Nick Land's drugs got him there well before everyone else, but I'm talking about the right wing cranks such as Big Yud that have kept up a mask of "grey tribe" pretenses, said stupid stale memes like "politics is the mind killer," and worshipped billionaires as the more radiant energy beings they are, being of the sky while we are of the dirt.
Sure, it seemed inevitable all along, especially when billionaires started outright buying ownership stakes in "futurology" conventions. It got especially creepy when the United States Department of Defense openly peddled contractor wares in such places.
It isn't fun being the Cassandra, seeing it happening in real time, warning people, then getting laughed off about it. I've lost real life friends to this stuff, people that were superficially just open minded and quirky in college but now wear the metaphorical armband and goosestep to wherever Sam Harris or other crypto-bigoted cranks tell them to go.
I ended up following a splinter group of the rationalist community that was fairly left-leaning and generally pretty decent overall, so most of this transformation was invisible to me.
But something snapped within the last year, and not only are a bunch of them more right-wing than they ever were before, but suddenly half of them are okay with vaccine denialism. And just... how can you possibly take part in a "rationalist" community that accepts that level of crank shit.
Also Yudkowsky is going to turn into a communist. It's going to take him way too long (guessing between 10 and 20 years from now), it's going to be hilarious watching him try to rationalize why it took so long, and even better when he starts blogging again to mythologize how great and smart he is for finally changing his mind.
This is a far advance prediction of a detailed hypothesis with seemingly low probability, so, when it turns out I'm right, all the rationalist crowd has to bow to my wisdom, because those are the established rules.
I'm going to take an even edgier position.
He's already a Marxist, but doesn't realise he's accidentally reinventing Dialectical analysis in the slowest way possible while holding his fingers in his ears yelling "lalalalala I'm developing positivism actually!"
I reckon he's going to basically write State and Revolution in 15 years but it'll be called something absurd like "The rational sword cuts only the rotten beams of the cathedral"
:stalin-heart:
You should write that! I know you've got the theory background, and you clearly know how to write in the rationalist lingo. You could write a rational!StateAndRev under a Definitely Not A Yudkowsky Alt pseudonym, post it on /r/rational, and convert a bunch of tech weirdoes to the cause.
I could do it, but could I ever feel clean again?
Edit: also, is this accelerationism?
I could do it, but could I ever feel clean again?
Alas. If only there was a Dirt_Mardoniush.
also, is this accelerationism?
Nah, this is a false flag. Accelerationism would be if you somehow increased the rate of the natural process by which the contradictions in the rationalist community manifests. Giving Yudkowsky a brick of cocaine, I guess.
Honestly I think drugging him with Peyote for 3 weeks straight would do him a world of good.
Would you characterize this plan as more of a road trip movie, or more of a heist movie?
Relevantly, I'm a good driver and have some unpublished major advancements in AI that we could use as bait.
His self insert fanfic character is clearly a maoist. When I asked about this people got upset.
I'm not so sure Big Yud will truly go communist, even in a superficial way.
I've suffered enough of his tweets where even his flirtation with Marxist ideas seems more like being contrarian for the sake of seeming smart, which is his entire brand, including his Harry Potter fanfiction.
It is meant to be a provocative prediction!
But I read one of his more recent fiction works, and he's very clearly spending a lot of time trying to figure out what capitalism doesn't work, despite markets being so magical and special. And I'm estimating it'll take him about 10-20 years to exhaust every possible idea that isn't "private ownership is a sham."
Has he entertained the idea that maybe his billionaire buddies aren't actually particularly brilliant and radiant and illusions of being so are just the designer drugs and unchecked egomania talking (his and theirs)?
It was incredibly frustrating when in HPMOR he talked about need to decapitate local brand of Nazis, how established political interests need to smear everyone good, and how the hierarchies are always seeming much more just for those at the top than for those at the bottom, and then turning around and talking shit about historical revolutions. It was very :LIB: shit.
They're held together by billionaire worship, fantasies of superpowers and living forever, a paradoxically stagnant and nostalgic view of how society should be arranged, and ironically a fear of change (to class systems, to their current privileges, to things being less "normal" in the future except those precious gizmos).
Land realizes the contradictions within the system, but his brand of accelerationism isn't concerned with the "moralizing" that comes with left accelerationism. It's a large part of why he's taken up reactionary thought. It's convenient to hide his own brand of cowardice.
The biggest issue with the rationalist crowd is their maddening ability to ignore historical and sociological context. It just leads to a bunch of arm chair theorizing that ends up with a terrible version of some idea that was already fleshed out by some Enlightenment philosopher in the 18th century. This belief that you can just bootstrap your way into examining and fixing/mitigating your own cognitive biases without understanding why the fuck you think the way you do to begin with is just dumb. It almost always leads to some evo pysch bullshit because that's what you've been largely fed within certain education systems
after dabbling with them in my teens, I grew to eventually largely disdain the rationality community for the general ignorance of social science that extended outside of claims or theories that sigh confirmed their priors. Let alone all of the humanities or arts. The more I learned about methodology and deeper I delved into the fields of social science and biology, the clearer the ignorance of folks whose primary training was software, physics, math, etc was.
STEM Zombies who think that being good at math gives them great wisdom have been a disaster for the human race.
It's not to late you can read Anthropology 101 books and learn to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Save yourself.
I prescribe a program of thinking very hard about the epistemological consequences of Goedel's Theorem and reading a lot of Lakatos.
I'm glad I went to college and touched grass with SocDems, so I had models of thinking which weren't just Less Wrong.
In my experience they always place the techno rapture comfortably within their own remaining lifetimes.
They were always there of course. Remember the fucking Extropians?
But yeah, feels bad. At least a bunch of us got out.
Wait those are real? I thought they were just a faction in Ecpipse Phase.
Yeah, sigh. They were a nonceitarian faction of the Transhumanists lead by a guy who literally changed his name to Max Moore. There was also an outright fash group called the Prometheans but they got booted pretty quickly.
I do remember the Extropians, unfortunately.
Before Silicon Valley was really a thing, they were the harbingers of the techbro hellworld to come, subsidized by Clinton era neoliberalism.
It was inevitable.
I got on around the end of hpmor. I tried goijg to the meetups. I spoke with yud a few times. I even tried to get a meetyp going. It was in a bikini cafe so it ought to have worked. One young man was intrested in how much milk he could drink in a day. I wanna blame it on the autism or something but look at us. It is just especially irksome that these people specifically dedicated their energy to solving problems and then go about it as poorly as possible and get the wrong answers
All "rationalists" I've seen became either libertarians or communists.
Reminder that Italian fascists are direct evolution of the "futurists"
