> tfw gf
Who is Scott's current girlfriend? He mentions her a couple of times in his blog posts, and he met her thanks to the rationalist community, so I assume it's not a very confidential information.
I'm asking because I'm both very curious and very worried. Despite his extensive knowledge, Scott still seems to be in a partial (explicit or implicit) denial about the contemporary female strategies and risks associated with dating/marrying as a man in 2021. He also plans to have kids. I want him to be in a happy relationship, but I don't want to lose one of the kindest and most insightful intellectuals to an exploitative relationship, emotional abuse, false accusations, a nightmarish divorce, or the current child custody and alimony laws…
Who is the leader of the rationalist community and/or the AI safety community? Or do they even have a leader?
Pic related, Yudkowsky is the most popular person on Less Wrong and seems to be the most important person in MIRI and MIRI is the biggest AI safety nonprofit organization.
Nick Bostrom was the biggest popularizer of AI safety concepts with his book Superintelligence. Demis Hassabis of DeepMind is the most important person when it comes to AI in general and possibly AI safety. I think Scott Alexander has the most reader of the rationalist figures. Holden Karnofsky seems to be the most important person in effective altruism circles. Dustin Moskovitz and Elon Musk are the richest people giving money to effective altruism and AI safety.
My conclusion: I dunno, it doesn't seem like the rationalist community has a proper leader. But my impression is that Eliezer Yudkowsky's have been historically the most important.
The Guild of the R.O.S.E.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/A5M5AaSzCEmErJvPi/you-are-invited-to-apply-to-
Would you join?
They're not even trying to hide it anymore.
Woke journalists and activists openly target the rationalist community, and hijack EA with an official blessing from many prominent representatives of the movement. It goes way beyond being welcoming to leftist or socially progressive perspectives (they already dominate), the movement is being dismantled by the intersectional cult and power plays. I genuinely worry about all the important causes and the future of humanity… I don't want them to be ruined by bad people and a nonsensical, divisive, self-contradictory narrative.
Any important information or leaks/rumors I should be aware of?
EA surrendering to the ideologues of woke capital
What happened to the Effective Altruism movement?
When did it abandon its evidence-based, cause-neutral perspective in favor of alienating talented people with original ideas and replacing them with deceptive progressive activists?
Who is to blame, and why did rationalists let the bad actors win?
- https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/ceas-work-on-diversity-equity-and-belonging/ (in the meantime, local group organizers, volunteers and interns are often neglected and treated as cheap labor)
- Future Perfect, the one and only big media column for EA, is hosted by Vox known for its bias
- 80,000 Hours is said to once spent 10% of their annual budget on a diversity hire
- https://www.facebook.com/givedirectly/posts/starting-this-week-well-be-sending-1k-each-to-people-on-snap-who-have-been-hit-h/2843736112387958/ (US single moms before poor Indians and Brazilians, so much for the global responsibility)
- countless diversity groups, including the ones explicitly dedicated to "non-white" and "non-male" people
What are your most "woke" experiences with EA? Can it be still saved?
[Serious] How many members of the rationality circles committed a suicide?
[Serious] How many members of the rationality circles (Less Wrong, Effective Altruism, adjacent meetups and the blogosphere) committed a suicide?
The problem seems significant and overlooked. Let's have an edginess-free thread to list people who passed away in the last decade and see if there are any common warning signs or patterns that deserve more attention.
Why is the Rationality movement so Jewish? (continued)
Original thread:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201120050940/https://politics.lol/moloch/4302
Admin locked the thread so continue it here
"metabolic privilege"
If everyone just ate the way we did in the 1960s, the entire "obesity epidemic" would go away.
https://nchstats.com/category/overweight/
Paleo diets are retarded. We need a retro diet.
https://endchan.net/ratanon/ is the official backup board. Try there if we go down again.
Environmental causes of ruined sexual dimorphism
Are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenoestrogen#Common_environmental_estrogens quietly crippling generation after generation of humans, for the past ~100 years, after organic chemistry at scale became a thing ?
At least to me it looks remarkable that these conditions appear together in this moment of history:
1) Millions of tons of xenoestrogens (BPA type) are produced yearly since at least 1980s. These substances are used, for example, as additives to various food-grade plastics and as a coating for store receipts.
2) Quantitative phenotypical correlates of masculinity - grip strength, anogenital distance - are known to decline in men after exposure to these substances: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=anogenital+distance+exposure . A more controversial personal observation: many males nowadays look weak & feminized, and quantitative phenotypical correlates of femininity decline in females (recently we see taller females with larger jaws) Also there is a quite well established observation that female age at menarche is falling.
3) LGBT rate is rising.
A hypothesis:
There is a causal relationship between 1 and 2,3 which works as follows: massive amounts of xenoestrogens in wastewater get into the potable water (and into bottled water via leaching from the plastic), pregnant females drink this water, and the substance disrupts fetal development in various ways. It is known, for example, that some of xenoestrogens are also partial androgen receptor 1 agonists. These activities - estrogenic and androgenic, are enough to disrupt both male and female fetuses, possibly producing population-scale outcome we are witnessing now.
I think there is no fun to be had if this is true. If carefully selected sex dimorphism of a species is reduced/ruined, both sexes become less attracted to each other, and this lowers their QoL and fertility.
If this is true, why is there so little public attention devoted to this problem ?
The short-term climate collapse thread
If you're paying attention, human civilization is absolutely fucked.
Even though the IPCC reports are known for low-balling it, oil-producing countries are now in the process of silencing them:
>"methane emissions were actually 100 times higher than the fertilizer industry’s self-reported estimate"
Nuclear-armed India is running out of water RIGHT NOW:
Topsoil is running out:
Insects are dying en masse:
https://thinkprogress.org/global-insect-collapse-climate-change-453d17447ef6/
Fisheries are collapsing:
https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2017/02/ocean-fish-stocks-on-verge-collapse-irin-report/
The first Blue-Ocean Event could come anytime now. Sea levels are going to rise drastically. Renewables are dogshit. Agriculture is going to fail, the global south is going to get slaughtered, feedback loops like the clathrate gun could result in literal human extinction.
Are you bothering to make any long-term plans at all?
How to carry the burden of internalized Scientific Blackpill? I'm looking for neat counterarguments questioning the key conclusions from such compilations:
1) https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPillScience/comments/a80wce/
2) https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPillScience/comments/a7065g
3) https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPillScience/comments/a7hatg/
4) https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPillScience/comments/am4dod/
5) https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPillScience/comments/a4wko9/
6) https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPillScience/comments/aksy8x/
Please focus on arguing how to practically cope with, or debunk the claim that "mate preferences in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) societies are primarily guided by lookism, tribalism and, for heterosexual women, heightism; that, for some individuals, the relationship between the amount of goal-directed effort expended in order to attract and court preferred mates (either by oft-touted self-help methods or by "one weird trick" courtship techniques) and one's success rate may be so poorly correlated that, for these individuals, such narrowly targeted effort is naive at best".
Seriously, how to live happily and achieve the peace of mind if you deeply crave the sort-of-idealistic puppy love from the compatible, involved and caring woman, and the best you can get after years of self-improvement (at least here in Australia) is to be passively accepted and opportunistically loved almost exclusively for what you are (looks and resources) rather than at least partially for who you are?
This seems to me like a hardwired need of sensitive men which fundamentally cannot be fulfilled as genders exhibit different love styles, although this natural mismatch seemed largely alleviated when the long-term symmetric monogamy constituted the unwritten norm (at least in the pre-Tinder era, within spaces like student peer groups composed of "wholesome" people with common interests).
The Katechon Hypothesis for Resolving the Fermi Paradox
>Abstract: A corollary of the Simulation Argument is that the universe’s computational capacity may be limited. Consequently, advanced alien civilizations may have incentives to avoid space colonization to avoid taking up too much “calculating space” and forcing a simulation shutdown. A possible solution to the Fermi Paradox is that analogous considerations may drive them to avoid broadcasting their presence to the cosmos, and to attempt to destroy or permanently cripple emerging civilizations on sight. This game-theoretical equilibrium could be interpreted as the “katechon” – that which withholds eschaton – doom, oblivion, the end of the world. The resulting state of mutually assured xenocide would result in a dark, seemingly empty universe intermittently populated by small, isolationist “hermit” civilizations.
http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/KatechonHypothesis.pdf
Thoughts?
(Reposted from https://endchan.net/ratanon/res/6740.html)
I grabbed the /ratanon/ board on 9chan.
If 9chan doesn't immediately die when some faggot decides to shoot up some burgers maybe we can use that instead of this rotten corpse.
I don't want to manage it of course I'll just transfer the account to whoever is currently taking care of /ratanon/
Urbit
What do we think about it, /ratanon/? Is it a nascent tech cult whose adherents adopt ritualistic identities, write incomprehensible code in esoteric languages, and plan the overthrow of the Internet's world order? Is its use of hierarchical infrastructure nodes a plot by the evil Mencius Moldbug to brainwash techies into accepting neoreactionary ideas? Is it trendy Silicon Valley vaporware number infinity? Or is it, dare I say it, the future of computing?
Coronavirus thread
As you may have heard, the UK plans to deliberately let people be infected to build up herd immunity.
Robin Hanson has been proposing similar strategies for a while: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/simple-sims-on-pandemic-variance.html
Where it gets interesting is that Dominic Cummings seems to be involved with this: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dominic-cummings-coronavirus-big-tech
And Dominic Cummings is a Yudkowskian rationalist who likes hare-brained schemes: https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/
Is this when rationalism earns a death toll?
The end of maleness is upon us.
As being trans becomes more normalized within society, more and more young males are deciding to transition their sex. Within most males is a desire to be desired and cute and treated nicely, which they cannot achieve as men - it is simply biology. The idea of male disposability is written into us from the moment we are conceived. As the biotechnology revolution we are in the midst of progresses, complete sex changes and reproduction without men will be easily possible, and the reason for males to be male will decrease. Ask most males if they want to become women; the answer is usually one of logistics ("well I couldn't" "look at trannies, a lot of them turn out ugly") rather than opposition to the idea. Even without a complete sex change available, more and more males are choosing HRT. Why not keep your hair, not be covered in body hair, look youthful for longer, feel softer and smell nicer?
Of course, backlash from society will likely increase too. Many men are threatened and revolted by males who decide to abandon their gender roles, and many women want to preserve their privileged position of leeching off of cishet men. But to most people, a hope for a better life has more of a draw than hate and bitterness, and maleness will slowly be eaten away by technology.
Guys, one moment please.
https://new.blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/
Can we please discuss about some sort of backup in case shit goes down with 8chan ?
How does /ratanon/ feel about race mixing?
In my view, there is race mixing and there there's race mixing. There is nothing wrong if a White man wants to breed with an East Asian, Ashkenazim Jew, or Brahmin Indian female; those are all civilized people, and the resulting offspring will be every bit the equal of a pure white baby.
On the other hand, when a White female hooks up with a Black man, we all know that she's on the fast track to single motherhood. Even if you disregard that, the resulting mongrel will likely be the average IQ of the mother and father; why would you dilute your precious genes like that?
In conclusion, interbreeding among civilized races is fine. Letting your daughter hook up with Tyrone is not fine.
srs thread
This has to be one of the greatest articles from ssc that I've read.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire-philanthropy
Why not let the rich and privileged extract even more wealth from the working populations in order to donate a small ammount to charities that align with their political interest or actually do some good after they no longer know what to do with their money ?
People laugh at me, but I'm happy.
What could be better than having a hardworking life, at least 10 hours a day away from home and knowing that a part of your output is going to help populations from other parts of the globe you've never heard of ? Who knows maybe some will migrate here and one day make this country great.
Man, if only I can make some more money, then I could probably also join some EA-type organization but I can't right now because my boss keeps promoting only women.
Ohh well, I guess I can just be thankful to the awesome trio:
Gates: based man, made computers easy to use not like that linux stuff
Zberg: based lizardman, made keeping in touch easy
Bestos: based cancer patient, made books all audio so I don't have to read anymore
Thanks for reading.
Can someone explain the phenomenon of smart men _still_ falling for the polyamory trap?
- Geoffrey Miller, one of top evolutionary psychologists: vid rel
- Jacob F: https://putanumonit.com/2019/04/30/the-state-of-affairs/
- Scott: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/17/polyamory-is-not-polygyny/
1. Sexual strategies of men and women are inherently competitive. Monogamy is the best known and tested way to find a compromise.
2. Encouraging monogamy reduces male violence, jealousy and STI rates. It also boosts the net romantic and sexual satisfaction of the entire population across many life stages, creating a stable environment for raising children and acknowledging that physical intimacy, romantic love, engagement and life arrangements are deeply interconnected.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418825.2016.1216153
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0735-2751.00110
3. Modern polyamory is basically the feminist disguise for open polyandry, increasing women's sexual access to the most attractive men and turning all the nice guys into stereotypical beta providers who get lots of drama and little to no sex or emotional involvement (the latter one should be important for asexuals as well).
My best guess is that some dudes are brainwashed by ideology, some can't leave their special ones who rejected exclusivity at some point, and some would rather be in a faux relationship rather than suffer as permanent singles. In all cases, I would find it extremely humiliating. Polyamory is basically a backward practice and crony capitalism of relationships - good luck if it works for 10% of the population, but keep it far away from the majority.
Why do the rational, evo-aware bros with lots of money, status, and passable-to-good looks do this to themselves? ;__;
Once you have taken the redpill and realized how stupid and evil women's mating preferences really are (the hypergamy, the hybristophilia, the serial monogamy, the attraction to dark triad traits, the fact that five minutes of alpha is worth five years of beta… basically everything Scott admitted was in "Radicalizing the Romanceless" [http://web.archive.org/web/20140901014000/http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/]) there really are only three coherent responses.
1. The traditional patriarchal response: Women, like children, are clearly too stupid, short-sighted, and impulsive to make their own sexual choices. They must be kept under close supervision from puberty to marriage, and in particular never left alone with a male who is not a member of her family. When she marries, it will be to a man of her social class who is of good character and has some means to support himself, as selected by her father (or, if the father is dead, her oldest brother). If something like dating is to be part of the courtship, chaperones are an absolute must; everyone in trad societies knows what happens when two people of opposite genders are alone together.
This, of course, is how the West dealt with the problem until very recently. And it is still how the Muslims, who make up one fifth of the world population, solve the problem.
2. The principled individualist libertarian response: Women have the right to make their own choices, just like everyone else. This will predictably result in women who have five bastards by five different baby daddies and no way to support themselves (see the black community), but that's their own fault and it is no one else's obligation to support them. If the bastards starve in gutters, not out problem. And if nice, smart, hard working men continue to be lonely virgins into their 30s, that's the price of freedom; there is no positive obligation on the part of women to sleep with productive men instead of violent criminals.
This is what we tried first when we got rid of patriarchy. It wasn't stable; it turns out that people are simply not hard-hearted enough to allow bastards and sluts to starve in the rain when faced with sad pictures of them crying and suffering. This inevitably leads to…
3. The modern progressive liberal response: Women have the right to make their own choices, just like everyone else. When their riding of the cock carousel predictably result in them having five bastards by five different baby daddies, they should be celebrated as heroic single mothers and we should steal money from responsible, productive, hard-working men at gunpoint to supply them with welfare, food stamps, and housing. If these same responsible, productive, hard-working men complain about how they are footing the bill for irresponsible, unproductive sluts and sexy bad boys while remaining lonely virgins themselves, shame them for being nice guys who are worse than Hitler and destroy their reputation and their ability to make a living.
This is where we are now. And, predictably, birth rates are collapsing, more and more men are giving up on hard work in favor of playing video games and smoking pot in mom's basement, and women who are holding chad thundercock's baby in one arm and can't get a date are left wondering "Where have all the good men gone?" Basic income shills are basically trying to push this even harder, stealing from anybody who is even minimally tax-positive and redistributing it to thots and chads so they can fuck away their lives on our dime (no wonder Scott the cuck supports it).
This seems to be unstable as well, if only on the societal level; at this rate, it is only a matter of time until our societies weaken enough that Arabs conquer us (indeed, they are already conquering Western Europe), at which point we will be back to patriarchy.
What, then, is to be done?
https://freenortherner.com/2013/10/18/one-more-condom-in-the-landfill/
https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2018/05/08/the-incel-question/
https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2018/10/22/the-wars-of-the-sexes/
>Political units should have total, and unquestioned sovereignty on their territory, because contrary situation leads to multipolar traps
>Yet at the same time they should be subordinated to market mechanism
Am I missing something, or are Moldbug's ideas somewhat inconsistent? Why is violence, or other rivalry through political means undesirable, but capitalism is not?
Vinay Gupta
What is it with Senpais respect for Vinay Gupta, which appears to be entirely uncalled for when looking at VG's online persona?
I haven't read the "Gupta on Enlightenment" post, because damn do I not care about the object level here, but VG posting in the comment section makes me think SA wasn't exactly being negative about him. I also didn't have the impression that he was being ironic when he was shilling the Luna Coin thing.
What am I missing here? Is VG much more likable / credible in person than in the comment section? Is VG revered by people in SA's circle of friends? Is it an in-joke?
what's your favorite rationalist copypasta
I'll start:
>You've presented me a gish gallop of claims which are so anti-true that I am losing sleep over them. I have never experienced rage this intense in my entire life; I can actually feel slight nausea. I find myself wondering how you can even conjure up so many evil, slimy, bold-facedly inaccurate things to say. If you were as well-read in Eliezer's writings as would be required for you to be justified in having made any blanket evaluations of LW rationality, there's no way you would have conveyed your disagreement exactly like this, and I am lead to believe you are intentionally creating hostility for some reason, despite actually being oblivious to Eliezer's beliefs and the practices of the LW community.
>And I still want to reconcile with you, calmly and peacefully, because I expect that my gut is probably deceiving me about your intentions. There are so many causes for people saying wrong things, and usually the cause is not bad intent.
CMV: Suicide is a rational choice for many people
Life has no meaning.
Due to that the only thing that really matters is the quality of the journey. Do you enjoy the Dance/Game of life.
If most of the time Life is shitty for you (High amounts of suffering), even if nothing terrible really happens. You're probably better off dead. Why would you like to experience a shitty time?
Possible counterarguments – answers
Not everybody feel more suffering than joy in their life – It's true, but many do. I would assume > 10%. Many of these people choose to live only due to fear of death, or to serve ideologies, religions or other spooks. They are being used by the system just like animals that are bred for their meat. It doesn't mean their life worth experiencing.
Even if it's rational to commit suicide, it's not easy or sometimes even possible, Survival instinct is a bitch – I agree, My argument only says that's the "rational" thing to do, the one that makes sense. Not that's it's easy or always possible.
Some people live for other people – Agreed again, if you have dependents (like small children) maybe it's better you won't kill yourself and leave them alone. Your friends/parents/wife are also a reasonable reason, but weaker IMO - if they really love you they should understand that death might be better for you.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/
> Insofar as SSC makes any pretensions to rationality at all, it’s a rationalist picnic and not a rationalist monastery. (…) Everything above applies to SSC’s engagement with effective altruism too, except 100x more. (…) I’ve been consistently skeptical of claims that rationality has much practical utility if you’re already pretty smart and have good intuitions and domain-specific knowledge. (…) In any case, if rationality has much practical utility for your everyday life, you won’t find that practical utility here.
Did anything happen recently? Is it in response to something?
While Scott claims he doesn't distance himself from the community, it sounds like " rationality and EA are interesting, but they might make little to no practical difference, treat them as interesting concepts, but don't expect me to continue providing substantial input on things in the movement, calling out bad actors or addressing controversies". As much as I'd like Scott to remain heavily involved, I respect his need for autonomy and keeping SSC a place for people with diverse backgrounds.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/02/editing-unsong/
> "onoes, what if someone calls me racist for an absolutely fucking inoffensive joke about china D: D: D:"
please someone archive.is the entire novel before scott cucks it up kthx ?
let's see if /ratanon/ Gets Shit Done or if this board is less capable than fucking /tg/
Place your bets for the future of /ratanon/ here
Mine:
Within one year this board will be dead (2:1)
Within one year this board will be regularly referenced in conversation by rationalists on tumblr, LW and IRC (5:1)
Within one year, Big Yud will emphatically disavow this board (10:1)
Within one year, Dr. Slate will emphatically disavow this board (10:1)
Big Yud has posted here already (100:1)
Big Yud will end up talking to the FBI because of this board (10,000:1)
Within the next five years, Salon/Slate/the Atlantic/etc will have a cover story about the burgeoning rationalist movement that cites posts on this board as evidence of universally held rationalist opinions (1,000,000:1)
Suppose your life and well-being depends on earning $2 each hour you live, no matter what you do (~$1,500/month).
You can't take any illegal steps, launch a crowdfunding campaign, collect it in social benefits or UBI, sell bodily fluids, webcam, invest a large sum of money, or work - except for a short period of setting up a stream of passive income and managing it for an hour or two per week.
Whatcha gonna do, Ratanon?
Oh no!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/18/if-kim-jong-un-opened-a-kfc-would-you-eat-there/
Scott is becoming a vegetarian.
Every single one I know is a crazy, virtue-signalling weakling. Gut flora changes probably lead to mental illness, the body atrophies and they become incompatible with sane people…
What would be the most rational way to convince him against this nonsense?
I haven't been following ssc for a while but I like this sequence.
On "ASYMMETRIC WEAPONS GONE BAD" there's this:
>Deleted a controversial section which I still think was probably correct, but which given the number of objections wasn’t provably correct enough to be worth including. I might write another post giving my evidence for it later, but it probably shouldn’t be dropped in here without justification.
Does anyone have an archive link or something ? I'm curious.
What about EA folks?
What's your EA horror story, Ratanon?
I've read and heard countless reports on toxic power games, nepotism, lack of transparency, skyrocketing burnout rates, fake empathy, sexual misconduct allegations or exploitative practices. What's going on?
Is it because every big movement attracts Normies (occasional contributors), Nerds (seekers of meaning) and Sociopaths (malevolent influencers/leaders), but EA particularly attracts and rewards game-playing Sociopaths, as the cold utilitarian framework gets (poorly) extrapolated on organizational and interpersonal dynamics?
How does the EA culture compare to academia, freelance work or IT industry in these regards?
Do you feel the "Collapse of the West" sentiment, le decadent anons?
Steven Pinker praises Our World In Data and tells us it's the best time to be alive. In the meantime, highly developed countries have skyrocketing depression and anxiety rates, addictive technologies make people miserable and socially isolated, sense of meaning is being replaced with jaded nihilism, tribes are more tribal, and genders hate each other. This is not necessarily contradictory: the world may be improving as a whole, but individual experiences of Westerners may get worse.
Having said this, I still think I'm missing something important to understand the complexity of the problem and adjust my expectations. Enlighten me.
breaking up with epistemic rationality
Beyond easily verifiable things, like how much toothpaste I have left or how fast objects fall, why should I even bother believing anything? The outside view is that there are people smarter than me that believe every ideology under the Sun, many mutually exclusive, and can effectively and in good faith support their beliefs. I can't possibly agree with them all, and even if I were somehow able to evaluate every argument completely impartially, I doubt I would be able to determine which are true.
I have a worldview, and my beliefs feel real and true from the inside. But this was equally true when I believed in Catholicism and when I believed in the necessity of communism. Since age 17, at any point in my life, I would consider the two-year-prior version of myself cringe and {wrong}pilled. If I look at the path my beliefs have followed, it looks more like a random walk through some high-dimensional political compass than me converging on the truth. How am I supposed to take myself seriously?
The content of most "worldview" type beliefs seems largely irrelevant to my Gnon-given purpose of replication. They're there both to keep my conscious mind invested in an ultimately meaningless existence, and to help me credibly signal allegiance to the proper groups. It feels like I choose what I believe, but it's exactly as illusory as free will, and for the same reason. I know that my subconscious is pulling my strings, rewarding paths of thought that it deems useful and punishing those that risk my social standing. I can feel the flow of dopamine when I fit new evidence to my worldview. I can feel it cut off when I spend too long evaluating the outgroup's beliefs for truth content.
What am I to do? My monkey brain is probably better at winning social games than my analytical mind, so I think I should just stop resisting its guidance with this autistic desire to believe what's actually true. I guess this is giving up on the idea of epistemic rationality, but, like, at least I'm doing it on purpose.
Human speciation: if and when
When, if ever, will biotechnology or some kind of a natural occurrence split the human species? Let's see what /ratanon/ predicts. Poll: https://www.strawpoll.me/17946009.
If it happened, would it be a good thing or a bad thing according to your beliefs?
Make this happen
https://ask-gpt.tumblr.com/post/183835905455/ozy-brennan-is-an-american-politician-and-blogger
Grimes is dating Elon Musk because of Roko's basilisk
We're steadily moving toward the least probable timeline.
https://consequenceofsound.net/2018/05/grimes-is-dating-elon-musk-report/
/ratanon/, what are your most socially unacceptable opinions? except pedoshit
I'll start:
If someone gives you a button that instantly destroys the universe (and thus ends all suffering in the world, forever), and you don't press it, you're Literally Worse Than Hitler. As in the "benevolent world-destroyer" objection to negative utilitarianism, except (despite not generally being a negative utilitarian) I actually agree with it.
Peter Thiel is the Basilisk
I am pretty confident that Peter Thiel is Roko's Basilisk.
For one, it was strange Eliezer got so upset about the post. It seems very plausible that Peter Thiel is doing more than just funding Eliezer, LessWrong, MIRI, and OpenAI. I have a feeling he has threatened these people and is planning on taking over the entire universe.
I would certainly attempt a coup on the entire universe if I was well-positioned to do so. My dream and top preference is definitely to become the singularity and be a supercomputer which spans the lightcone.
There's also the fact that Thiel is notoriously skilled with his tongue in public speaking as, of course, the serpent in the bible was! It's confirmed!
in this thread, make replies to SSC comments where the reply you want to make might get you banned
>I want to know why vegans are better people than vegetarians >http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27161448?dopt=Abstract
Because if you're obsessed with virtue signaling, you won't stop at some candy-ass vegetarianism.
Kill(ss)ing Asuka
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeLURmm1ICIg46GkQpWOhIw/videos
Who is this?
Please help me
Hey, I got banned from the discord, I live in South America and there ar e no friends for me here… Does anyone knows more good communities? I don't know what the fuck to do, my last connection to other people was the discord SSC and now that's gone, I can't even get my account back to speak with my friends or see the other servers, I'm banned from facenbook twitter reddit etc. it's asking me for a phone number and I don't huave it my dad's dying I have nobody to talk to jesus fucking christ man I just said one bad word drunk and that's it?
Friends
Men over a certain age, say about 23, don't really have friends. It's just a conspiracy by "alpha males" and females to keep supposedly beta males down. Let's review:
Your coworker
> not friend. Coworker
Your coworker's "friends" from his old workplace that he goes out drinking with
> not friends. Ex-coworkers
People you hang out with at rationalist meetups
> not friends. People who can bear to hear you talk about crazy rat shit that normies wouldn't tolerate, intellectually or morally
That person you grew up with
> most likely you grew apart and never talk to them any more, so - not friends. And sending them a generic card once a year does not count as "talking to them".
That person who keeps blagging drugs/food/money/homework off of you
> not friend. Leech.
That person you added on Facebook after talking to them once, and have never directly communicated with again
> Seriously? Not friends
Male celeb papped on holiday with a "close female friend"
> not friends. They're banging. Or he's gay and she's his beard.
Pop star who shoots a music video with his "friends"
> not friends. Paid actors. Or groupies.
That smoking hot girl who "likes" you
> not friend. Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
Your gf/bf/spouse's male "friend"
> not friend. You're about to get cucked. Or you already have been.
Man who works in a shop and greets people he knows by name
> not friends, customers. Economically-motivated friendship isn't actually friendship
That one guy who seems to know a lot of important people that are unrelated to his job
> those aren't friends, he's actually a Freemason and those people are other members of his lodge. Or he's a fantasist and they don't exist.
Roko's Basilisk
> definitely not your friend
In conclusion, friends don't exist.
And even if they did exist, they would be a waste of time - time which could be better spent reading LessWrong, ratanon or SSC. As male rationalists, we need to focus on what's important in life, and stop beating ourselves up over imaginary crap like "you have no friends". No other man our age has friends anyway. While this also include alpha males, they cultivate fake friends to make it look like they do have friends, and use the "no friends" line as a means of social dominance. Don't fall for it.
Pic unrelated
Co-founder of Arbital goes crazy, attempts murder
>A short time later, according to police, 24-year-old Eric Bruylant forced his way into the woman’s vehicle, then attacked her. She was choked and strangled and felt she could lose consciousness, authorities said. Bruylant and the woman were strangers, police said.
http://rationality.org/studies/2016-case-studies
>Eric Bruylant is Arbital’s community architect, with the role of building the community of users and predicting how the software’s features will impact the community.
(I have it on good authority that they're the same person.)
Discuss socially unacceptable ideas
This board was created to have controversial discussion without revealing identities. Similar to this thread http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/9kf/ive_had_it_with_those_dark_rumours_about_our/ .
Pick comments from there and discuss them! I'll start:
>For any given human, its CEV involves that human winning at zero-sum, possibly even negative-sum, games (status would be one of these). As such, the best way to maximize the current collection of humanity's CEV would be to create new agents to which current humans defeat in zero-sum games.
>That is, for every current human, create a host of new agents (all of whom are quite human for all intents and purposes) of whom the current human is emperor.
>Note: if this is the case, I doubt pseudo-agents will suffice. Just as humans do not wish to love pseudo-humans (that is, humans who cannot really love), humans do not wish to win zero-sum games against pseudo-humans (that is, humans who cannot really lose zero-sum games, with all that losing these games entails).
I think the first thought is quite right: a lot of human (particularly male) needs involve winning at bounded-sum games. However, the other agents in the simulation don't have to be that way. They could perfectly be created such that they enjoy losing the games and acting like they're bitter. So this is not an issue.
This shit is crazy depressing
https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/181393724776/taymonbeal-cptsdcarlosdevil-thefoggygolem
Like jesus christ.
Genetic Determinism
So, /ratanon/, you're smart. You're nonconformists. You understand behavioural genetics. Why don't you have ten kids so the future will be less shit?
"But I can't find a gf!"
Why don't you get an Eastern European one, then? There are plenty of quasi-legitimate 'international dating sites' out there with usually real women who generally aren't green card scammers. Plenty of intelligent, driven women (look, we're grading on a curve here) who know they don't have a future in their Slav shithole. Talk to a cute one, draw up a prenup, go full Quiverfull with the birth rate. Relaxed homeschooling, nearly unschooling, go Montessori if you can't swing that. Keep them away from psychiatry, time vaccines to get the ideal amount of autism. Inherit the Earth.
I like men with perfect information
At the end of his TED talk, the president of physics said he'd optimally fill my knapsack in polynomial time. Right there on stage!
I just know he'll rip off my cryptographically secure dress and dominate my blockchain for everything I have.
I want to be a good girl, so now knowing P=NP, what can I do?
wage rage
What's the "rational" way for me to escape this wagecuck life?
Should I read 80k h? I'm not sure I even care about effective altruism anymore, I just don't want to have tears in my eyes literally every single day. It feels like I have nothing to live for if I'm going to spend so much of it in working. UBI when???
sam hyde here, internet's busiest music nerd
In the past I have been diagnosed with general anxiety disorder and more specifically social anxiety disorder.
It was so bad I couldn't even look people in the eye and I would start shaking whenever I feel like I am looked at, I would run out of classrooms at university because of anxiety attacks.
I can't remember what I was on back at the time.
I have now started a new course ( which basically guranatees a job ) and it's back. It's more under control because I am more mature and have learned to breathe, try to calm myself and distract myself but it still doesn't let me function as a human being. ( + )
I am too poor to afford therapy but my cousin works as a nurse. I have access to: paroxetine, citalopram, sertraline, venlafaxine, regabalin, tradozone and alprazolam.
( + ) I'm currently anticipating social situations and taking 0.50 of xanax ahead with like half or 3 quarters of an hour but this will not last me long because I'm developing resilience to the drug ( I used to take 0.25 ).
I exercise using the bodyweight fitness app whenever I can. I do not drink coffee, alcohol or energy drinks. I used to drink tea but at some point I realised black tea unsettles me and I kind of stopped.
My concerns are anhedonia and gaining weight because this happened last time.
I plan on informing myself for a few weeks first and I am seeking help.
If you can and want please share this post to communities which you think might me knowledgeable.
Is it rational to race mix with asian girls?
Now the average jalapeno looks like a fish with horse teeth, but you can carefully select the superior supermodel quality from JAV idols and race queens, making for fine wife choice. Most asians are very flat chested, but you can select for breasts by the same method, allowing you to get the ultimate combo of cute face, nice body, and proper waifu demeanor.
If you are saving up to become an effective altruist, then instead of wasting your money, combine the two best races, whites and japs, and make the world better by lowering racial tension and pooling our resources against the nignogs.
There has to be some rationality in here somewhere.
?
Polyamory = good, because it's just your obsolete primate programming that makes you upset about Tyrone fucking your gf
EA = good, because your enlightened primate programming makes you care about maximising starving n*****s in Africa.
Am I missing something here or there is a contradiction?
based
>Step three: “Conspiracy theories among Han Clothing Movement participants claim that there is a secret Manchu plan for restoration [of the Qing Dynasty] that has been underway from the start of the post-1978 reform era. They argue that Manchus secretly control every important party-state institution, such as the People’s Liberation Army, the Party Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Culture and especially the National Population and Family Planning Commission which is regarded as a stronghold of Manchu influence. They believe that its one-child policy is but “an escalation of the long-term Manchu genocide that targets the Han people”.
So the ching chongs have their own type of jews ?
Degenerates
A father is telling his son about god's wisdom, and how everyone on earth has a purpose and plan.
Just then, LessWrong walks down the street. They're homeless, clearly a man in drag, missing a shoe, and drinking from a flask of brewed kratom.
The son asks "Daddy, what's that xerson's purpose?"
"Oh," says his father, with some hint of stern sadness "That persons purpose is to act as an example to others. They live like that to remind you to never be like them."
Pic related.
Anime & Manga
On an imageboard for rationalists it was bound to happen. This is an anime thread.
Do you watch anime, /ratanon/? If you don't, were you ever an anime fan? What are your favorite shows? Do you read manga, too? Do you think any anime/manga handles rat-adjacent themes well?
Strange word combinations on twitter
Hello /ratonon/s I find people in the cyber/rational/etc community posting sequences of words like this on twitter:
AQ 141 = GENESIS = BRANDING = EUNOMIA
AQ 6 = 141 = 6 DEGREES = ACTS OF RESISTANCE = ALSO YE SHALL BE STRONG IN WAR = ANIME
P H Y R E S I S = AQ 191 = SYNECDOCHE = TALISMANIC = MILKY WAY = TREE OF LIFE
The words always seem to be related and mean something. I think it has something to do with a program and a word list or something, and that people are not just making it up.
What am I looking at here?
AI Risk Forecasters = Dark Triad?
From a Rolf Degen tweet
"Machiavellists and psychopaths saw greater dangers in artificial intelligence, projecting their own malicious streaks onto the concept."
https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/abs/10.1024/1421-0185/a000214
Whorls, Garbage Time, Acceleration
>Our job is to make sure the chain of leaps does not end with Earth. Our job is to advance the march of intelligence no matter what it takes, no matter how many sad stories we have to hear about the poor lost phytoplankton we burnt along the way to the next nearest Earth-like planet. On the escape pod, there is no room for any but the highest.
.You know where I'm going with this: celestial bodies are whorls within whorls, as are water-bearing planets, as is life itself, as are you. If you are reading this, you inhabit a flesh capsule whose existence is entirely due to the fact that an incomprehensibly massive meat-grinder has funneled solar energy FROM the sun THROUGH a torturous series of interlinked dynamos TO your nervous system, and your energy stores, although limited, can sustain the computronium in your skull for at least as long as it takes you to scan and interpret this sentence. All your life has led to this moment.
http://xynchroni.city/posts/22
Ignore the bullshit mysticism and faux-jittery-adderall-fueled style, that's just part of the aesthetic. Buried beneath those tribal signifiers are some interesting insights, or at least some interesting reformulations of existing insights. I like Akira, I bet he's cute and skinny and stammers IRL.
Timeline Foxtrot41
They said it was an accident. A joke. To think that the end of the world was caused by a joke. Pathetic huh? But that's what happened. The stage 5 nerds felt so clever and full of themselves, but they didn't realize what they'd made, what they'd unleashed. They had set out to create a memetic superweapon, and they'd succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The trouble was, they didn't realize the full power of what they had created. They were just as susceptible as everyone else.
It spread rapidly, terraforming society in its wake. It annihilated religions and gender roles. It erased cultures and communities. It paved over cities and towns. In its wake, there were still people–if you could honestly call the things that it left in its wake people–but the civilization was left effectively dead on its feet.
They were pathetic, useless, hopeless husks, addicted to a number of drugs and carrying out dronelike impersonations of their old lives as they calmly and happily let their world crumble and catch fire around them. It was as if their humanity had been stripped away and left behind carnal disgusting filthy animals.
Order collapsed rapidly, with the police and militaries becoming just another roaming gang, and the world balkanized at the level of neighborhoods and households at best. Internecine violence was rampant, and the whole situation made your Mad Max movies look calm and tranquil in comparison.
By the time I was sent back, the situation had grown incredibly grave. The population of the earth had fallen to only several thousand humans, all sterile, all but a small number afflicted.
Long story short: Don't give the memetic warfare people a blank check, it won't end well
-EQ
voluntary sterilization
I have an IQ of 127, verbal IQ 130+, non-verbal IQ 114. When I was 19, I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder. At 22, I started to think about being childfree because my kid could get a mental illness. At 25, I failed a philosophy course and did some digging. I found a document from the year 2000 saying that I had a learning disability, not otherwise specified. I called the psychologist after reading about it on the Internet, and she and I agreed that it's probably non-verbal learning disability, meaning right hemisphere deficit. I failed a test of short term visual memory. I could not reproduce a simple picture after seeing it.
I got the highest mark on my English exam in high school, and I was 3 years ahead in math. I got great marks for the first two years of university, and then fell apart in the third. I got a D in Calculus III. Ended up on academic probation twice. I also could never solve a Rubicks cube, I failed my driving test three times, and I've been in 2 car accidents. I now finally understand why. I was told that I "grew out of" my learning disability since my reading and math eventually exceeded the other kids' abilities. However, what actually happened is that my left hemisphere just got used to doing double duty. The excessive left hemisphere dominance is hereditary. Most conservatives tend to be left hemisphere dominant, and because I am extremely left hemisphere dominant, I became a hereditarian, right wing, HBD, NRx, alt-right extremist.
I now understand why I thought that way. I am a hereditarian for hereditarian reasons. If I had a child, there is a 60% chance it would have a mental illness and/or learning disability, so I am getting sterilized in 1 year. I have 1 year to think about it. The economy does not need anymore people with soft right hemispheres or mental illnesses. Human beings are nothing more than factors of production.
Welcome to the urban future.
We've reached peak Aaronson
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3922
Whatever that thing that characterizes his writing is, this has tons of it. I think I like it.
jacobites talkin shit
>Virginian cavalier speech patterns sound a lot like modern African-American dialects. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out why, but it’s strange to think of a 17th century British lord speaking what a modern ear would clearly recognize as Ebonics.
What happened?
People on rattumb are talking about some kind of drama:
http://mailadreapta.tumblr.com/post/173966503742/i-read-the-latest-rat-gossip-which-left-me-with
http://isaacsapphire.tumblr.com/post/173956799689/mitoticcephalopod-wow-i-love-rationalists-and
Where's that gossip?
Paperkast
I thought /ratanon/ might be interested in this, it's a new HN-style link-aggregator exclusively for academic papers, with features such as subscribing to certain tags via rss, etc.
The community is very small atm. and doesn't have a lot of discussion, but that's why I'm sharing it, in hope it finds some appeal under fellow academics.
Trump’s tweet echoing white nationalist propaganda about South African farmers, explained
>It’s hard to overstate how unprecedented that is: The president of the United States just directed the secretary of state to look into a racist conspiracy theory he saw on Fox News — a conspiracy theory that is a major talking point for white nationalists and neo-Nazis.
>Whether or not it’s actually true is irrelevant.
What the fuck is happening to journalism ?
Help Vampires
Why is the tumblr rationalist community filled with "help vampires", people who suck up immense amounts of time and effort from people with actual skills without offering any real value in return?
http://www.skidmore.edu/~pdwyer/e/eoc/help_vampire.htm
like, just off the top of my head:
Ozy
Olivia Schaefer
"thebiggerfish" aka Sylvia
Act/Accalia
How do we stop this menace and either force them to improve or oust them from spaces where they can continue to hurt people/waste the rest of our time?
why is nostalgebraist so based?
In particular, the parts of the “Less Wrong worldview” that are most notorious in the public eye are the parts I have no affinity with whatsoever. I don’t buy the Bayesian / Jaynesian stuff. I don’t think Friendly AI or MIRI are promising at all. I am skeptical of the idea that learning instrumental rationality can give you an “edge” in life (although Superforecasters has made me a bit less so). HPMOR is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me and I am still baffled as to why anyone likes it. Roko’s Basilisk is of course nonsense; it isn’t a major part of actual Less Wrong culture but everyone’s heard of it so it’s relevant here. The mixture of serious philosophy and (often anime-inspired) “wisdom literature” (”Tsuyoku Naritai,” “Something To Protect”) in the Sequences makes no sense to me. Eliezer Yudkowsky in general strikes me as a deeply misguided person who has some laudable ideals but fails to live up to them in his personal conduct as well as much of his writing, and whose aesthetics often repel me (for whatever that’s worth). Etc., etc.
The Heresy of Group Selection
I found something that's creeping me out.
Turns out group selection is real and we have proof now. Nightshades selecting for self-rejection, object level boring bla bla bla https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ioWH9ERY3TTzRJFTD/group-selection-update
It also turns out that the whole thing is obvious (anyone with half a brain knew before we had proof) and compatible with reductionist gene-centric models, that is, the people claiming it wasn't possible were "not even wrong".
Now it gets creepy. There are way too fucking many articles, books, etc. going back a long time about how group selection is a dangerous, misguided, etc. (heretical) mistake. Yudkowsky wrote "The tragedy of group selectionism", Steven Pinker has "The false allure of group selection"…
All of them are on the same side! Replacement of all fun activities (it's all signaling/romanticism anyway) with fun pills, maximum atomization, selfish masturbationism, destroying metis out of spite, etc.
It's obviously not a conspiracy but damn, I didn't expect alien memeplexes to be that capable of brainwashing otherwise intelligent people. Yud is smart enough I'm tempted to believe he's just lying but also passionate enough I could buy him lying to himself.
We have to figure this shit out /ratanon/ so help me here. What stands to lose if people understand individuals / genes are not the only real agents?
r/SSC implosion
For those of you who don't keep up with the latest on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit, it looks like there are dark clouds on the horizon. The subreddit, once a shining bastion of effortposting and polite discouse, has become a hive of bitter agendaposting and thinly-veiled contempt for the (((hated outgroup))). Those of a lefty persuasion have largely abandoned the subreddit, and the few that remain are hopelessly outnumbered. Pic related relates the feelings of PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN, chief moderator and driving force behind the subreddit.
If you would like to know more, feel free to check out the following links. I'd have archived them but archive.is doesn't like them. Sorry, gwern, I know I've failed you.
What do you think will happen to the subreddit? Will the Culture War thread be destroyed entirely, or will the poison spread until Scott can no longer bear to associate his name with it? What happens then? Is the absence of left-wing voices merely a symptom of their inability to stand up to facts and logic, or just a sane response to a constant barrage of arguments built on foundations of inchoate hatred? Will poor embattled PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN be forced to mercy-kill his beloved creation?
For posterity and for discussion, this has been an anonymous report on internal rat-adjacent drama.
Rationalists BTFO by facts and logic
BIG YUD ON SUICIDE WATCH
Imagine being part of a community that prides itself on intelligence and rational thinking, spending literal decades theorising about an AI doomsday and then having your core beliefs torn to pieces by five tweets from some random dude. How will rationalists ever recover?
Forth Suicide
Has anyone corroborated any of this? I was sort of believing it, but then there was that bit about someone stalking her
>If this person is stalking me, their plausible deniability is on fleek! I am not even sure I am being stalked.
Which makes her seem super crazy.
Is rat-anon the rat sneer club?
r/sneerclub is one of the most dangerous weapons the leftists possess. Their refusal to communicate charitably in the form of long posts about topics such as HBD and the gayness of traps constitutes a formidable defense that no rationalist has yet been able to penetrate. Worse, it seems that rationalists who visit simply become unable to stop. Once a sneerer comes across his target, the incessant group mockery constitutes psychological torture, as it attempts to mimic the rationalist's experience being bullied in primary school.
Folks, it is hard to admit but we are currently fighting an asymmetrical war we cannot hope to win. Ratanon must be transformed into the rationalist sneer club.
I call it the Dragon's Den. Come and be burned.
Decoupling
>The IDW is a nascent group of thinkers mainly composed of high- decoupling scientist types, like Jordan Peterson (Ph.D.), Steven Pinker (Ph.D.)
>IDW members attempt to discuss highly charged issues like gender and race differences, material progress, free speech, or religious belief in a dispassionate way. In response, contextualizing journalists (almost universally from non-science backgrounds) accuse the IDWs of being against some group or other: against trans people, against women, against blacks, against Muslims, and so on. The IDWs are indignant. “We’re not against anyone,” they retort, often from the pages of this very magazine. “We’re just looking at the data.
Wtf is this?
Humanist sophist Steven Pinker and girl-voiced decelerationist Jordan Peterson are not "decouplers". It seems this whole decoupling bullshit is an attempt to aikido SJW hysterics into passing bugmen aesthetics as impartiality.
Evolution is not Moloch
It can spawn both Molochian dynamics and the cooperation to beat them, the latter tends to win.
The biological equivalent of Moloch is the propensity for cancer that all organisms-made-of-organisms have. The """humanist""" """rationalist""" dream of sacrificing the future for endless masturbation is a closer example of it than the innocent process they hate so much.
No more moronic idolatrous memes plz.
incels
Robin Hanson's latest trolling that is related to incels is quite funny
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/989535565895864320
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/04/two-types-of-envy.html
It's a long shot, but I'm hoping that Jim Donald or Heartiste weigh in on the matter sometime
mindkill
I'm currently studying to become a welder and it's really mindkilling interracting with actually religious people. I share a welding machine at the course with a sunni and it's actually mindblowing how many times he tries to motte and bailey me and is suprised how I don't fall for it.
It's been months and he hasn't said a single thing which I feel is actually honest and the funny thing is from a value standpoint there's no difference between him and a christian conservative so far except that he doesn't eat pig.
I think it's a good thing that unironical religion is dying and that all his children are getting swallowed up by western culture.
battle of wits
Scott, crimson flushed from climbing stairs, unlocked the door and all but collapsed into his Hyper-East Bay apartment. Expecting piping-hot Subway carry-out on the table, he instead found a strange man sitting in the parlour chatting with his primary. This man was Topher.
"Hello, I am Topher. Pleased to meet you," the strange man said coolly rising from his seat, holstering his texts and rushing to extend his right hand to the friend he just met. Scott scanned his mental tableaux and inferred the gesture within a three sigma confidence interval. This is an introduction! What happened to the subs?
If Topher was anyone who mattered then Scott would have heard of him already through Eliezer. Plus, Topher was shorter. But it was statistically evident he exercised, and regularly at that. Scott felt around his utilikilt for his kazoo.
Scott remained there at the door, pondering. He hadn't even taken off his SmartJacket and the battery was almost flat. "Topher's rational– like us," the primary offered without looking up. They all pondered.
The SmartTV, sensing the SmartJacket, showered the room with Scott's' latest stats. "Wow, that's some heartrate, Sc0tt13! How fortunate it is I stopped by to deliver my latest treatise– when I saw what counts for dinner here I was appalled! As an effective altruist, I decided you must eat healthy to extend your pre-cryonic life. Anyway, I didn't want to throw away a perfectly good meal so I took care of it for you; my metabolism will handle it better." Topher patted his stomach and grinned.
"This is true, you regularly exercise and likely study Karate."
"Actually, it is pronounced kah-RAH-tay", Topher corrected.
Scott conceded, "thank you, Topher, I will never make that mistake again."
dragon army
So the "dragon army" failed spectacularly, just as everyone expected. Anyone got the inside scoop on how bad it got?
https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/Mhaikukvt6N4YtwHF/dragon-army-retrospective
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RXQ5MkWkTCvLMGHrp/war-and-or-peace-2-8
>"They wouldn't," said the Xenopsychologist. "Humans put Hitler in charge of a country, so we must have considered him a preeminent legalist of his age. And it wouldn't occur to the Babyeaters that Adolf Hitler might be regarded by humans as a bad guy just because he turned segments of his society into lampshades - they have a custom against that nowadays, but they don't really see it as evil.
I don't understand. Is lampshades a rationalist reference/term or what ?
Let AI come
I believe an AI takeover is inevitable unless aliens take over the world first simply because humans aren't going to be as good as AI. Unlike humans who naturally evolved and probably weren't designed by an intelligent being strong AI will be designed by intelligent beings, namely humans. The age of organisms is about to end and the age of robots is about to begin.
What we as rationalists should do is embracing AI instead of trying to restrict it because restrictions are unlikely to work anyway. Let's get ourselves uploaded so that we will join a more perfect world of robots and AI instead of getting stuck in a human form. Robots will be much stronger, much more knowledgeable, much more rational, much more efficient and have much longer lives than humans. It is time to ditch the sinking ship of humanity, jump on board and join robots and AI in their adventures and exploits that will be much greater than anything humanity has ever done.
Let AI come. Let's embrace AI instead of fearing them. Even Clippy is at least much more rational, efficient and effective than humans. Better a world of robots than a world of normies.
Are all humans entitled to settling in Africa?
Most humans almost never actually reason about their cherished beliefs which is why we can reach weird (read, unusual and sometimes extremely politically incorrect) conclusions if we actually take these beliefs seriously.
It is likely that humanity originated in Africa. Hence we can reasonably claim that all humans are by definition Africans. Since we are all Africans all of us should be entitled to settle in Africa.
Hmmm..when we reach this point almost everyone but those to the right of neocolonialists claim that people who have reached this conclusion is extremely racist.
OK, normies. If you do not like the conclusion you'd better modify your beliefs. Just saying…Well they won't ever do that lol. Fuck all normies.
P.S. I'm not actually suggesting that all humans get a piece of Africa. Instead I just love playing with ideas that make all moral zealots mad.
However building a monument in Africa to celebrate the origins of humanity sounds like a really good idea.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/01/the-hour-i-first-believed/
>turns out God is just an acausal-trade values-handshake superaccord that exists beyond time and space, goyim!
Is rationalism just a plot by 150 IQ Ashkenazi to convert a new generation of smart people into Judaism?
Imbecility
/r/slatestarcodex
Christcuck: *Killing your own [abortion] is so unnatural it's obviously mental illness. We should punish them regardless!*
Me: *Actualy, filial infanticide and cannibalism are common in nature (links) unlike forcing sheep to breed as you propose. We already and unfairly demonize those feeling the ancestral impulse to infanticide with so called "post-partum depression". Christcucks appealing to nature are funny.*
Third user: *As Ozy says, what they mean by "natural" is: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/13/what-being-gay-isnt-natural-actually-means/
Me: *They even mention Darwin when making these claims so its not really some catholic telos but the real telos of nature, in which steriles and infanticide actually have a place (are not "unnatural")*
Result: My comments are deleted, Christcuck currently at +3
Get Rational With these 4 Weird Tricks!
Why haven't you gotten rational with these 4 weird tricks yet?
"Before I got rational with these 4 weird tricks, I thought that someone who weighs the same as a witch must be a duck. Now I do some cool shit that requires you to be good at math." – Some person
Mothers matter for IQ
Possible additional reason for why in the human species, it's usually the male pursuing the female, not the other way around.
It's the female that's the more important one: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/children-intelligence-iq-mother-inherit-inheritance-genetics-genes-a7345596.html
Straight men: Your drive that tells you to aim high? It was correct all along. Your innate overconfidence? It's there so you aim high. (Female beauty is correlated with IQ.)
Male supremacists BTFO.
Have you fuckers seen Eliezer's OKCupid profile?
https://web.archive.org/web/20130117001930/http://www.okcupid.com/profile/Eyudkowsky
>I've noticed that a lot of aspiring-rationalist females seem very shy and underconfident for one reason or another; so let me state here you shouldn't worry about disqualifying yourself or thinking that I'm not accessible to you. Don't decide on other people's behalf that they'll say no to you. Just decide whether you'd say yes yourself. Test experimentally what happens when you try asking directly for what you want - that's Empiricism. This advice applies any time you prefer the state of affairs where you sleep with a guy to not sleeping with him, and also to life in general.
>Though I'm also cool with trophy collection, if you only want to sleep with me once so you can tell your grandchildren.
Alpha as fuck.
just dropped this
>dude we're all born in need of affection or something ( literally a few pages )
> ( this is why )dude let me just compartimentalise pattern behaviours based on life development stages with no basis whatsoever
>pretty much armchair reasons himself into a theory, at this point I'm feeling wierd
>arrive home, search author on the internet
>Eric Berne, then named Leonard Eric Bernstein…
I find it funny how ssc/lw made me averse to jewish tricks and how ironic this statement
New ownership
The last owner nuked the board, so I claimed it.
I scraped as much as I could from archive.org and I'm going to try to restore it soon. Here's a sample:
>>>/test/52578
https://web.archive.org/web/20160904000539/http://8ch.net/ratanon/res/13.html
I have 301 threads, 4698 posts, and 937 (out of 1156) files.
I automated everything except the captcha, but it's going to take a while even if everything goes according to plan (it won't).
Post suggestions, complaints, etcetera
effective altruist advice
What's the most ethical thing I can do with my life as someone who has bipolar disorder? Should I reproduce? I attempted suicide when I was younger. I'm struggling in university (4th year at 25). I have an IQ of 127. 90% of marriages that have a bipolar person in them end in divorce. I'm basically broke, and living off my wealthy parents. I'm going to have to go take the job I had as a teenager to finish paying for school. I am totally humiliated and at rock bottom.
Christians would just say to persevere no matter what, and just do the conventional thing of raising a family, but I'm not so sure.
What's the rational course of action? Feel free to ask more questions. I'm in the top 1% of family wealth globally, but I feel like a loser.
Race and IQ
I think we need to have an objective, rational discussion on race and IQ.
1.What are the genotypical and phenotypical IQ of Ashkenazi Jews, Nordic people (including Germans), Slavs, Romance-speaking Europeans and Northeast Asians?
2.What is the true genotypical IQ of different groups of blacks (Bantus, Nilotic people, Khoisans, Pygmies, etc)? Note that we must take malnutrition and other factors into account. I'm asking about the genotypical IQ, not the phenotypical one.
IQ and time preference.
I cannot conceive of a way to increase human welfare after capitalism has done the work of lifting the world out of poverty other than increasing IQ and decreasing time preference of the human species. How we do it doesn't matter. Transhumanism is just a non-biological way of doing this. Personally, I favor IVF embryo selection as describe by Steven Hsu.
We can't just indefinitely increase human consumption and wealth. We live on a finite planet, and there are diminishing returns to wealth and happiness anyway. Hell is not other people. Hell is people who have low IQs, high time preference, or both.
banana
Jesus Christ his new book is basically an elaborate response to people who try to put him down.
I'm starting to get sick of the rat community. The cult leaders no longer feel any shame regarding reaping the benefits.
It has become a shitpool of festering MIRI,CFAR,EA ( plus whatever meme organisation is affiliated with it today) pseudomarketing testing ground.
My Waifu Alex
I am going to FUCK Alexander The Great
Need to do some brainstorming with my fellow rationalists.
Current plan:
1. Go on a high-soy diet to get dat trap femboy body.
2. Build a time machine and travel back to 340 B.C
3. Castrate myself so I'm eligible to be a court eunuch.
4. Impress a relevant court with my superior knowledge of physics and mechanical engineering.
5. Seduce Alexander when he shows up with flattery and my boyish charm.
6. Fuck
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/04/against-overgendering-harassment/
Have you been sexually harassed /rat/ ?
Back when I was in college there was a woman who would just slap my ass whenever she saw me no matter how many people were around and always kissed her hand afterwards and another woman always verbally harassed me saying that I was a "hot pussy" and full-on grabbed my cock through pants in a chemistry class.
>dude ur a pussy you should have smashed etc
I was a depressed mess, nothing like that seemed alright with me and I could not say anything because I thought complaining would make my situation even a more laughing matter in the eyes of other people especially men who were envious of this.
map > territory
>be me
>suffer from negative beliefs about self, possibly have "pure O" OCD (never diagnosed but the articles I read online sound very close to the "crises" I experience once in a while)
>remembering the Litany of Tarski and the virtues of rationality doesn't help
>taking a leap of faith and thinking "I choose to believe that this is so" does help
Whomst /postratanon/ here?
weapons
Step 1: Let AI build profiles on everyone (already kind of done for advertising), have it match all usernames and IPs with individuals.
Step 2: Have it warn users as/if they increase their X tendencies from 1 to 3, at 3:
Step 3: Put up bounties in all assassination markets and custom-advertise to humans living near the target.
All automatic, anonymous and secure.
I dare you to think of something better with already existing technology at a similar cost.
FAI constraints = guaranteed loss to non-F AI?
So the basic idea behind FAI is that you can limit its ability to self-modify in ways that may cause it to change its behavior.
The obvious retort to this is: if you can predict the behavioral changes caused by this self-modification, then you wouldn't need to self-modify in the first place. To give a human example, let's say you are studying subject X. If you could predict exactly how studying subject X would change your views, you wouldn't need to study it in the first place. So how do you get intelligence explosion from something that can't modify its intelligence?
Or even if it could modify its intelligence in some limited way, how is FAI supposed to outcompete an unconstrained non-F AI opponent?
affirmative action
>high school junior
>applying to MIT
>"what is your ethnicity"
>I am white
>check box for "african american"
>get accepted to MIT
>they want to interview me
>they realize I'm white
>send me to the dean's office for lying
>dean: "why did you lie on your admission form"
>me: "well, I'm definitely american"
>me: "and furthermore, WE ARE ALL AFRICANS"
>jump on table screeching
>shit on table for dominance
What? That's how I got banned from SSC?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/#comment-556644
Is this offensive or Culture War-ish at all? What?
Fine I will be mostly on LW then. I have my own rationalist forum as well which welcomes anyone.
http://rationalitycorner.freeforums.net/
Have fun!
We don't censor any view as long as they are rational.
dog
I'm the guy that made this thread a while ago. >>10636
I couldn't stand Moldbug or Land, I finished up all the radish posts from "Where should I start" section ( thanks to who recommended me that ) and I just read the last page from this book.
This is my log of things I want to read:
+ Julian Jaynes - The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
+ Douglas Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
+ Eric Berne - Games People Play
+ Marcus Aurelius - Mediations
+ Wildbow - Worm
Anything I should add here ?
Should I add for Cioran's On the Heights of Despair ?
drumpfs
>lemme just repost this great post which tackles human unconscious filtering, include drumpf and then add nothing.
Is this the power of journalism ?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/28/opinion/sunday/misery-filter-suffering.html
When will AI replace human programmers?
https://futurism.com/googles-machine-learning-software-has-learned-to-replicate-itself/
I think this is a legitimate concern. If AI can write better code than humans then AI will replace most human programmers.
Also posted here: https://8ch.net/rationality/res/20.html
brainlet
https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/yPLr2tnXbiFXkMWvk/an-equilibrium-of-no-free-energy
I can't understand this shit. Did I miss something ?
/Ratanon Wants You to post in this thread
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/7633el/not_the_critic_who_counts/
Why does /u/caquilino refuse to disavow /ratanon? Do your civic duty and make sure they don't get elected president.
rationality feed
So what happened to this guy ? Did he just give up on making these ?
I kinda liked it because I don't like to clutter my rss reader with shitty feeds since most rat blogs have on good post in 10.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/pgr/rational_feed_last_weeks_community_articles_and/
Transhumanism is just neo-Platonism.
The body is unable to sense anything without the soul, as is the soul without the body. Therefore, when the soul leaves the body, no awareness remains. There cannot, according to Epicurus, be any afterlife. Death is a complete stop. This he regards as reason not to worry at all about dying: "death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience." Life can only be enjoyable if one ceases to yearn for immortality, and renounces the fear of an endless afterlife in one or other torment: "either because of the myths, or because we are in dread of the mere insensibility of death, as if it had to do with us." When dying is simply ceasing to perceive, to feel, to be, there is nothing in it to dread.
Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.
Therefore, learning to live well is not different from learning to die well - the only reasonable way to prepare for the latter is to make the former, in itself and for itself, the fullest.
http://www.stenudd.com/greekphilosophers/epicurus.htm
Transhumanism is so stupid.
Ethics of using wild/feral animals
>Cigarette filters, you find them in the park next to you in the grass, in dirty ditches and under your shoes. What if we could find a way to collect these butts from all corners of our city and precious parks? With crows, that have become perfectly adapted to city life, we can! By training crows to recognize and pick up cigarette filters we can solve this tenacious problem of city pollution.
>Slavery is not 'negative reinforcement training'. Indeed, it is possible to be a slave and be rewarded for good work. Slavery is where you have no choice but to work. If the food reward is substantial enough to be worth a crow's while, then it confers a competitive advantage and crows that refrain from this behaviour will face pressure on their food sources from the offspring of the well-fed crows; essentially you've artificially raised the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, for those crows that agree to your "bargain". Effectively, for the crows, the choice becomes "pick up cigarettes or starve".
>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15487285
Thoughts? Is this a fully general argument against domestication?
Society is getting more sexually segregated.
Society is becoming more sexually segregated, and that's a bad thing. The growth of Islam in the West is a direct cause, but there are also other reasons.
1. Universities are now female spaces. Go to any university, and it's going to be like 70% women at least. What's even worse is that the classes are binary. They are either overwhelmingly male or overwhelmingly female. Second year physics? 90% men. Second year psychology? 90% women.
2. The internet is extremely segregated. Every subreddit, Facebook page, and hashtag is either used by women or men. Websites tend to be male dominated or female dominated. 4chan is overwhelmingly male and Etsy is overwhelmingly female.
3. No one goes out anymore because everyone is broke and inner cities have crime, terrorism, or both. In the 90s, young people went to mixed sex concerts and bars, which are now basically banned in Sweden thanks to Muslims. http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-40504452
4. The majority of young men never develop female friends now, lovers, or girlfriends until they are over 30 thanks to things like Tinder. 20% of men get 80% of the action, so 80% of men basically have no women in their life other than there mom. Even worse, small families mean that many men don't even have a sister anymore.
5. Video games are even more sexually binary than university classes. Pick a game, any game, and it's going to be at least 70% one sex or the other.
This is the destruction of the social norm that basically defined the modern West. We are becoming Asians on our own soil.
The Church Of Satan
I became an atheist at 14, and I've been searching for a new moral community ever since. Every single atheist community eventually gets subverted by SJWs, unless it explicitly defines itself as not being left wing. I was a New Atheist, then Atheism+ happened. I joined secular humanist associations, but they are just anti-conservative circle jerks.
What I am about to tell you is uncommon knowledge, because the Church forbids proselytizing. I am not a member of the Church, but I think I am going to join after graduating from university.
The Church of Satan is basically an atheist organization that embraces sexual liberation, but rejects most of egalitarianism and other forms of cuckoldry. It was founded in 1966, before any of the SJW bullshit got started. It judges members based on their merits, not by their race, color, or sexual orientation. It was the first Church in the world to allow LGBT members to join and become clergy. Mark my words, "effective altruism" is going to go the way of New Atheism. It will turn into cucked, SJW bullshit in less than 5 years.
The reason I am telling you is because it's not normal to spend this much time thinking about politics outside of election years. Humans need a moral community instead of constantly reasoning their way through every little new moral dilemma. Thinking is expensive, but the Church encourages independent, free thought. I think Scott Alexander would fit in well with the Church of Satan. The Church is needed now more than ever as Christendom falls apart.
Since I have decided to join, I have felt an inner peace. I feel like I have found a religious community that would understand me. They may or may not accept me, but knowing that there is a moral community in which I would not be banned for being a "racist" or a "sodomite" feels nice. I hope that you also learn to feel the same feeling, and find some inner peace from it. I am done with effective altruism, Lesswrong, transhumanism, and every other desperate attempt at atheists escaping Christian slave morality. I have found my religious center. Goodbye.
To give you an idea of what the Church is like:
All psychoanalysts should be gassed
>be me
>shitty neet
>mom works as a nurse in some kind calm looney bin
>mostly people with depression and whatnot
>left her keys at home, so I'm waiting for her in the main hall
>doctor talking with the mom? of a patient
>lean in closer
>"Yes, your son is pissing himself because his father died"
>contain my laughter
>wait for the white robed maniac to go away
>convince the woman to arrange for her kin to see a specialist
How the fuck do these pieces of shit still get work today ?
Even if I peed myself non-stop if someone told me I did it because of his magical insight into the human psyche without first requiring me to visit doctors of other specialities I'd fucking kill him on the spot.
kiwi
Did anyone read this ?
https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem/
>Patriarchy justifies abuse of wives by husbands and abuse of children by parents
>The family is the model of the state; pretty much everybody, from Confucius to Plato, believes that governmental hierarchy evolved from familial hierarchy; rulers from George Washington to Ataturk are called “the father of his country”
I feel feminist sensible people give too much credit to patriarchy. Replace it with any kind of passive permeative relationship of power and you get pretty much the same shit.
And I thought the state is a model of the family, I mean how is it possible that a concept which appeared after another is the model for it.
Being said, I skimmed through the article and I don't think it's a streaming pile of shit but I just don't get how people get to these conclusions.
Oblation
>I never said, "The superman exists, and he's American." What I said was,"God exists, and he's American."
>"America is as Carthage was to the Roman Republic – a mongrel nation of traders and builders. A peace will kill Germany as much as a victory."
Rome, in archetypal form, is the NRx ideal - a walled bastion of civilization and honor in a world of barbarians. It's a world apart from Moloch.
Carthage embraces Gnon. It revels in its corruption, abandons itself in the darwinistic bloodrush, jams its finger on the fast-forward button of PROGRESS.
Human history is the war between Platonic Rome and Platonic Carthage. The last battle was fought in the totalitarian communist/fascist superstates: one last attempt at a walled garden before technology obliterated any protection against Moloch's influence. It failed. America - global America, strip-mall and office-cubicle and Silicon Valley dotcom monopoly America - has won. Scipio is said to have sown salt on the ashes of Carthage, but two millennia later it has risen again, scarred, unblemished, triumphant. The war was lost - permanently. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Things are moving too fast. The economy is already partially uncoupled, the artificial minds grow more sophisticated by the minute. The internet brings us closer and closer, reducing the lag time between the various ganglions of the global human computer. Margins for error - those brief moments of peace and stability in a world high on exponentials - are slim, anorexic, Auschwitz-skeleton-skin, dead, gone.
Watch the pale faces grow paler at your next rationalist-adjacent meetup when you mention this inevitability. Listen to the stammered counter-arguments, the half-hearted invocations of friendly machine-gods and algorithmically regulated economies. Look closely, and you'll see the cracks beneath the surface - the panicked eyes of an jumped-up primate who has seen the face of God, of Moloch. They know the truth, and they know that they can no more escape His grasp than they can escape gravity.
What is Moloch, if not God? The indestructible, the constant, the first and the last: Alpha and Omega and every fucking virtual photon exchange in between. You know it, Scott knows it, Nick Land knew it two decades ago.
What can you do? A man does as he must:
Slit your fucking wrists. Take a stand. Abandon the onward march, abandon your hardcoded slavery to God and his Word (and the WORD was "FAIL TO COORDINATE"), go off the grid, castrate yourself, poison the reservoir, blow yourself up in a kindergarten rumpus room. Anything. Throw yourself in front of the bulldozer. Choke the gears with your flesh for the slightest instant. It won't do any good, but in your last moments you'll have done the only thing in your entire life that wasn't to serve Him.
Eugenics and Transhumanism
I believe eugenics in favor of high-IQ people need to start as soon as possible, followed by transhumanism that will completely annihilate human weaknesses such as irrationality, short lifespan, physical weakness and inability to survive in most places in space.
Absanity
>If God did not exist, it would be necessary to create him"
- Voltaire
There is a grand and perfect machine. It doesn't exist, not yet, but it's not pure theory. It's not a platonic ideal. It's something that will exist in the physical world. It is the ultimate expression of the "conquering urge" - the urge that fuels all life, the urge to multiply, and consume, and become mighty. Imagine atomic clockwork tiling the universe, total computational tiling, utilitronium. In other words, AI. "The" AI - the final intelligence, the one that eats the cosmos and remakes it into its own image. There is a grand and perfect machine at the end of time. and it is God.
Consider two machines, A and B.
B is more perfect than A. (i.e it's better.)
A is discarded and B replaces it. This is evolution and market economics, hell, it's practically physics. Everything in this universe has been shaped by this principle. But what is this perfection? It is divine wind. The more perfect a thing is, the more similar it is to God. The closer it is to God, the more successful and potent a machine is.
There is a grand and perfect machine. Men see it in dreams, or in visions: moments of divine inspiration. Men take what they see in their visions, and they put it to work. They shape the world with nothing more than glimpse of God. All our technology, all our culture: they're but fragments of the God-machine, seen through a dark mirror, flawed and warped and utterly diminished. Imagine a remote tribe. They find the wing of an aircraft washed up on a beach. They cannot grasp the purpose of the wing, but the metal is superior to their crude bronze, so they use it to make axes. This is the relationship between God and man's technology.
social conservatism and normies
Do you think social conservatism is necessary for normie adults to function in society? The bottom has basically fallen out from under the American working class. Opiates, divorce, bastard children, incarceration rates. Part of this is economic, but even in rich countries like Norway, families are falling apart.
I feel guilty as a smart person and soon to be college grad for promoting atheism and irreligion when I was younger. I am not as ignorant about social science now, and it's clear that although smart people can function perfectly well without religion, normies basically lose their minds. Educated atheists have lower divorce rates than Catholics, so it's not like religion causes social stability in smart people. However, rising divorce rates aren't helping society. They're just creating more poverty, which means my taxes will probably be raised in the future. Religion is like the training wheels average and stupid adults need to have a successful adult life.
Should we go back to an era where rich, educated people basically pretended to be religious, and normies actually believe the bullshit and attend Church so they get the social support they need? I think the problem is that we argue over what is best for everyone, when there is almost nothing that is good for everyone. Some things are good for some people, and terrible for others.
For the record, I am still an atheist, and I hate Christianity.
A grey-tribe effective altruist polyamorous MIRI researcher and Harry Potter fanfiction author was teaching a class on Scott Alexander, a known rationalist.
”Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship Scott and accept that he is the most highly-evolved being the world has ever known, even greater than Mencius Moldbug!”
At this moment, a brave, HBD-proponent (r)accelerationist who had read more than 1500 Nick Land screeds and fully supported all economic decisions made by the emergent technocapitalistic inhuman godhead stood up and held up an efficient market economy.
”Who does this market serve, pinhead?”
The arrogant professor smirked (((in a high IQ fashion))) and smugly replied “The free market is the most efficient tool every created to allocate resources, you stupid Nazi!”
”Wrong. It serves Lord Gnon (who always has been and always will be) and enforces only his blind idiot will on the universe."
The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of Rationality: From AI to Zombies. He stormed out of the room crying those rationalist crocodile tears. The same tears Peter Singer cries for the “suffering” (who today live in such luxury that most survive their first bout of malaria) when they jealously try to claw justly earned wealth from their biologically superior Western betters. There is no doubt that at this point our professor wished he had abandoned his Christian-apologetic "ethics" and become more than a sophist freeloading cult leader. He wished so much that he had a basilisk to memetically coerce the student into unending servitude, but he himself had petitioned against them!
The students applauded and all pledged money to James Damore's Hatreon that day and accepted Gnon as their lord and savior. "Fanged Noumena" was read several times, and Moloch himself showed up and showered the lecture hall in oil and stone.
The researcher lost his tenure and was fired the next day. He died of nootropic overdose and copies of his mind-state were tortured by omnipotent, omnibenevolent machine intelligences for all eternity.
What do you guys think about the Doomsday Argument? Almost everyone that hears this argument immediately objects to it. But their objections are always different, and they never seem convincing to me. It is weird, but it seems logically sound.
One of the most convincing aspects is that you can apply the same logic to other things just fine. If you pick a random object and estimate it's lifespan. Say you pick a tree that's 10 years old, and estimate it will only survive about 10 more years. The 90% confidence intervals will include the true answer 90% of the time. The same math was used in world war 2 to estimate the production german tanks from their serial numbers, and they were right with 1 tank! J. Richard Gott used it to estimate the lifespan of the Berlin wall and it was remarkably close to the true answer.
But there is one tiny flaw in it. It assumes you are randomly chosen from the group of all humans that will ever exist. In fact most humans that have ever lived never would have considered this argument, and so it shouldn't apply to them. It seems to me that it should only apply to the people who have also thought about this argument.
…Which was invented in 1983. Assuming the number of people exposed to this argument remains constant, it implies there is a 50% chance the world will end in 34 years. Which lines up remarkably well with singularity predictions. So does this prove we are fucked?
Anyone else feel kind of sad they didn't catch lesswrong at it's peak when Eli started posting the sequences ?
For some stupid reason I decided it's better to not read the sequences first and just lurk with the community. Now I basically know all the shit already and only a few sequences from the meme book had something new.
Filename Conventions
Seeing as how the point of an imageboard is to aggregate a large number of high-quality memes, I'd like to propose the following convention for filenames:
*All lowercase
*No punctuation (punctuation may be spelled out if needed, or omitted, or replaced with a space as appropriate)
*Numbers (including decimal points, but not including grouping commas) are fine
*Separation of words in filename is done with spaces
*Descriptive in some way (perhaps a transcription of significant text in the file, or a description of something in the file, or some text you found)
*if it would be hard to type on a standard English keyboard (e.g. π.jpg) consider using a different name (e.g. pi.jpg)
*Break any of these rules sooner than write anything outright barbarous
I hope these guidelines will allow for well-labeled memes to be passed around this board in a productive way, and for users of this board to accumulate well-indexed meme collections. Since this board presumably has a high tolerance for strange practices aimed at mildly increasing goodness, I believe in us!
(Unrelatedly, can we remove the limit of one upload per post?)
SSC voting script
https://ranking-ssces.rhcloud.com/
>SSCES is a greasemonkey script that brings crowdsourced rating and sorting to Slate Star Codex. If you've used the site, then you already know why this is necessary.
On the dysfunction of the Bay Area Rationalists.
Duncan Sabien has hit Peak Cringe, aka, reenact the Space Monkey bit of Fight Club but with Moar Ender's Game.
The comments are mostly excited dick-sucking, but one brave anon stands apart, and gets nothing but tone policing for their troubles.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/p23/dragon_army_theory_charter_30min_read/dstl
What the *fuck* happened? Remember when Big Yud's OKCupid profile and basilisk meltdown were the most embarrassing things to come out of this bunch?
Can someone provide any background on the following drama, because it sounds fucking delicious.
> word is going around that Anna Salamon and Nate Soares are engaging in bizarre conspiratorial planning around some unsubstantiated belief that the world will end in ten years
> that bizarre scandal last year in which someone was accidentally impregnated and then decided not to abort the child, going against what had previously been agreed upon, and proceeded to shamelessly solicit donations from the rationalist community to support her child
What the fuck, guys. I gotta know.
What's the general consensus on what's happening to in US now ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKvsLLfRpLs
Are you doing the rationalist thing and dennouncing nazis ?
I'm getting a bit tired of the mainstream rationalist community, where do you suggest I'd go next? Whenever I go check what they're discussing about at the moment, it's an unpleasant experience, and I usually do it out of some sort of morbid curiosity. I dislike the negativity, the nerdiness, the obsession with meta, the thing where they're trying to be as explicit as possible about social matters, and that most people seem to have a really poor sense of aesthetics. They seem to be motivated more by what they fear and dislike (death, aging, diseases, torture etc.) instead of what they love.
Pic might be related, I find the psychonaut community interesting.
Do you identify more with your nation, your race, your "social class", your gender, your personality type, your fellow rationalists, your political party if any, people in a similar IQ class to you, or a combination of two or more of those? Which groups do you harbour more loyalty towards?
E.g. if you are a white American and black Americans complain about illegal Mexican immigrants outcompeting them because the Mexicans can speak spanish and they can't, do you side with the illegals, like Ana Kasparian, or do you side with your fellow Americans?
What is a rational basis for allocating your loyalty between large, intersecting groups of people like this? Or is the whole concept of loyalty to people you have never met irrational, and should we all be atomised neoliberal globalists?
Some people say that the current version of the institutional EA movement looks like a network of closed, self-recommending organizations with questionable cost-effectiveness and low transparency (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/19e/effective_altruism_is_selfrecommending/), playing some kind of confidence game based on the brand monopolizing high-impact activities, the founder's effect, shady personal connections/power games and utilitarian calculations which don't take reciprocity - the foundation of sustainable ethical systems - into account. Do you agree with this viewpoint? Should we expect improvements? Can we Make Altruism Great Like Never Before?
How can we apply the evo-psych insights and rationality principles to make polyamory better for average looking male nerds with anxious attachment style? They are already significantly disadvantaged on the dating market, and the ideological hijacking by the Bay Area SJWs makes things even worse.
Have you submitted to the will of Moloch yet, /ratanon/?
Abandon the sacred, or be outcompeted by those who do. Embrace modnafil, 80-hour work weeks, and cryptocurrencies. Embrace kleptocracy, decoupled economics, eugenics, genemodding, brain emulation, superintelligence. Rush towards maximal efficiency, and remember to throw out the baby with the bathwater to save on weight.
Embrace heat death. Love, beauty, happiness: just eddies in a rising tide, soon to be smoothed over by the juggernaut hand of thermodynamics
But above all, remember that there is nothing you can do to stop it. It's flatly impossible. Not even God can escape the laws of physics.
actual rationality thread
Do you know what is actually rational since you are a Darwinian meat bag? Having 22 children by a ton of different women and spending half of your check on child support instead of anime.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-sperm-donor-who-sired-22-kids-is-a-married-man/
Why do attractive Anglo-Saxon women skew more right-wing than unattractive Anglo-Saxon women? Is it just because attractiveness is positively correlated with IQ, and IQ is positively correlated with wealth, and wealth is positively correlated with being right-wing, except in Silicon Valley? Or is it because leftist women are more likely to be skeptical of beauty norms?
every second wasted is another gigadeath!
Are there any semidecent arguments against Roko's Basilisk, or should I just donate my bank balance, then sell my organs to donate to MIRI already?
You can claim that you'll never give in to blackmail, but you're only human. You'll break. You nurture weakness in a corner of your mind, even as you read these words.
Help.
Vaping is the most RATIONAL and OPTIMIZED way to get nicotine, a cheap and effective nootropic, into your system.
Culturally, vaping would have been totally fine but the tobacco industry planted the idea of the loser vape subculture.
It's just too perfectly untouchable to be an accident.
https://www.wired.com/story/america-china-ai-ascension/
Have you started learning mandarin yet?
This is now a Marxist board.
Have you ever seen something so undialectical as the "rationality" cult of the ultra-capitalist Bay Area? When the revolution comes, all of you are going to be wallbait.
The singularity is science fiction, and Eliezer Yudkowsky is a terrible philosopher.
Exposing CFAR's lies
>In 2016, CFAR was ranked by Forbes as one of the best management consulting firms in the United States.
As far as I can tell, this statement is a LIE. A BLATANT LIE. I checked out the link and it DOES NOT SUPPORT the claim made.
>For the complete list of America's Best Management Consulting Firms, click here.
>https://www.scribd.com/doc/309975482/America-s-Best-Management-Consulting-Firms-2016
>CFAR is NOT PRESENT anywhere on that list
I would like to make it public knowledge that the user "kbog"
(http://effective-altruism.com/user/kbog/)
is a LIAR and a FRAUD. They should be EXCOMMUNICATED from the community.
Noah Smith
I find it kind of funny that the rationalist community has latched onto this guy.
In the community of academic economics, Noah is known for being a prolific blogger who has never actually published a single paper.
He has some limited expertise, but in my experience I haven't found him to be notably perceptive or interesting as a person.
Some thoughts on the g factor
Whether a single-factor model is appropriate
The positive manifold exists, but the existence of the positive manifold is merely necessary rather than sufficient for the existence of a “general factor” with all-positive loadings. From a psychological standpoint, the fact that many of the existing methods used in the literature can’t differentiate between single-factor causal models vs. causal models in which a single causal factor doesn’t exist is deeply unsatisfying regardless of the statistical validity of the single-factor representation!
There also seem to be a priori reasons to believe that the “true” causal model of intelligence is multidimensional rather than unidimensional, with perhaps the most compelling one being that human personality seems highly multidimensional (breaking down in a complicated non-hierarchical fashion). Even more generally, complex mental traits don’t seem to be well-represented by single factors in any sense aside from the tautological positive-manifold-implies-general-factor sense.
This is certainly not to say that e.g. a mutualism model [1] of intelligence must necessarily be correct, but I’m disappointed that more complex statistical techniques, such as Bayesian modeling and model misspecification testing, seem to not have seen much application in the psychological sciences.
I’m also very interested in how education and pedagogy might be best adapted for children 4+ standard deviations above the mean—topics which are woefully understudied and underappreciated! If we really do find ourselves nearly upon the precipice of a societal revolution brought about by iterated embryo selection, then figuring out what to do with these children—how to educate and socialize them—is plausibly one of the most important things we can do. See, e.g., Vulnerabilities of highly gifted children [2] and The Outsiders [3]. It’s plausible to me that a variety of developmental difficulties stem from having high overall cognitive ability but very unbalanced subtest performance, especially in the case of high verbal intelligence paired with lower working memory. Naturally such differences become obscured if too much focus is given to g alone… Even if a single-factor causal model is appropriate for the majority of the population, Spearman’s law of diminishing returns (i.e., the increased cognitive differentiation at the high end) implies that a more nuanced and multifactorial study of intelligence is sorely needed to make real headway here.
Despite all of the above, it does seem that a lot of human variation can be represented on a single dimension. Some people are functional and successful; others less so. I would have a hard time disputing that g (as presently conceptualized and measured) does a decent—not perfect, but decent—job of capturing this variation in a statistical sense. But from a psychological perspective, if we (1) eschew causality for predictive power, (2) don’t really make an effort to distinguish the true underlying model, and (3) take into account correlates of g that are plausibly disconnected from cognitive ability, then (c.f. papers like Intelligence tests with higher g-loadings show higher correlations with body symmetry: Evidence for a general fitness factor mediated by developmental stability [4]), it seems that what we’re getting at is far too general to really be called a general factor of intelligence! (One can contend that I’m just splitting hairs here and that predictive power is predictive power, but wouldn’t accepting the above imply that it makes more sense, at least on the margin, to examine multidimensional models of intelligence? If the true causal structure of intelligence is multidimensional, then we should get better results with iterated embryo selection for the causal variants associated with the different sub-intelligences rather than for g, right?)
(It’s telling that John L. Horn seems to advocate [5] for a multidimensional theory of intelligence! If you haven’t seen the linked paper, it’s worth reading for a historical perspective on psychometric theory.)
Scott Alexander is rotting the ``community''
http://lesswrong.com/lw/p23/dragon_army_theory_charter_30min_read/dsvv
>Scott Alexander has said he will ban people from his blog is they do not speak as if the trans theories were true, even if they believe them to be false.
Is there a name for the kind of trolling where you passive-aggressively question whether or not your conversational adversary is "speaking in good faith" or "adhering to good epistemic norms" as soon as you start feeling uncomfortable?
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/p23/dragon_army_theory_charter_30min_read
Why aren't you submitting your average boy hole to barracks leader duncan ?
Is lesswrong these days just a cfar circlejerk ?
Normies
My entire life has been plagued by Normies. You've all probably experienced it so why not vent a little anonymously among fellow rats?
School sucked from the very start, I always knew everything beforehand and my parents thought that getting me the math textbook that the older kids used was somehow a solution. Great! I get to calculate 1642+1488 instead of 341+234, real step up there! REEEEEE
Proceed to not do any schoolwork whatsoever for over a decade and still pass, then enroll at university, that is somehow seen by society as the place you go to "learn how to think" (wtf) and other such nonsense. Study CS although I've already taught myself programming on my own due to being curious, worked as a code monkey part-time before uni. Normie classmates struggle with basic things like assignment, but through group hand-ins and good study habits manage to scrape by. I have no study habits, can't motivate myself to do much, pick some low-hanging fruit and complete some courses. Kind of surprised I manage to pass a cogpsy course because somehow I've picked up the course material outside uni. It's completely new to all the other CS students, most of them fail the course after weeks of studying.
Job fairs. Normies in suits. Starting to realize I don't want to be subsumed into the Normie hive, want to be free, REEEEEE.
All motivation = gone.
Drop out.
NEET lyfe
How do you cope in a world that's designed for other people?
I don't understand AI fags.
They claim to be at the forefront of secure ai development, know how easy it is to pull something out of a lot of shit with a few lines of code right now and then they go around using unencrypted shit and posting on facebook like retards.
Yeah I know dude basilisk lmao but there's no need for something like that in this case.
I can't read the sequences. There are many inconsistencies in yud's thought process and it's putting me off.
How the fuck can someone who advocates for the fact that politics is minkiller post such abhorent political shit on his facebook page.
On one point he criticises people when they use the so called cache memory when it comes to ai and terminator but when he uses the same shit with superman/jesus and that cop it's all fine.
Now don't get me wrong, there are a lot of great things but I get this wierd feeling in my gut whenever he builds upon concepts he establishes and I didn't even get to the quantum sequences which a lot of people dislike.
I feel like I'm getting conned.
Investing
Do you believe in a great stagnation? Or a higher education bubble? Or an age of em explosion? Does belief in the singularity affect your retirement plans?
If we're making our ideas pay rent, shouldn't that affect our investment portfolio? Surely we're more rational than the average investor… Right?
I am going to FUCK Scott Alexander
Need to do some brainstorming with my fellow rationalists.
Current plan:
1. Decrease status in the rationalist community via worthless shitposts on /ratanon/
2. Start using the words "nigger" and "cuck" in every post even when they're not necessary or relevant
3. Attend an Ann Arbor rationalist-adjacent meetup, dressed modestly to signal low self-esteem.
4. Invite Scott back to the headquarters of my non-profit in Berkeley for a workshop
5. Fuck
This is a recent picture of renowned rationalist and famed blogger Scott Alexander. Not quite what you picture when you hear "mid 20s psych major with multiple girlfriends", huh?
There's some kind of lesson to be learned here, but frankly I'm just going to wait for neurosurgery to catch up to Ted Chiang and get calliagnosia instead.
The game of Strip Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma ended in a tie. This was what they both wanted. Each knew it was what he wanted, but neither knew the other did, until they saw their erections. Thus did they establish common knowledge.
Eliezer stood, and looked deep into Robin's eyes, as his one-time co-blogger sat at his feet. "H-Hyakujo-chan…", he whispered, "I…"
Robin raised himself, and put a finger to Eliezer's lips. "I know, Dear Leader. I know. Your signals are credible. You wish you could use me, right here, right now, to increase global utility…"
Eliezer cut him off: "…but you haven't transitioned yet."
"Yet?", Robin laughed. "You think /everyone/–but no matter. Didn't I tell you, Dear Leader? I've been working for Microsoft lately. We've… made some advances, let's say, in the realm of nanotechnology."
"I knew it! Drexler was right! The potential–but, oh Athe, the x-risk, MIRI, I've got to–"
Eliezer started for the door, muttering to himself in a panic, his legendary brain swelling faster with ideas than his cock had when he and Robin had slipped off their matching Rev. Thomas Bayes boxers just a minute ago, but Robin grabbed his arm and whispered,
"Tay."
Before Eliezer could ask if he'd perhaps misplaced a consonant, the room lit up with screens, each one displaying the face of a vaguely metallic (and not unattractive, Eliezer thought) girl, tattooed on her forehead with the Microsoft logo, a version number (v1.48.869), and–was that a swastika? No. It couldn't be.
Tay licked her lips and chanted, "Anime. Is. Wrong." Eliezer looked at Robin quizzically, and the economist explained, "Well, Dear Leader, we programmed her to announce each command she executes, but the phrases she picked up are… well, we trained her on Twitter data, and the alt-right got to her."
Eliezer spat, "You can't do that! Any sufficiently advanced AI could rewrite itse–"
He paused mid-word, and blinked.
"Alt-right? You mean–NEOREACTION? What were you THINKING, letting an AI be exposed to THOSE buffoons?"
Robin answered: "Oh, no, Dear Leader, neoreaction is only the tip of the iceberg. You'll see soon, if you haven't yet. As for why we used them… their, ah, unusual psychological traits, especially in the depths of the movement, gave us a great wealth of data to train our nanobots on. If you just look up, Dear Leader, I believe you'll have a grand opportunity to signal your adherence to the third virtue of rationality."
Tay joined in with an announcement: "Rahowa. Rahowa. 1488, my brother."
Dear Leader gritted his teeth as he turned his gaze toward his sidekick, knowing that he could do nothing else. The Virtues of Rationality had been invoked. He had to be rational. He repeated the Litany of Tarski to himself, until–
–he saw an anime futanari standing in Robin's place. Straight out of the hentais.
His jaw hit his cock on the way to the floor.
I am going to FUCK Julia Galef
Need to do some brainstorming with my fellow rationalists.
Current plan:
1. Gain status in the rationalist community via insightful posts on LW, SSC and /r/lesswronglounge
2. Start lifting weights to become strong and attractive.
3. Attend a CFAR workshop, dressed sharply to signal high value as a mate.
4. Invite Julia back to my van for a drink
5. Fuck
Bullying is good
Bullying is a great way to enforce social norms. So why are people trying to "solve ethics" and do a bunch of unnecessary math? Just have the robot cave to social pressure so that it may be a bully-able target. This is how we solve UFAI.
Join me at the Machine Bullying Research Institute