Eats the same bland meal every day of his life. Takes an ungodly number of pills every morning. Uses his son as his own personal blood boy. Has given himself a physical appearance that can only be described as "uncanny valley".
I'll never understand the extremes some of these tech bros will go to deny the inevitability of death.
Happy Valentine's Day everybody!
It's kind of fascinating how rotten the "New Atheist" movement turned out to be. Whether it's Richard Dawkins revealing his inner racist-misogynist, Michael Shermer being rapey AF, or James Lindsay turning into a Christofascist, the movement seems to have spawned and/or revealed a lot of really problematic people. I guess it's no surprise that the rationalist scene had such a membership overlap.
I haven't read Scott's comment sections in a long time, so I don't know if they're all this bad, but that one is a total dumpster fire. It's a hive of Trump stans, anti-woke circle-jerkers, scientific racists, and self-proclaimed Motte posters. It certainly reveals the present demographic and political profile of his audience.
Scott has always tried to hide his reactionary beliefs, but I've noticed he's letting the mask slip a bit more lately.
It's absolutely bizarre that Scott labels Rufo a journalist. Rufo is a right-wing activist who has only ever worked for right-wing think tanks. He first came to my attention as a part of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based "think tank" best known for promoting creationism.
Then again, Scott has previously said that he's impressed by the arguments of creationist Michael Behe, another Discovery Institute lackey.
Glowfic feels like a writing format designed in a lab to be the perfect channel for Eliezer's literary diarrhea.
My P(harrassment scandal) for EA is 0.98.
Exactly. It would be easier to take Scott's argument more seriously if it wasn't coming from the very same person who previously labeled as unstable and thereby non-credible a woman who accused his rationalist buddies of sexual harrassment -- a woman who, by the way, went on to die by suicide.
So fuck him and his contrived rationalizations.
Imagine thinking there is actually some identifiable thing called "white culture". As if a skin color defines a culture.
Yeah, sounds like a Nazi.
I think in their minds, there is this magical threshold below which all the brown and disabled people live, and once you get rid of all the people residing below that threshold all you have left is smart people who want to make the world better.
Only an EA could take seriously someone who approvingly cites journals like "Mankind Quarterly" and crackpots like Richard Lynn, Steven Hsu, Jonathan Anomaly, and Emil Kirkegaard.
The author considers himself a "rationalist of the right" and a libertarian who enjoys Richard Hanania and Scott Alexander. He describes ten tenets of right-wing rationalism, 8 of which are simply rephrasings of various ideas promoted by scientific racists. It would be an understatement to say this guy is monomaniacally focused on a single topic.
(Oh, and he publishes his brain farts on Substack. Because of course he does.)
You know the doom cult is having an effect when it starts popping up in previously unlikely places. Last month the socialist magazine Jacobin had an extremely long cover feature on AI doom, which it bought into completely. The author is an effective altruist who interviewed and took seriously people like Katja Grace, Dan Hendrycks and Eliezer Yudkosky.
I used to be more sanguine about people's ability to see through this bullshit, but eschatological nonsense seems to tickle something fundamentally flawed in the human psyche. This LessWrong post is a perfect example.