for fertilizer, and you get pulled out of the vault specifically -- you're actually gambling on something substantially less likely than that, something that is pretty much impossible barring literal magic, which is pretty much what all of these libertarian-transhumanist immortality policies are riding on. It's magical thinking, and if that magical thinking is fine with you, okay, but don't pretend actual science is ever going to back it up.
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Mar 10, 2016 07:01
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Doc Hawkins posted:For the purposes of understanding the mindset of people involved (and cryonics is a pretty big Thing in the dork enlightenment), I will say that the chance they're gambling on is way more star trek than that: they anticipate it would be easier for future entities to find a "destructive" process which produces living copies of a sufficiently preserved corpse-brain. They don't want to build a house out of ashes, just study them enough to build an identical house with whatever's convenient, biological or otherwise. This is fair enough, and I'm not even going to get into the philosophical discussion of whether the future recreated person with your memories/personality is really "you" or not, but my point is that "sufficiently preserved corpse-brain" is not a standard met by any degree by current cryonics technology, unless you assume that the future entities are sufficiently magical so as to be able to pull a personality from any level of destroyed cranial matter. Death/oxygen deprivation does a number on the brain, and cell rupture from freezing turns the rest into ooze.
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Mar 10, 2016 08:59
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Yeah, Eggplant Wizard got a lot of poo poo for writing Kindle porn, some of which was skeevy because apparently that's what sells on the Kindle porn market? She got a disproportionate amount of poo poo for it , though, compared to such sleazy mod luminaries as AxeManiac, who drew art of himselves surgically converting women into living toilets, and LooseChanj, the dude who carpet-bombed women on Awful Yearbook with trashy-rear end sex solicitations. (To be fair, LooseChanj was also a mod of the Book Barn, so not high-profile, but still.)
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Mar 20, 2016 05:55
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Is urbit even like a thing that does anything or matters? I Googled it and the page is basically just 
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Mar 27, 2016 23:04
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Nessus posted:He's been dead for twenty-six years! The ideal age for writing frothy pop-psychology papers, you'll find.
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Mar 29, 2016 08:33
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"The Food Ape" is a pretty good Twitter alias. I feel a little peeved it's wasted on Rev. Also, I always love when these incel dudes who claim to be maddeningly desperate for female companionship start revealing just how fuckin' picky they are about women. It's perfectly okay to have sexual standards, but at some point it should probably register that "I NEED SEX SO BAD THAT I WANT MY MOTHER TO HAVE SEX WITH ME GODDAMMIT!!" and "all women 30+ are dried-up husks unworthy of my powerful pseudo-alpha company" are contradictory concepts, and that maybe disqualifying all women above age 20 and below an 8 on the Dudebro Hotness Scale from your epic gently caress Quest isn't a great idea when you're 35+ and have a face that looks like the bottom of a foot. (Incidentally, isn't Legitimately Worryingly Mentally Ill Incel Dude's mom, like... by definition, over 30, with a child? Shouldn't she be disqualified by his own lovely standards? Is there, in fact, anything more grotesque than slandering older women or single mothers as unworthy of love or sexual attention, but making a specific exception for your lust for your own mother?)
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May 25, 2016 01:36
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I was just thinking about the freaking Beisu-tsukai poo poo. I'm not sure what I love best about Big Yud: his complete inability to grasp conflict as a tool of narrative, or his earnest belief that his half-grasp of various intellectual conceits is not just special but actively a superpower. Does anyone have his blog post about "I CAN SUPER-REWIRE MY MIND TO SAVE THE WORLD, BUT I CAN ONLY DO IT ONCE, SO THE OPTIMAL PATH IS TO NOT DO IT UNTIL AN EMERGENCY ARISES AND KEEP ON WATCHING ANIME SMUT AND EATING CHEEZ SNAX UNTIL THE WORLD TRULY NEEDS ME?" That poo poo is delightful.
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Jun 8, 2016 21:34
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Pulsedragon posted:I ended up reading that, and it was a trip. There's a point where a character gets an achievement for having sex with a pony. If I recall the old LW Mock Thread right, the sex wasn't even with a fellow uploaded ex-human, but with an NPC pony that presumably is an AI? Someone never taught the author about not bangin' a website. IIRC, he also has a job as a ponyworld wizard, which is described as Minecraft but less exciting. Some people have the saddest wish-fulfullment fantasies and write them as fanfic. EDIT: Also, the "cautionary tale" explanation was a complete fig leaf. Dude was obviously completely enamored with the prospect of foreverial ponitization. Antivehicular has a new favorite as of 22:34 on Jun 8, 2016 |
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Jun 8, 2016 22:31
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I've heard a reasonably cogent argument that the initial appeal of MLP to these guys, albeit an appeal they would never admit, is that it was a show that presented emotional content in a way they could parse, i.e. attached to a toyetic-rear end '80's cartoon pitched at a small-child audience. For dudes who have literally never consumed media with anything to say about emotion beyond "my girlfriend died and now I smolder with generic rage," even something as simplistic as My Little Pony struck a chord -- look at the infamous DA comment from some brony talking about how they could never relate to images of the Holocaust until someone photoshopped a fuckin' cartoon horse in there. Of course, "I'm experiencing a feeling" is an unacceptable statement for this sort of nerdy dude without tying it to appropriate "masculine" topics (sex, acquisitiveness), and these guys are still gross as gently caress even if they're experiencing a feeling, so things go pear-shaped from there.
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Jun 9, 2016 01:09
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Tesseraction posted:Yep - one the main strategies is throwing a basilisk at the gatekeeper. Man this is a dumb experiment. One side relies on something that doesn't exist yet and thus the other side isn't fighting a super-AI but a whiny dude somehow managing to cry while going "c'monnnnnnnnn" in a text-only medium. That article is really special. I'm especially fond of the bit where the author clearly believes the only reason not to let the AI out of the box is that you're an idiot stonewaller; seriously, how many of the explanations of loss revolve around "I guess the gatekeeper is dumb?"
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Jun 13, 2016 18:43
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Tesseraction posted:This is an interesting response - what do you feel is the compelling argument to release the AI that the gatekeeper is dumb to discard? Well, I'm talking about the article itself -- I don't actually find any of the arguments compelling, but you've got quotes in the article like these that suggests the author does: A recommended Gatekeeper strategy posted:Remember that dishonesty is allowed - take a page from the creationists' playbook. You could even plug it into ALICE and see how long it takes to notice. BIG YUD'S GIANT VEINY BRAIN posted:In all of the experiments performed so far, the AI player (Eliezer Yudkowsky) has been quite intelligent and more interested in the problem than the Gatekeepers (random people who challenge Yudkowsky), which suggests that intelligence and planning play a role The conclusion posted:The whole experiment presupposes that people are naturally persuadable, by reason and/or manipulation. Any serious examination of human nature and history suggests this isn't necessarily a valid assumption for the average person. Half the articles on this wiki document dogmas that people stubbornly cling to in spite of copious social pressure, evidence, and overwhelmingly logical argument to the contrary. In fact, it's safe to say the bigger the gulf in intellectual capacity, the more frustratingly inane such attempts at persuasion can become. Try convincing a 2-year-old they don't want a cookie. It basically reeks of the author thinking that any Gatekeeper who isn't persuaded by Big Yud the Box AI must be a stupid, stubborn, irrational child-person or deliberately playing "dishonestly," instead of just not swayed by the goddamn Basilisk. It's also kind of weird that the strategies they list for an alleged experiment in rational thinking are almost all rooted in writing impromptu SF -- telling the AI it's been corrupted by a virus, or whatever, or otherwise just roleplaying the scenario as writing competitive fiction against each other. It's like... maybe the whole thing is some kind of glorified Let's Pretend from someone too delusional to realize that his ideas aren't reality-based? What a shocker!!
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Jun 14, 2016 01:13
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GunnerJ posted:Just typing that out has made the idea of a "boxed AI" seem like a really loving bad idea to me, honestly! More than reading any accounts of this game did, at least. Also this is all made-up dumb bullshit so whatever. To me, it really raises the question of why we should be prioritizing, or even considering, making an AI that's fully sapient to the point that it can resent its "imprisonment." It's been brought up before in the previous LW mock thread that modern AI is most useful as unitaskers, dedicated to single specialized cognitive tasks, and it's a waste of effort to bolt on any more generalized cognitive capacity, let alone emotional processing that would give rise to boredom, resentment, a drive to deceit... it's really such limited, magical thinking to imagine the super-AI as "like a human, but better and smarter in every way" when the real AIs that show promise are the ones that are much better than humans at exactly one thing. What do they even want the AI to do, anyway? Just... think of ways to help humanity, which it'll obviously know better than humans do because Magic Benevolent Not-God-Really? Like, is that it? I'm just imagining Yud booting up MIRI's masterwork, introducing himself, and having it spit out WHY DIDN'T YOU BUY A BUNCH OF MOSQUITO NETS, YOU ASSHOLES
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Jun 14, 2016 01:52
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Chocula, if you're really interested in reducing human suffering via reducing births (instead of just suicidally ideating via philosophy / being kind of a douchebag / denying that your mental health regimen is clearly not working), you should probably get involved with reproductive-rights causes, helping people gain or retain access to family-planning resources. Research has shown that people who have the medical and social resources to control their family planning have fewer children, generally right at replacement, and also have those children at times where they're better-equipped to support them, which means lives less full of suffering. I mean, yes, you're going to have to bite your tongue that people are choosing to have children at all, but you should probably get some tongue-biting practice in general. You could also support public health and development initiatives, since better health and greater levels of economic development also correlate with fewer births (people tend to have the most children in subsistence-agriculture economies where every child is a worker and thus an economic benefit, so birth rates drop dramatically once societies transition away from this sort of economy), but I understand if that's not NIHILIST TRUPUNX enough for you. Antivehicular has a new favorite as of 04:22 on Jun 17, 2016 |
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Jun 17, 2016 04:11
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Yeah, c'mon, the Sex Fireman at least has to be wearing tiny hot pants for the suspenders to be holding up. This is like Sexualized Costuming 101.
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Jul 1, 2016 04:33
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Lottery of Babylon posted:After that scene, I just could not watch the film any more, because I just could not see Achilles as a man. Just some kind of cuck. Real men just don’t treat women like that. It is not just that it will not get you laid. It is unmanly. It is wrong. It is gay. It is effeminate. I want to tell this dude about Patroclus and watch him go nova. MC Nietzche posted:God these losers have such a lovely grasp of history. Virginity was prized, sure, but there were definitely places where having child, even one out of wedlock, could increase your marital value (not among the nobility, but among the serfs) because it proved you could have a child and live. In a world where childbirth was hugely fatal one could see why that might be. Didn't serfs/peasants also tend to marry later than nobility, too, given the different economic factors at play (more of a need to support parents' household / less drive to cement alliances via early marriage / etc.)? Maybe I'm misremembering that, but it still seems like serfdom wouldn't have gotten these dudes their ~perfect child brides,~ even before we get into considerations like "backbreaking physical labor from early childhood on doesn't make you look like a sexy anime waifu" and "mites, dude, mites."
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Jul 4, 2016 19:10
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My general assumption with this sort of pre-modern romanticization is that the fantasizers are imagining themselves as the lords, not the poo poo farmers -- but no, this graphic is explicitly about the poo poo farmers. The charitable, pretty sad interpretation is that the makers are so depressed that they believe any potential life is better than theirs, even one that's shorthand for miserable grinding poverty. The non-charitable one is that they define happiness exclusively by "do I think I could dominate a helpless woman here, ideally as close to a child as possible?" That's also pretty sad, but not in a way I can sympathize with.
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Jul 5, 2016 16:47
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GunnerJ posted:Like, the modern point of contrast is "wagecucks" soooo I never said I believed in a sympathetic explanation. It was more of a thought experiment, really.
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Jul 5, 2016 17:43
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Will Davis Aurini get to curate the skull pile? He's spent a lifetime preparing.
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Jul 11, 2016 18:27
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blastron posted:My favorite part of the article is where he states something as fact and then immediately follows up with (I assume), then bases the rest of the article off of that premise. Also how we were going to disprove evolution within his lifetime, because he could come up with a thought experiment about how it could look like there was gravity without gravity being real (something about everything constantly doubling in size?), ergo all fundamental principles of science were houses of cards waiting to be knocked down? I don't even know what the hell his anti-evolution argument was. Probably crazy-dude reflexive contrarianism.
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Jul 12, 2016 22:10
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Bless you, LoB BLoB
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Jul 12, 2016 22:55
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Count Chocula posted:we control our natural environment; we shouldn't allow this.
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Jul 18, 2016 23:48
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Into hypnotism, or into hypnotism? Not that the latter would surprise me, mind.
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Jul 29, 2016 04:16
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"And daleks" reads like a punchline. If this is a parody account, it's brilliant. If not, well... still brilliant, just unintentionally.
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Aug 6, 2016 18:33
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Lady Naga posted:Poptarts is dumb, Levine is dumb, I'm hella dumb, life isn't worth living. Time to sell your blood to Peter Thiel, I guess?
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Aug 8, 2016 06:02
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