YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

Apparently, pace my own username, you don’t know who the fuck I am.

I don’t think any of that first paragraph is true. LessWrong and EA very blatantly do not teach people how to spot fallacious reasoning. Nor does the culture of either encourage the adherents of their one movement to repress their “irrational” emotions. Fallacious reasoning, emotional reasoning, irrational thinking - all three of these self-evidently ran rampant in the culture, so there has to be something else going on here which would explain both what the culture is like and why you have an impression that seems to line up so squarely with their self-presentation.

Rather, it seems that what happens at LessWrong and EA is roughly that a charismatic self-presentation of “rational thinking” (with attendant ideas along the lines of repressing one’s emotions and so on) hooks in impressionable people, who - like victims of any multi-level marketing scheme - quickly replace their own styles and habits of thought with those propounded and taught by the movement. So those people do do something like “repress” their emotions, but only in the sense that they repress those styles of thought and emotional presentation which had previously come naturally to them. But of course the movement also teaches that it is right and proper or that there is even a sort of duty to make impassioned (whiny) emotional appeals to this or that privileged source of the right kind of emotions to feel (such as feeling indignant about normie reasoning, or feminism, or whatever), which are (some would say fallaciously) considered above rational criticism themselves.

You can see that sort of thing play out in basically any rationalist discussion or article at Vox’s “Future Perfect”!

So what you describe with respect to drugs and so on is true enough but misses the point. It’s rather that throughout the movement there’s a strong current of precisely the things that in its self-presentation the movement is supposed to ward off. The drug scene isn’t an outlet for repressed feelings, it’s just a particular place (of many) towards which the movement’s leaders have directed the energies (which they don’t repress but encourage) of their followers.

The shame and guilt thing is a separate issue, it has nothing to do with the conscious or directed repression of emotions under the auspices of the movement.

My impression is that, as a group, on average, rationalists tend to both feel and repress more intense feelings of shame and guilt than the rest of society can be bothered dealing with, and I say that as somebody who has spent nearly two years doing addiction recovery

The little paranoid devil on Siskind’s shoulder screaming horrible compulsive thoughts in his ear is my favourite character in this whole decades long saga

The fossil fuel companies thing is a metaphor run wild. It makes some sense in its own context as a characterisation of the way economic ‘forces’ (or ‘capital’) are able to go on operating and eating everything no matter what human beings collectively try to do about it. It does not make sense when you transfer the metaphor over to a new domain by holding onto one word (for example: “machine”) and behaving as if it continues to mean the same thing in a new context.

It isn’t a parsimonious way of thinking, it’s a rhetorical move he’s making.

Did OP consider the work going on at literally every single tech college’s VC groups in ~~optoelectronic~~ neural networks built on optical components to improve minimisation and how ~~that’s going to impact the decoupling of AI training and operation from Moore’s Law~~ that’s one hope for making processing power gains so that the banner headlines about “Moore’s Law” are pushed back a little further? I’m guessing no.~~___~~

You have the insider clout of a 15 year old with a search engine

I’m just cackling at whatever this guy thinks ketamine does when you’re already on speed playing jump rope with the traffic, other than “you will lie face down on the pavement for half an hour and conduct a week long interview with satan between the gap in your eyelids”

If you want to prematurely end your stimulant rush, booze, GHB, or ketamine will do that.

Ketamine and booze will absolutely not do that, and for the love of God do not take GHB to cool off a rush, what in God’s name are you thinking, you ludicrous phoney

Btw…

I am not going to discuss the actual experiments that have been done on calibration—you can find them in my book chapter on cognitive biases and global catastrophic risk1—because I’ve seen that when I blurt this out to people without proper preparation, they thereafter use it as a Fully General Counterargument, which somehow leaps to mind whenever they have to discount the confidence of someone whose opinion they dislike, and fails to be available when they consider their own opinions.

lol

I am absolutely astonished that anybody with the most basic understanding of relativity would ever take Yud as some kind of brain genius after he shows his entire mucky arse all over just those two opening paragraphs

Right, so go after him for that!

No, but Singer does mean stuff like “supply birth control to people who don’t have birth control” and “make them rich and educated so they have fewer kids” which eugenics or not is a real policy response by governments which had to deal with famine pursued

I don’t really get the sneer here, he mentions population control at a time when it was widely believed that overpopulation was a looming problem