@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.
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?
Greg Egan was lampooning them in Zendegi and Schild’s Ladder for what is worth, and also Crystal Nights contains the following banger:
You know what they say the modern version of Pascal’s Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God. Perhaps your motto should be ‘Treat every chatterbot kindly, it might turn out to be the deity’s uncle.'
Interestingly, the posthuman worlds in some of Egan's books do resemble longtermist wet dreams somewhat, the crucial difference being the lack of superintelligence.
