this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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When I was at school there was a kid who earnestly believed that he would, as an adult, build a nanobot machine to do modern day alchemy by rearranging the component particles of atoms, but he is, as far as I know, doing good and normal things out in the world today
I find myself thinking about this story frequently in a sneering context
I was that kid growing up, mostly for fantasies around AI and the singularity
some of it was due to a natural pull towards reading a lot of sci-fi, but looking back a lot of it was indoctrination from the same folks who’d much later be responsible for the cultier strains of Silicon Valley thought. the idea was that the only way to become a great programmer who would change the world was to adopt certain clusters of ideas and hobbies, but the actual goal from the folks doing the indoctrinating was to turn as many young minds as possible into weirdo ancap libertarians with no personality outside of being exploitable labor
It’s kind of amazing that when I was growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s you heard a lot of silly season rubbish about nanobots, grey goo, unlimited life extension, humanity living in pods, and all this, only to discover as an adult and AFTER having already begun to devote some amount of your free time to dunking on Eliezer Yudkowsky that actually it had all along all been coming out of this very specific media-oriented cult or proto-cult amongst the same people who were flogging Netscape and palm pilots
fucking right? that’s what goes through my head when I sneer — tracing a line from jankily paying for unnecessary crap on eBay using an unregulated bank to those same mediocre assholes who could barely do an online bobcat bank having their own mythologies
I put charcoal into a potato mashing thing and squeezed, was disappointed when I got no diamonds.