Looked at his twitter. Dude seems to be or have been on a palpable adrenaline high at a time when it might have been less deranged to step away from the keyboard and go for a walk. I get it, but those are some weird-ass posts.
YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM
joined 1 year ago
For anybody hard of hearing at the back, the combination of a “characteristically (neo/)lib failure of imagination” and a “Promethean ideology” is subtext for “striding confidently towards fascism”
Honestly I’ve made it my life’s purpose to be a loser by the standards these people set, and succeeded beyond either of our wildest dreams
TracingWoodgrains is an out-and-out rationalist. Long time poster on /r/slatestarcodex and heavily involved in all things SSC. It just benefits them to be coy about it. Which is whatever! Fine! Who cares? But they’re 100% in the bag for rationalism in any way that matters.
Honestly, anyone who read the essay can see that the question of whether Yud approves is totally irrelevant to its thesis, but these people are incapable of reading styles of argument that don’t proceed by declarative statements about binary choices, except of course in those situations where something precious to them (such as their good standing at the “not a racist” club) might by at stake
To use “wikipedia editors went batshit over an editor’s decision” as evidence of anything is just wild to me, a man whose knowledge of wikipedia editing extends to the one thing everybody knows about wikipedia editors (their tendency to go batshit over each others’ decisions)
The interesting thing about this is that these people never stop to think that the future they dream off might never happen. Aside from the fact that their cryo company might just go under, they don’t ever consider that in 200 years they might just wake up under a dystopia.
At one time I was going out with someone who was into Max More, without either of us being cogniscant of the rationalist link back then, and she gave me the infuriating justification that it was all a probabilities game with a bizarre political economy in the background. The thinking goes that if your society becomes a dystopia, there’s no reason and/or no resources to wake you up. Looking back, it’s amazing to see it as a combination of that characteristically (neo/)lib failure of imagination and Promethean ideology.
Ahhh Jaan Tallinn, the Diet Coke of batfuckery. Jaan “Diet Batfuckery” Tallinn.
The Valley Spirit never dies. / It is called the Mysterious Female.
The entrance to the Mysterious Female / Is called the root of Heaven and Earth
Endless flow / Of inexhaustible energy
(trans. Stephen Aldiss and Stanley Lombardo)
These people really need the Tao Te Ching
I still think that this represents a bias towards a military-geopolitical interpretation of history that’s not wholly sustainable, in spite of its appeal. In the Russian Empire case, I’m quite certain that that’s a popular myth, because I know that it is certainly the case that when the first railway infrastructures were being built, the political powers, administrators, and engineers responsible were as much influenced by technological and physical geographical imperatives as they were by geopolitical. The Russian Empire’s decision to use what would become the Russian gauge was multi-factoral - indeed looking it up, it appears that they were persuaded by Brunel’s own preference for a wide gauge, which was famously thwarted in the early development of the British railways.
It’s funny because you will hear over and over again from them online, in almost rank-and-file prose, about how it was all a big storm in the collective teacup, and then some time later run across yet another story of a real life non-anonymous person who was freaked the fuck out for some good period of time, as were some large portion of their friends