Anything that people say about the god complexes of :reddit-logo: moderators/admins has nothing on capital-R "Rationalists."
Ah yes being able to google stack overflow makes you a god. Egotistical devs piss me off. I'm a dev, I'm just a middle man for google. I solve puzzles for a living basically. A god this does not make me
Iron law: the more someone worships "code" "devs" "software eating the world", the less likely they are to even know what "compile" means.
One of the best paid capital-r "Rationalist" cult leaders, Big Yud, released a smarmy poem about how unfortunate it is that the normies are inferior because they can't/don't/won't learn to code.
He himself doesn't know how to code and never has. :galaxy-brain:
Didn't he have a post where, during one of hiss anti-philosophy screeds, he refused to learn Lambda Calculus? (which is barely coding but absolutely needed for any sort of foundational math and logic)
Yes. He isn't educated or trained in pretty much anything. He dropped out of school early and is a very loud enthusiast for "autodidactism" which means making shit up and finding rubes to believe it. Some of it is genuinely little boy power fantasies, like telling his followers he has the power to completely rewire his brain... but only once. :cringe:
He is only rich because he was in the right place in the right time to write bootlicky contrarian Harry Potter fanfiction (while also admitting that he only saw like the first two movies and never read the books), and it was awful enough for billionaires to literally pay him millions of dollars to reward that and his other fawning sycophancy screeds about how billionaires "have more life, more spark" than the rest of us.
If he lived in the middle ages, he would be a remarkably enthusiastic royal ass wiper that also gave happy endings.
I remember that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was also making fun of things that clearly weren't thought through in the original series... except said things weren't even in the original series.
Are Rationalists just bootlickers for a class of people that doesn't even have boots?
It's a brainchild of Alex Garland of Ex Machina, Annihilation fame. It's good if his slightly pretentious style of sci-fi is your thing.
It also includes the most cringe-inducing scene of a bone breaking I've ever seen in a movie or TV show. I can still remember it to this day, that one scene was legit disturbing to watch.
No spoilers for people who want to watch it, but you'll know the scene I'm talking about when you see it. Absolutely visceral.
Stat state codex has some actually intresting ideas about the lack of statistical rigor in most psychiatric medicne and he has Absolutely dogshit ideas abkut everything else.
Scientology also has some interesting ideas about self esteem and about how psychiatric institutions might overprescribe unnecessary medications. Yeah, lines up.
When scientology was invented they were absolutely still quacks. That would have been contemporary to the standird prision experiment. Medical ethics would even be invented for psychology for several years. So there were similarly correct about a very specific subset of their claims
Yep. You know a Scott Alexander Siskin article is worth reading if and only if it's about psychiatry.
I just thought of something else about this: bootlickers like him don't really actually seem to like actual developers much at all. They stan for "captains of industry" and upper management who don't even fucking code. Their entire ideology is about making excuses for billionaires existing and getting richer. These are the same kind of people that think "crunch" is a good thing and should be a constant as part of "hustle" culture. In short, they are like basic chuds that say "support our troops" but don't actually care what happens to the troops outside of superficial gestures, especially after they come back damaged in some way.
bro i get it that you get paid a lot of money for some reason and you had to grind leetcode for 3 months for that job at facebook but please shut the fuck up
Most technology cultists don't actually know the technology all that well.
It's arguably similar to the fact that very few conventional cultists have theology degrees.
He is even worse than a psychiatrist, he is -- may Allah forgive me for uttering this word -- a blogger
In his April Fool's Day post where he admits to being an alien from a planet of rationalists, Eliezer Yudkowsky describes the infrastructure of an idealized society, which does not use trains, because Eliezer Yudkowsky does not know what a train is.
flexing my godly powers by shuffling dotfiles around all day
Judging by Big Yud's obsession with sex slavery, mind control, and animating bodies after removing their mental agency, yeah, it's another magical realm to dare enter.
But I mean actually, in Scott’s fiction one of the early premises is that computers are used to recite random strings of text because within those sounds exist possible divine phrases that underpin reality. I never finished it, but it wasn’t actually that terrible from what I vaguely recall.
Woody Allen had some bits that were actually funny and "What's Up, Tiger Lily" was a problematic favorite of mine, but that didn't make him any less of a creep in the grand scheme of things.
The Scott you mention has said, and believes, some fascist-adjacent horrible stuff that I've posted on The_Dunk_Tank quite a bit before.
I lean towards death of the author as my philosophy of engaging with media. I don’t really believe that entertainment media is a particularly powerful force for shaping people’s views, except maybe as teenagers, and that the emphasis on purity of consumption is in itself, a trap that distracts from actual political and social issues. With the caveat that financially supporting chuds should be avoided, I think people should consume whatever media they enjoy. All that’s to say, yeah Scott’s a weird dude put on pedestal by a larger collection of internet weirdos, but idc if someone enjoys his fiction, or Yud’wow’sky’s, or Woody Allen’s for that matter. Just understand that the creators can be awful people and still create something enjoyable for some, and that their other views aren’t going to transfer through like media osmosis or something.
The "Methods of Rationality" fandom alone is now several dubious institutions (MIRI, LessWrong, SlateStarCodex) funded by millions of billionaire dollars, influencing the beliefs and the lives of thousands of adherents. Brushing it all off with a "to each their own" just sounds somewhere between lazy and dangerous.
Either way I got to go for now. I agree to disagree with you.
Sounds like the problem is with the billionaires wielding undue power.
I think it’s intellectually lazy on the part of the left to knee-jerk media as the defining character of groups they don’t like. Libs as HP/west wing/marvel idiots, is just reductionism of extremely complex social, political, and economic forces down to easy to analyze and critique media. We do it because it’s easier and it’s fun, but it’s also a poor facsimile of actual understanding of these issues.
The Hpmor thing certainly is an interesting example of a piece of fiction wielding undue influence... until you think about the actual power players in what you described: the billionaires. I’m just highly skeptical of any claims that the world would be significantly different if Hpmor didn’t exist. Techbros would somehow be magically better people if a particular juvenile fantasy novel didn’t exist? Or is their arrogance, tech-Utopianism, and body odor a set of pre-existing conditions.
The problem is also that HPMOR, its writer, and the cult following that writer are not only fine with billionaires wielding undue power but want billionaires to have more power on top of that.
"My entertainment has absolutely no effect on me" is an extremely common take on :reddit-logo: and it is attempting the nearly-impossible task of proving a negative. If entertainment has no effect on people, why does advertising have an effect on people (if it didn't, a massive trillion dollar industry would be entirely a waste of money and people's choices of products should have zero correlation between what is advertised to them and what they purchase)? If advertising has an effect on people, how can you claim that there's some sort of boundary, like a magic barrier, that surely prevents entertainment of similar media having a similar effect?
I'm not calling for a cessation of literature treats or shows or movies for that matter. I have problematic favorites of my own (Dune is my favorite book of all time and the gender politics alone are really, really dated), and I think there's no need to put up all this unnecessary defense for bad people that use their fiction to further their bad agendas. Do you want to go to bat for Triumph of the Will next? Birth of a Nation? Mein Kampf?
The problem is also that HPMOR, its writer, and the cult following that writer are not only fine with billionaires wielding undue power but want billionaires to have more power on top of that.
Yeah, and if it wasn't Yud'wow'sky it would be another dipshit. Hell, there's still think tanks that give out university scholarships for Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged essays. The wealthy class rewards lapdogs that gratify their sense of self-importance.
“My entertainment has absolutely no effect on me” is an extremely common take on and it is attempting the nearly-impossible task of proving a negative
It's not near impossible, it is impossible. But besides, the actual claim that would fit here is 'X work had Y effect on Z group/individual', which is a falsifiable statement, but also pretty difficult to actually prove. But it's also not the argument I'm making. I never actually made the claim that media doesn't affect people? I have two central claims:
- Authors views don't automatically transfer via their works.
- The political beliefs of people cannot be solely attributed to the fiction that they consume.
If you want to talk about those claims, then let's have at it, but I'm not going bother with the bait and switch that advertising, a medium with an entirely different end and model, is somehow equivalent to fiction consumption.
Do you want to go to bat for Triumph of the Will next? Birth of a Nation? Mein Kampf?
Super good-faith brah, really loved doing this with you.
"Someone else would have done that exact same thing and got the exact same kickbacks from billionaires and start the exact same institutions of MIRI, LessWrong, and SlateStarCodex with that billionaire's windfall money" is what you are claiming. That's, again, very presumptive and seems excessively defensive for something I'm not really threatening and have no power to remove from existence even if I wanted to.
I have to say it a lot more than I wish I had to, but I'll say it again: it's possible to enjoy entertainment while accepting the existence of criticism of that same entertainment.
"Super good-faith brah, really loved doing this with you."
After that, yeah, I'm going to continue to disagree with you and know that arguing with you further won't go anywhere good.
Also w/ the caveat that something written expressly as a propaganda piece for a certain philosophy should be given a bit more strenuous criticism.
