quote:

The microscientists claim that there "are" 4, or 6, or 27 dimensions, dispute each other's claims and try to "find" exactly how many dimensions there "are". But a dimension is not something that exists outside the brain, but a mere concept that the brain creates and projects onto its environment in order to "understand" it (i.e., as I'll be explaining shortly, predict its behavior with a view to shaping it for its wishes). The microscientists have once more mistaken their models for reality, and have confused the question of the number of dimensions of the universe (infinite — which is to say the same thing as one), with the number of dimensions in their models (the more the better). The more dimensions a brain can resolve, the more subtle, more powerful it is. Which is why the microscientists say that there "are" 4, or 6, or 27 of them — and I say infinite.

quote:

Wittgenstein is — once you have got past "that hocus-pocus of mathematical form", in which, like Spinoza, he encased and masked his philosophy — utterly exasperating. Ethics is transcendental, aesthetics is transcendental, logic is transcendental! — everything is transcendental! But all these things are in the universe, you goddamn brainless twit, how can they be transcendental! The universe is everything, nothing is transcendental! that's just a word imbeciles use to signify that they are incapable of understanding something! — And sure enough, he understood neither logic, nor ethics, nor aesthetics — among a great many other things, practically everything! — partly because he didn't bother reading enough of what his predecessors wrote, but mainly because he was a little man with small experiences and therefore incapable of making any progress in psychology, which is where all these "transcendental" categories begin — and end.

quote:

Napoleon and Hitler: two faces of the same coin, with devastation following at the end in either case. Why the extra hatred for the latter? Partly the far greater scale and scope of WWII over the Napoleonic Wars, partly the increased power in the means of war and the ensuing devastation, partly Jewish lies and propaganda. That no one studies history any more and therefore has no clue who Napoleon was and more importantly what he did, is not exactly helping either.

quote:

Have been prescribed anything by a psychiatrist more than once

divabot posted:

This is also the MIRI argument for cryonics. "But a sufficiently powerful AI ..." "No. It's hosed. You hosed it. The data is gone." "But a SUFFICIENTLY POWERFUL AI ..."

Count Chocula posted:

I've never heard of the group on the right.

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

Huh, I thought he was dead. 13 year old freshly-gay me loved Dhalgren

Woolie Wool posted:

Humans don't reduce to data and facts,

quote:

The fact that said unbalanced education and the technocratic mindset it engenders makes intelligent people more compliant with and more loyal to capitalism makes it even better.

quote:

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

quote:

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

Merdifex posted:

Wesley thinks that the only reason people think that Moldbug is bullshit is that Moldbug is verbose, instead of being wrong, and bullshitting all over the place. I guess ideologues will defend their idols to any extent, with any old nonsensical argument.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Wesley Morganston posted:

I made the mistake of believing I was a Brahmin, going to a very strongly Brahmin college, and maintaining some Vaisya ideals, so I was treated as an Antyaja, by which I mean I was accused of being a member of the KKK, told that America and the world would be better off without people like me, and forced out after one semester

Wesley Morganston posted:

And as for the charge that Insane Clown Posse “sounds no different than the usual black rap”… well, I’d like to see Soulja Boy do this. Or even this.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Reminder: LW people treat Wesley like he's the smart Nrx who's playing an entirely different game from people like Jim. This is the best of the best, according to them.

Woolie Wool posted:

It sounds more to me like the Black Brute stereotype for the men. The women get hit with the Jezebel stereotype.

quote:

Funny, I thought the majority of people did crime when driven to a corner. So the Dalit are rebels but not really and aesthetes but not really?

Race Realists posted:

So, outside of work, statistically I’m almost always the smartest person in the room. I would much rather be in a room full of people wiser than myself. Given the typical arrogance of people at my IQ level I’m far more likely to learn something important if I am the smartest. It’s all about ego. Or lack of it.

Jack Gladney posted:

The intellectually demanding field of software

DStecks posted:

It's because there's this perception out there that programming is this mystical art that you need to be a next-level intelligence to understand, when it's not really different from any kind of mechanical repair or electrical work. This perception attracts people who see themselves as intelligent, and they have no incentive to refute this perception.

quote:

It also doesn't help that programming education is often very limited unless you're prepared to self-teach or take post-secondary education for it, and involves vernacular and concepts that don't have easy analogues outside the world of computers. Half the difficulty of learning to code is just getting through the front door, but once you basically understand what programming is, then anyone who's at all mechanically inclined can do it. Programs are just machines made of words.

Woolie Wool posted:

But the AI will create a pocket universe for us because uh space magic! *waves hands frantically*

The Vosgian Beast posted:

I thought Nithgrim was someone else?

Mind you, Nydwracu changes his blogname every few days, so who knows really.

Merdifex posted:

You know, I don't think I've mentioned this before, but nydwracu is the only DE moron who makes, or made, his own music. You check his poo poo out at his website he says he made when he was 15. Notice the subtle racial messages in some of the songs.

http://cryptm.org/~nort/

Klaus88 posted:

White hip-hop and rap should be prosecuted as a crime against humanity.

Heresiarch posted:

I don't know if this strictly speaking confirmation bias, I think there's a better term for this particular kind of unintended cherry-picking but I'm tired and not firing on all cylinders so I'm sure somebody else can name it.

Jack Gladney posted:

Just like easy jungle living made African savages lazy and prone to demanding welfare from those hard-working honest white Americans!

The Vosgian Beast posted:

http://thefutureprimaeval.net/fear-of-a-black-planet/ just being really, really open about it at this point

Nessus posted:

Oh so "a culture that likes things other than the masculine arts which I personally favor" eh

divabot posted:

This is Invictus' resignation letter from a previous job. His law school friends show up in the comments - apparently he was known at law school as a weird but OK guy, very very smart but very very weird.

His accent is apparently half a put-on. A southerner trying to go mid-Atlantic for pomposity, and the result being nearly as awful as when an Australian tries an American accent or an American tries an Australian accent.

Invictus is not NRx as such, although he and Rachel Haywire did exchange mutual admiration on Twitter.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Maybe plastic skulls are the secret masters of neoreaction

Woolie Wool posted:

Latinos who look 100% European can definitely become white if they Anglicize, and many do--look at George Zimmerman, hero of racist white people everywhere. "But he's Hispanic!" I've heard some people say, but he's also, as Trayvon Martin put it, a creepy-rear end cracker. The expansion of whiteness to encompass light-skinned Latinos in general, not just those who take on Anglo ways, is all but guaranteed, because it's necessary for white people to hold onto power in America.

Nessus posted:

I thought that was the usual argument back in the day. "Yes, the Jew and the China-man may edge us out slightly in one field, but they lack real zest, gumption, etc. Let us make sure they look at the whole student character, so our fair halls of Harvard and Yale are not infested with nerds."

Munin posted:

I for some reason would like to see the reaction of some people discussed in this thread to this little news snippet:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/06/08/nigerian-student-ufot-ekong-solves-30-year-old-maths-equation_n_7533358.html

divabot posted:

Phil Sandifer, suffering Dork Enlightenment fatigue, posted on why scientific racists are actively horrible, I reblogged it and the rationalsphere turned it into an utter lw.txt clusterhug. There are several branches of this stupid, but here's Phil's finishing response.

pelswick posted:

the all-consuming terror of death is an accidental negative side effect of our giant thinking brains

quote:

There is a very much alive and healthy branch of social psychology - Terror Management Theory - whose foundational assumption is that human behavior can largely be explained by, fundamentally, dealing with fear of death. (Since it's not my branch, this is about what I know of it though.)

Count Chocula posted:

That's cool, your denial of the fear of death will protect you for awhile. I envy you man, I really do, but mocking people who fear the worst thing that will happen to most people - the thing that's inspired religions and poets for millennia - like they're people who like the wrong kind of videogame is just silly. FFS, one of the first stories ever, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is about fearing death. Becker's book and Terror Management Theory

quote:

explain so much. Including why we distract ourselves with petty Internet fights.

quote:

Lik Woody Allen says, he has to do 5 things at once to distract himself from the fear of death. And it's why I've read every blog post Phil Sandifer's written about Doctor Who and British comic wizards.

Jack Gladney posted:

You don't find it philosophically interesting that only human beings are able to predict and reflect upon the inevitability of their own deaths? Terror's not the right word, but it's something you do have to think about from time to time. It's not exactly fun, even for a Buddhist.

Cingulate posted:

Khmer Rogue

Fututor Magnus posted:

The fucks who go on about poo poo like that splintered off of SA and have their own lovely off-site forum where all they talk about is SA mods and drama. It's really quite pathetic. Except for the ones who're still here on the gbs.

GIANT OUIJA BOARD posted:

Did someone say SSC? LIGHT THE CINGULATE BEACONS!

Woolie Wool posted:

Assembly looks more practical than that gibberish.

Doc Hawkins posted:

That's not a dark revelation! It's just the denouement of The Difference Engine! Nick Land is a hack so bad the work of better writers gave him a dissociative episode.

SolTerrasa posted:

Huh. Is that a widely-held belief among experts, is Phil an expert himself, or should I be drawing parallels to Yudkowsky?

BobHoward posted:

I don't think he's a programmer. ISTR his gushes being something along the lines of "gee golly i'm not technical but moldbug is a political genius so this must be his brilliant masterwork!!!!11!!1". I've never seen any indication Clark has technical acumen.

In fact, merely being a gushing fanboy of Urbit is pretty solid evidence against. You know how over in the computer and funy computer subforums we have threads where we post WTF code written by awful programmers (who are sometimes ourselves)? It is not possible to write code in Yarvin/Moldbug's idiotic system without it being material for those threads.