@ESYudkowsky: Remember when you were a kid and thought you might have psychic powers, so you dealt yourself face-down playing cards and tried to guess whether they were red or black, and recorded your accuracy rate over several batches of tries?
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And then remember how you had absolutely no idea to do stats at that age, so you stayed confused for a while longer?
Apologies for the usage of the japanese; but it is a very apt description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūnibyō,
No matter where he went he would start a cult, wouldn’t he. His belief in his own greatness is too strong. If it was the 1920s he’d be running a spiritualist church or something, if it was the 1970s he’d be running an LSD church or something, but unfortunately it’s the here and now and he’s running a computer church.
He’s the L. Ron Hubbard of our times, a sci-fi author turned cult leader of the information age just as Hubbard was for the space age.
@GorillasAreForEating Yud is an SF author? Tell me more …
For some reason this sent me into a Kilgore Trout rabbit hole
Innit. Any word on him having links to satanists? At least those 50s cults inspired some interesting art. Can the same be said for the wonkish cult of EA?
Long-ass blog posts are an art form, right?
Wilhelm Reich’s orgone stuff resulted in one cracking song 30 years later (orgone accumulator). Maybe we’ll have to wait that long.
Greg Egan was lampooning them in Zendegi and Schild’s Ladder for what is worth, and also Crystal Nights contains the following banger:
Interestingly, the posthuman worlds in some of Egan’s books do resemble longtermist wet dreams somewhat, the crucial difference being the lack of superintelligence.
it’s weird I found out about Diaspora (also a really good book) from the rat-adjacent crowd posting excerpts on the orange site, but Egan keeps sneering at that portion of his fan base in his books
I tried reading one Egan book (Incandescence) and had to give up because it was 90% infodump. Glad to see he’s mocking rats though.
god damn, maybe my internalized ideal of a sci fi author is Asimov but not a shithead? depressing. I need better sci-fi
no, the fault is mine. He’s written tons, I tried this and bounced off it. I might take a look at Diaspora
Quarantine was one of the least infodumpy books of his. Also the short stories, though they’re a mixed bag. Avoid the Othogonal trilogy and Dichronauts then, I’ve liked them a lot personally, but they’re even more infodumpy than Incandescent.
My one gripe with Greg Egan is that he just loves to pause a plot to unsubtly rant about something only vaguely related to the plot (usually religion, superstition, or channeling Sokal on postmodernism). I even agree with him on many of this, but god damn. The worst offender is Distress I think; which is a shame as the whole concept is interesting, the refutation of solipsism near the end is touching, and ancom islanders fending off an invasion of ancap mercs on Big Biotech payroll is glorious.
@maol @zogwarg
20s/30s: Some kind of orgone-type thing based on radio waves.
the computer church also occasionally does LSD
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when your cult leader doesn’t understand tolerance so you have to start faking hallucinations after the first week