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ahopefullycuterrobot @awful.systems
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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • I'm mildly surprised at Krugman, since I never got a particularly racist vibe from him. (This is 100% an invitation to be corrected.) Annoyed that 1) I recognise so many names and 2) so many of the people involved are still influential.

    Interested in why Johnathan Marks is there though. He's been pretty anti-scientific racism if memory serves. I think he's even complained about how white supremacists stole the term human biodiversity. Now, I'm curious about the deep history of this group. Marks published his book in 1995 and this is a list from 1999, so was the transformation of the term into a racist euphemism already complete by then? Or is this discussion group more towards the beginning.

    Similarly, curious how out some of these people were at the time. E.g. I know that Harpending was seen as a pretty respectable anthropologist up until recently, despite his virulent racism. But I've never been able to figure out how much his earlier racism was covert vs. how much 1970s anthropology accepted racism vs. how much this reflects his personal connections with key people in the early field of hunter-gatherer studies.

    Oh also, super amused that Pinker and MacDonald are in the group at the same time, since I'm pretty sure Pinker denounced MacDonald for anti-Semitism in quite harsh language (which I haven't seen mirrored when it comes to anti-black racism). MacDonald's another weird one. He defended Irving when Irving was trying to silence Lipstadt, but in Evan's account, while he disagrees with MacDonald, he doesn't emphasise that MacDonald is a raging anti-Semite and white supremacist. So, once again, interested in how covert vs. overt MacDonald was at the time.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 25 August 2024
  • Longer than I'd intend, but the way I describe it is probably as

    1. A mystical Harry Potter based sex cult deeply embedded in the techbro scene. They want what many cults want: to commune with God, achieve immortality or enlightenment, and obtain power in the current world, but they dress it in the trappings of science and computer programming.

    2. Do to demographic features, their desire to be clever, and a certain contrarian attitude, they will often seek to rationalise harmful social practices, which leads them to support anti-feminist and race realist positions with shocking frequency.

    3. Because of their close connections to the tech scene, along with the personal relationship the cult founder had with Peter Thiel, and the fact that the cult has been indoctrinating kids since the aughts, they are shockingly influential in the AI scene.

    4. As most cults, they claim to want to teach people to think correctly (rationally), but they actually value the community of being in a cult (and the potential social networking and financial benefits) over thinking rationally.

    5. In terms of style, they like long works with unclear arguments, being clever or witty over being right, and strongly signalling their rationality (sometimes even using good tools), but not allowing that to interfere with the core features of being a cultist.

    (1-3) are what I'd consider core. (4-5) are what I'd add if the person seems interested. If they seem really interested, I'd also discuss other connections (e.g. to Effective Altruism, the Future of Humanity Institute, George Mason University, Future Perfect, neoreaction), their ideology in more specific terms (e.g. the Sequences, Roko's Basilisk), and associated members (e.g. EY, SSC, Aella, SBF).

  • rationalists discuss: does testosterone make you stupid?
  • Nick Land claimed that trans women were the Jews of gender in response to some technofascist commenting about average trans femme IQ. I wonder if this idea is just in the air amongst LessWrongites and so you have many instances of parallel evolution or whether there was some actual direct adoption. I also half remember an AI-booster claiming that estradiol might be a life extension drug.

    Someone really should do a dissertation about gender and race in the TESCREAL subculture. The results would be fascinating.

  • Mother Jones sues OpenAI and Microsoft - best pic of Sam Altman-Fried
  • I feel like you would use an extended modifier instead: Die kindische und katastrophale von Rationalisten gebrauchte Sprache. Or maybe something like "die kindische und katastrophale Rationalistensprache". Not sure though. This is pushing the limits of my B1 German though.

  • Scott Alexander shares conspiracy theory that COVID didn't happen
  • An overly wordy misogynistic racist, who seeks to covertly transmit ideas from neo-fascist and race realist groups such as the Occidental Review to his primarily 'liberal' audience, and a major leader within a techno-utopian/apocalyptic sex cult, which for some reason is actually influential within tech policy.

  • The whole internet loves Kagi, a lovely paid search engine that can find things! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the CEO is an unhinged narcissist who will harangue you in email
  • I was trying and failing to do something like that. Basically, using ArchiveBox to download bookmarks, and then use recoll to index the webpages + PDFs + my own writing. Assumption was that I probably already bookmarked or had copies of what I wanted and just needed a quick way to find them. Was eventually going to import my browsing history as well. It ended up being more trouble than it was worth. (Too many bookmarks, not enough disk space, didn't know what the best setting for ArchiveBox were, Archivebox has its own search and I wasn't sure how that compared to recoll, unsure most efficient way to delete useless downloaded pages or curate them, etc.)

    I do use uBlacklist and the Huge AI Blocklist subscription to try to clean up my search results. Not sure how effective they are over all though.