Suppose you’re a college grad who has to decide between the usual unpaid internships at dumb startups vs. getting to be a ‘research fellow’ for a group that says it’s going to solve philosophy and save the world, and the only catch is that the group is actually a cult. Still seems pretty tempting honestly.

Oh?

NeoReaction: It’s Always Antisemitism

God this is so funny. He’s so evasive about why exactly it is bad to be associated with Epstein. I just asked mummy and she said no.

“I don’t think doing that would have made me complicit. But, you know, it would have been very embarrassing for me.”

Aw don’t worry I have no morals. But people would have been mean to me again!

what the hecky

he’s so offended he’s been told he’s not god!

Jesus fucking christ I don’t think I will ever get over how fucking dogshit the fucking rationalists are at epistemology

IT’S CALLED A FUCKING MAPPING. “MAP”. AS IN NOT THE TERRITORY. IT’S IN THE NAME.

Oh you should be extremely worried.

God I was just reading that and it’s so hard but it’s so funny because that poor girl freya seems to have caused a crisis for Kent by being genuinely enthusiastic about AI bullshit and making friends with chatbots.

I wonder if Kent is going to have to do conversion therapy on his AI girlfriend now. Ethically of course.

Good news! We’ve solved consciousness.

https://poc.bcachefs.org/paper.pdf

Liteplo says the seed of RentAHuman was planted during his travels in Japan, where humans can lease other humans as escorts.

“The story that I could tell anyone to blow their mind is that you can rent a boyfriend or a girlfriend,” he said.

huh? his big epiphany is learning about prostitution?

Someone claimed no country had ever pulled itself out of poverty except by capitalism

The funny thing is orthodox marxists wouldn’t necessarily disagree: capitalism is a necessary historical step towards communism. Not sure how that justifies the continued existence of exploitation and billionaires!

Oh absolutely. It’s frankly shocking how wrong he’s been about so many things for so so long. He’s also managed to pen the most astonishingly holocaust-denial-coded diatribe I’ve ever read from (ostensibly) a non-holocaust denier. I guess his overdeveloped genocide-denial muscle was twitching!

and, of course, Noam Chomsky

lmao the shade

Yeah! Exactly!

And of course on that theme from Melanie “Computer scientist” Mitchell

On the bad side: A.I.-induced psychosis! On the good side, some people will get a lot out of using chatbots as therapists.

These people have definitely offloaded the cognitive load to chatbots.

I like this one from “A.I. policy researcher” Helen Toner.

I believe the narrative around A.I.’s negative environmental impacts has gotten way out of hand. Yes, on aggregate the industry uses quite a bit of energy and water, but that’s true of any large industry. The relevant question is how it compares to other industries, and how it compares to how much value we’re getting out of it.

Yes girl, good job. Now maybe try connecting these two thoughts!

I was getting excited to read this but seeing the word “hyperstition” used three times in the abstract put a bit of a damper on things hahah

The thing is, the world in 1984 is feminist! as imagined by a bloke who hates feminism. Sex for pleasure is outlawed, makeup and dresses are banned, women look and act like men (and indeed are worse than men) instead of following their womanly nature. It’s a feminist dystopia!

I mean, if god damned Asimov thinks your book is misogynistic, you know you’ve fucked up!

I don’t think I disagree with much of what Asimov is saying here! Aside from the silly bits about left infighting and scifi as forecasting (yawn), and the horrible recount of the Spanish civil war, I’ve made pretty much the same observations about 1984. It’s nihilistic and reactionary, it’s profoundly misogynistic and it reeks of contempt for the working class. It’s also shockingly naive and paradoxically enthusiastic about the workings and effectiveness of propaganda and censorship. There’s certainly nothing prescient about it. It’s baffling to me that it’s still popular with leftleaning people to this day.

The most generous thing I can say is that the book might have been intended purely as satire, and as such it would at least be coherent. But sadly I don’t think this is how people tend to read it.

yup this is pretty much what happens when you grind books for xp instead of actually reading them