The way tha “cuck” has been elevated to a genuine category in their armchair social science is such a warm breeze of insanity whenever I come across it

I like to picture it as somebody with a polymathic understanding of how to commit a variety of financial crimes crossing jurisdictional boundaries

You know I wanted to come up with a joke but I don’t think that term is even grammatically correct nonsense, even to do the joke I wanted you’d have to figure out how someone can be a polymath of jurisdictions and then riff on how that’s nonsense

Oh I get it, they mean accounting fraud

Well look what happened to the last one of these who tried to paint watercolours

He’ll be judging standard of living by raw GDP/PPP per capita, where the US does indeed notoriously outperform everybody by an absurd margin. This does the rounds even on the “serious” econ net every few months, and it’s always the same paper thin sophistic ideas going back and forth arguing whether it’s telling you something meaningful about euro vs us living. In any case a good portion of self-assessed intellectual types have been drowning in that debate for about two decades (or more) so it’s always easy to spot lurking in the background: it’s a shibboleth for people who’ve self-educated on development by reading blogs.

Now hold on, I don’t want to say he’s WHOLLY wrong about my people

Identical experience. Goddamnit kid just get drunk and write a bad poem

It’a a magnificent giveaway though. “All the stock images of that bird look the same to me”. Yeah, I agree that you’re not personally capable of critically assessing the material here.

stop saying ‘we’ unless you’re actually paid by these ghouls to work on this trash

It gets better: and all of the “metamodern” post-postmodern solutions on the table revolve around making the bot “friendly”

I SAID I WANTED HOT WHEELS FOR CHRISTMAS

I don’t see how that works here. Humans don’t become impregnably narcissistic through bad management, rather insofar as management is the problem and as the scenario portrays it humans become incredibly good at managing information into increasingly tight self-serving loops. What the machine in this scenario would have to be able to do would not be “get super duper organised”. Rather it would have to be able to thoughtfully balance its own evolving systems against the input of other, perhaps significantly less powerful or efficient, systems in order to maintain a steady, manageable input of new information.

In other words, the machine would have to be able to slow down and become well-rounded. Or at least well-rounded in the somewhat perverse way that, for example, an eminent and uncorrupted historian is “well-rounded”.

In still other words it would have to be human, in the sense that human are already “open” information-processing creatures (rather than closed biological machines) who create processes for building systems out of that information. But the very problem faced by the machine’s designer is that humans like that don’t actually exist - no historian is actually that historian - and the human system-building processes that the machine’s designer will have to ape are fundamentally flawed, and flawed in the sense that there is, physically, no such unflawed process. You can only approach that historian by a constant careful balancing act, at best, and that as a matter just of sheer physical reality.

So the fanatics have to settle for a machine with a hard limit on what it can do and all they can do is speculate on how permissive that limit is. Quite likely, the machine has to do what the rest of us do: pick around in the available material to try to figure out what does and doesn’t work in context. Perhaps it can do so very fast, but so long as it isn’t to fold in on itself entirely it will have to slow down to a point at which it can co-operate effectively (this is how smart humans operate). At least, it will have to do all of this if it is to not be an impregnable narcissist.

That leaves a lot of wiggle room, but it dispenses with the most abject “to the moon” nonsense spouted by the anti-social man-children who come up with this shit.

deleted by creator

I’ve finally got around to replying to this but it’s been burning a hole in my subconscious

I think that’s a naive interpretation of the interests in play here.

Altman aptly demonstrated that a yes/no on regulations isn’t the money’s goal here, the goal is to control how things get regulated. But at the same time Democrats are hardly “eager to regulate” simpliciter, and the TESCREALs/Silicon Valley can hardly be said to have felt the hammer come down in the past. It may be part of some players’ rhetoric (e.g. Peter Thiel) that the Republicans (both pre- and post-Trump) are their real friends insofar as the Republicans are eager to just throw out corporate regulations entirely, but that’s a different issue: it’s no longer one of whether you can buy influence, it’s a matter of who you choose to buy influence with in the government, or better yet which government you try to put in power.

It should be noted at this point that mentioning Thiel is hardly out of court, even if he’s not in the LessWrong stream: he shares goals and spaces with big elements of the general TESCREAL stream. He’s put money into Moldbug’s neo-reaction, which is ultimately what puts Nick Land sufficiently on the radar to find his way into Marc Andreesen’s ludicrous manifesto.

And why should the TESCREALs fear being painted as a satanic cult in the first place? Has that been a problem for anybody but queer people and schoolteachers up to this point? It seems unlikely to me that anyone involved in Open AI or Anthropic is going to just stop spending their absolute oceans of capital for fear that LibsOfTikTok is going to throw the spotlight on them. And why would Raichik do that in the first place? The witch hunters aren’t looking for actual witches, they’re looking for political targets, and I don’t see what’s in it for them in going after some of the wealthiest people on the West Coast except in the most abstract “West Coast elites” fashion, which as we all know is just another way of targeting liberals and queers.

Not everything is about your toy train world geopolitical supremacy and there are people far too rich and powerful to give a shit about it who benefit from your believing that it is

Believe me, I’m not even American: it’s just you, me, and everyone getting the shaft on all five other continents as well

The State Department? That unimpeachable organ of American governance?! Why, I don’t even know whether to trust them not to collude with shadowy corporations or not to be duped!

It’s really gotta be emphasised that these guys didn’t come out of internet atheism and frankly I would really like to know where that idea came from. It’s a completely different thing which, arguably, predates internet atheism (if we read “internet atheism” as beginning in the early 2000s - but we could obviously push back that date much earlier). These guys are more or less out of Silicon Valley, Emile P Torres has coined the term “TESCREALS” (modified to “TREACLES”) for - and I had to google this even though I know all the names independently - “Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism”.

It’s a confluence of futurism cults which primarily emerged online (even on the early internet), but also in airport books by e.g. Ray Kurzweil in the 90s, and has gradually made its away into the wider culture, with EA and longtermism the now most successful outgrowths of its spores in the academy.

Whereas internet atheism kind of bottoms out in 1990s polemics against religion - nominally Christianity, but ultimately fuelled by the end of the Cold War and the West’s hunger for a new enemy (hey look over there, it’s some brown people with a weird religion) - the TREACLES “cluster of ideologies” (I prefer “genealogy”, because this is ultimately about a political genealogy) has deep roots in the weirdest end of libertarian economics/philosophy and rabid anti-communism. And therefore the Cold War (and even pre-Cold War) need for a capitalist political religion. OK the last part is my opinion, but (a) I think it stands up, and (b) it explains the clearly deeply felt need for a techno-religion which justifies the most insane shit as long as there’s money in it.

Ah, a minutes of wikipedia meetings

Undisputable Champion of “Well ackshually”

It appears that many of you have been hiding full blown hardout sneers from SneerClub, and I am baffled as to why