Toph Bei Fong posted:

That he's a... What's the word for the opposite of a useful idiot? Someone who thinks they're being fair and intelligent, but is actually giving the one side exactly what it wants at the expense of the other? Fellow traveler doesn't work unless we're counting Less Wrong, et al., as neoreactionary, but he cites Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky with praise a little too frequently not be associated with them.

Woolie Wool posted:

Does anyone have any thoughts on this article comparing and contrasting the rationalist movement, libertarians, and the Dork Enlightenment? The basic thesis seems to be that all three are forms of anti-political politics created because nerds are too to understand, accept, or do politics so they want to replace politics with mechanistic systems following rigid rule systems (respectively, logic, the free market, and , distorted and fetishized into forms completely divorced from reality). I think he gives them way too much slack, though. Someone like Moldbug isn't really very smart, he is a stupid person's idea of what smart people write like.

Woolie Wool posted:

Someone like Moldbug isn't really very smart, he is a stupid person's idea of what smart people write like.

Stultus Maximus posted:

That RationalWiki article wastes way too many words on something so stupid.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Good news, you can hear him read it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aa2UJX_EpQ

Merdifex posted:

neonnoodle posted:

Cultural Marxism, cultural Marxism... It sounds so familiar, where have I heard that before...

The Vosgian Beast posted:

He's WAY more into it than even SSC guy is.

Merdifex posted:

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Be careful though, making fun of the appearance of people like the dude above, who, it should be noted, wrote a blogpost about how women who suffer domestic abuse always deserve it, instantly makes you much worse than them.
Scott Alexander says so.

DarklyDreaming posted:

Someone described it to me as "Cultural Marxism is what you call it when capitalism and democracy are still the law of the land, but they don't work exclusively for you anymore" and that makes sense to me.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

He seems nice in a Into The Woods "You're not good, you're not bad, you're just nice" way.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/23/links-1114-i-link-therefore-i-am/ Here it is. Scott gets angry at people for making negative comments about a guy who jumped on the gamergate bandwagon to promote his political goals.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

I've noticed that when he wants to draw an equivalency between NRx and anyone left of center, he'll use as his example of NRx thinking some frequent blog commenter or another, and for his examples of the excesses of social justice warriors he uses... anonymous commenters on news articles that he's read.

Merdifex posted:

God knows how it looks like now. He's literally one of a few people who takes Nydwracu's pseudo-intellectual bullshit seriously, for example. His recent "Fearful Symmetry" blogpost is especially bad.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Sooner or later he's going to end up saying something really hideous about Charleston or Ferguson.

Thinky Whale posted:

Wait a minute. I have no idea what MIRI is, but I'm guessing HPMOR is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and judging by the words "friendship" and "alicorn"... is the entirety of the Fiction in his world Harry Potter and My Little Pony fanfic?

lancemantis posted:

Its fun to look through their staff page and see a bunch of people with no real qualifications to be performing research.
Then again its a research institute for sci-fi fantasy AI, as opposed to AI research most anywhere else.

Merdifex posted:

Wesley here seems to have an actually meaningful criticism of Gawker and affiliates.
LOL

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Yup http://severnayazemlya.tumblr.com/post/122796150058/jeysiec-severnayazemlya-oh-i-assumed-you

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Let me just illustrate this: you can support cop violence against blacks on the basis that American blacks descended from slaves brought over from Sub-Saharan Africa have lower general IQs and have a violent culture and it's the only way to ensure peace, and you can still not be a racist under this definition because you are not positing immutable indwelling essences.

Jack Gladney posted:

I'm beginning to suspect that we shouldn't be taking these people seriously you guys.

Jack Gladney posted:

This is the first time I've suspected he might be legitimately crazy. All that stuff he says about himself being a superlative film editor who can finish cutting a documentary in six months because of his unusual skill seems like pure delusion, given that he's an unemployed college dropout computer programmer who has never made a movie before now.

guy who doesn't get invited to Aurini family barbecues any more posted:

1:14 We have game, which is certainly useful. It's a skill that every man should have to some degree or another. You don't just use it for picking up sluts in bars, okay, this isn't pick-up artistry, it's just how you relate to women. 1:31 You use game, yes, to meet girls at bars. You also use it with your wife. Or even your nieces. A man with game, y'know, knows how to relate to women. And even little girls are still, they are little women.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Owen is a buffoon who is at least earnest about his terrible ideas and honestly thinks he has the moral argument. Aurini is.... something else.

MizPiz posted:

It's one of those books that psuedo-intellectuals have to show off to everyone else. I'm willing to bet he also has/had a copy of Freakonomics.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

My favorite part is that it had nothing to do with what was being discussed.

let us all hold hands and sing MO-OLD-BU-UG posted:

I am not sure what role the weird object level beliefs are playing except maybe as a form of hazing to keep less-than-fully-committed out, the same way religions require painful initiation rites or the renunciation of pleasant things most people don’t want to renounce. Superficial people get hung up on the object level stuff, therefore reveal themselves as superficial, and are kept out of the useful bits.

feminists stole my utilons posted:

Feminism seems to be the opposite. The object level beliefs are almost entirely unobjectionable, but when you look at the meta-level beliefs it starts looking like the entire philosophy is centered around figuring out clever ways to insult and belittle other people and make it impossible for them to call you on it.

potatocubed posted:

So let me see if I understand. An autistic (?) person sends him an ask saying they're uneasy about Singer's advocacy for post-natal abortions and his response is to waffle about how no, that's totally fine, because disabled lives are worth less than able-bodied lives?

And... he doesn't see the problem there?

Cingulate posted:

Scott is obviously pretty smart. Seriously, if you do not see that this guy is way above average, most likely including for doctors, you're not being honest. The problem really isn't that he doesn't have enough brains, but that he's using it wrong.

Merdifex posted:

Let's discuss the "insights" Scott gleaned from NRx and Moldbug. Is that whole "Moloch" concept actually something insightful or novel?

jonomancer posted:

Yeah, i read Slatestarcodex. His writing seems to alternate between brilliant and really aggravatingly naiive. And sometimes he has to use pages and pages of very advanced Logic in order to reach a conclusion that other people seem to have figured out by going outside and talking to people. But at his best he invents some really useful tools for cutting through bullshit, like the concept of the “bravery argument”.

You have to steer clear of the comments, though. They remind me of that Onion article “ACLU defends neo-Nazi group’s right to burn down ACLU headquarters”

neonnoodle posted:

I'd like to propose the word snart to describe people like Scott Alexander, the LW crowd, Mencius Moldbug et al., i.e., folks who are seemingly well-educated and have expansive vocabularies, who appear to employ logic and reason, but who are actually face-meltingly stupid.

DStecks posted:

Well that's my whole point. There isn't one. There can never be a measure of intelligence because you can't build a measuring stick for intelligence. Because what even is intelligence? You can objectively measure things like education, vocabulary, and some basic problem solving skills (i.e. arithmetic) but how do you measure something like emotional intelligence? Or physical intelligence? How do you roll all of those things up into a single number? Why would you want to?

It's just never useful to say "he's really smart but has lots of bad ideas", because that questions in which way he's smart. You can say "he's good at his job but overreaches in areas that are not in his expertise", or "he's very proficient with language use but expresses strange and wrong ideas with it". To say that "The problem really isn't that he doesn't have enough brains, but that he's using it wrong." is an extremely essentialist notion of intelligence, and I have never been comfortable with those, because that way lies notions of "meritocracy" which exist only to reinforce privilege, and eventually, eugenics.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

The people who just flirt with NRx kind of annoy me more than the people who go full fascist, because you get poo poo like this.
My knowledge of meta-level politics makes me avoid taking sides on petty object-level shenanigans like the riots in Baltimore, where everyone is blinded by tribal thinking.
Gamergate are the heroes of the modern age
It's like, you kind of have to try to be this hypocritical.

Cingulate posted:

The sports analogy based criticism has been done rather well by Tal Yarkoni and Cosma Shalizi: http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010...nitive-ability/
http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html
Cosma's piece also includes a :car analogy:

Cingulate posted:

Although the most definite critical research on the validity of IQ, and of its (in)applicability for estimating intelligence, is probably still Flynn's well-known work.
And I'm really not saying IQ is a terribly useful, or valid, thing. But your criticism is nothing but uninformed.

TetsuoTW posted:

I'm def. not reading loving Gawker, so you want to be a little less coy?

Aurini on LessWrong posted:

The worst crimes of the holocaust were a conspiracy within the Nazi government. The Nuremburg trials had testimony from an investigator who was attempting to prove his supicions of these practices, and ultimately prosecute the offenders who were killing the Jews. It is likely that only a few hundred Germans were directly involved.

The Nazi government was built upon projecting genetic kinship onto the state itself, and while it didn't want any Jews in Germany, they weren't actively seeking the elimination of the Jewish race. In fact, the 'final solution' was not the first solution - they attempted deportation several times.

I've come to be of the opinion that the Nazi goverment - while certainly not being the sort of state I'd advocate - really weren't all that bad. Given the feminist/pro-immigration state that's growing in Canada, I might actually prefer it.

Cingulate posted:

Aurini's channel is pure contrarian & rationalist goodness

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Oh hey that guy! That's the guy who said that poo poo about Qin Shi Huang.
I thought he was just some anonymous twitter rear end in a top hat.

Merdifex posted:

Konkvistador was probably the one who normalized discussion of Moldbug on LW. He and his friends were also big on downvoting the posts of everyone who disagreed.

Curvature of Earth posted:

You'd think the brightest collection of minds would've invented a system better than Reddit's at this point.