It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • The amount of toxic masculinity brain rot required before you willingly go for such an invasive procedure is inconceivable to me.

    The writer says there’s some indication it may literally be a psychiatric condition along the lines of body dysmorphia, and that most people who go through with it are at least average sized but unhealthily preoccupied with their member, consistently reporting feelings of shame and helplessness.

    She also says that supposedly the consensus on the evolution of genital size has been quietly moving away from assumptions about giving an edge with inseminatory success and towards them being just for show, as apparently male primates do tend to involve their genitals in threat displays. Which is to say, maybe for some people it’s just unusual wiring that manifests as penis related existential angst.

    Still, it doesn’t mention the extent to which the above is just evo-psych enthusiasts idly theorizing, or if field testing actually showed it’s possible to win a showdown with a gorilla by dropping trou and windmilling.

    And then there’s also the guy who had the procedure done and is super happy about it, except he’s now looking at options for enlarging his wife’s vaginal canal and entrance as she’s been having a rough time of it, and who I’m sure would be found out to be the walking and talking personification of toxic masculinity if you were to give him the time of day.




  • I read

    Most of it was exactly like the example above: Kurzweil tosses a bunch of things into a graph, shows a curve that goes upward, and gets all misty-eyed and spiritual over our Bold Future. Some places it’s OK, when he’s actually looking at something measurable, like processor speed over time. In other places, where he puts bacteria and monkeys on the Y-axis and pontificates about the future of evolution, it’s absurd. I am completely baffled by Kurzweil’s popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination.

    and immediately thought someone should introduce PZ Meyers to rat/EA as soon as possible.

    Turns out he’s aware of them since at least 2016:

    Are these people for real?

    I’m afraid they are. Google sponsored a conference on “Effective Altruism”, which seems to be a code phrase designed to attract technoloons who think science fiction is reality, so the big worries we ought to have aren’t poverty or climate change or pandemics now, but rather, the danger of killer robots in the 25th century. They are very concerned about something they’ve labeled “existential risk”, which means we should be more concerned about they hypothetical existence of gigantic numbers of potential humans than about mere billions of people now. You have to believe them! They use math!

    More recently, it seems that as an evolutionary biologist he apparently has thoughts on the rat concept of genetics: The eugenicists are always oozing out of the woodwork

    FWiW I used to read PZM quite a bit before he pivoted to doing youtube videos which I don’t have the patience for, and he checked out of the new atheist movement (such as it was) pretty much as soon as it became evident that it was gradually turning into a safe space for islamophobia and misogyny.






  • Architeuthis@awful.systemstoSneerClub@awful.systemsOK doomer
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    10 months ago

    In yet another part of the article:

    She had found herself in both an intellectual community and a demimonde, with a running list of inside jokes and in-group norms. Some people gave away their savings, assuming that, within a few years, money would be useless or everyone on Earth would be dead.

    More totally normal things in our definitely not a cult community.



  • Architeuthis@awful.systemstoSneerClub@awful.systemsOK doomer
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    10 months ago

    Basically their only hope is that an AI under their control takes over the world.

    They are pretty dominant in the LLM space and are already having their people fast tracked into positions of influence, while sinking tons of cash into normalizing their views and enforcing their terminology.

    Even though they aren’t trying to pander to religious americans explicitly, their millenialism with the serial numbers filed off worldview will probably feel familiar and cozy to them.