YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

That does clarify the point, but I also don’t think that it’s true. It may well be that a major reason proposals for unified European rail never got off the ground before recently was that European countries rejected such proposals on grounds that it would make it easier for them to be invaded. But the rail systems in different European countries nonetheless developed independently, using different technology and standards, mostly (arguably) in the 19th century.

This complex process doesn’t reduce to 20th century FUBAR, even insofar as diplomatic and security considerations were involved in its evolution (and yet of course beginning in the 19th, not the 20th, century).

due to all the 20th century conflicts

I assume he’s referring to the same question I was asking: did you just extrapolate this from the phrase “fucked up, disastrous mess” (referring to the sheer number of different systems in Europe?), because I think the big long reply above seriously undersells the fact that “20th century conflicts” aren’t even mentioned or gestured at in the video. There’s a map showing…different countries…but while 20th century conflicts changed various borders in Europe, they aren’t the origin of the borders between countries in Europe, or the origin of different European countries developing their own independent rail systems without any centralised plan - because they’re different countries, and the various bodies which today unify much of the continent only began to come into existence after the Second World War.

If we were talking about Former Yugoslavia, you’d actually be right! The integrated rail infrastructure of that region was completely devastated by the 1990s. But that’s not the focus here.

I think it misses the word for the trees to put the emphasis on a libertarian bent. The British and American class systems are perfectly capable of enforcing the same rules for prestige and polite discussion in order to favour some preferred hegemonic power without endorsing libertarian values. Indeed libertarianism as a movement most certainly adopts those rules because - for all that it may derive political support from (primarily white) guys of all sorts of backgrounds - it’s a fundamentally aristocratic proposition, right down to almost absurdist details such as its propensity to distribute land amongst an elite who employ lesser beings to work it.

In the case of rationalism, the emphasis should instead be on control: Yudkowsky built his system to control what was and wasn’t acceptable thinking, ostensibly for the benefit of the thinker. Its departures from actually very good patterns of thinking are what take it into cult territory, as the rigidity of the rules meets the hard wall of reality, and forces adherents to choose between reality and fantasy.

And as I say below to David, sure, there were other trends in play (most especially - as I note above as well - the tendency for America’s moral arc to bend towards racism). But I’d push back on suggesting that IQ-fetishism is distinct from naive biologism. Rather, IQ-fetishism itself is an expression of naive biologism (as we can see tracing its antecedents through back to Herbert Spencer), because you don’t get IQ-fetishism without the spectres of relativism and nurturism which, politically, it purports to counter-act - “IQ” is a supposedly sound, stable, measurable, cognitive category, where the alternative is understood to be a tangled mess of occult entities which cannot be reduced to any structure in the brain (and IQ holds out the promise of being reducible to g, which is in its whole conception reducible to a structure in the brain).

In this way the speculative futurism is simply of a piece with the biologism: once you reduce everything to (this very peculiar and highly naive, already science-fictional, concept of) the physical, you can manipulate it to generate whatever future you want. By the same token, the eugenic and fascistic trend in science-fiction pursues the same conceptual route. But it is only with the right historical ingredients, and the right players to activate those ingredients - which is to say an unequal society and the tendency to have people who want to naturalise that inequality - that the mixture becomes potently racist, and Yudkowsky, so to speak, is the one building the pot to specification.

People like TW are the perfect distillation of the booksmart Slate Star Codex fan class, who are so completely sealed in their bubble that they aren’t even in touch with major parts of themselves anymore. They lose, or never developed, the capacity to even simulate a coherent theory of mind which would make appropriate sense of what the other person is saying. Brains like a Frank Gehry building with a roof made from sheer enthusiasm supported by warped tent poles of Scott Alexander heuristics sticking out at odd angles from each other.

Wow, I went looking for something else and found a deeply sad illustration of exactly what I’m talking about:

https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1772398359745012139

I said in a comment the other day that Roko’s view here is the natural consequence of Yudkowsky’s original naive physical-scientific reductionism. He proceeds from those (abysmally vague but superficially straightforward) premises here. In essence, if everything ultimately reduces to the physical, then when you perform the natural reduction on e.g. the status of black people in modern America, the causes must by physical-biological causes.

The reference to Lysenkoism is perfectly apt on this (stupid) model: attempts to thwart the reduction are merely ideologically driven cludges to the real theory, and the example of Lysenko demonstrates how easy it is for a whole discipline (in this case: biology in the USSR) to fall to that ideology. Liberal (read: communist) biologists are just pandering and making exceptions when they produce their own demonstrations that scientific racism is bunk.

It’s helpful that, for historical and political reasons, i.e. America and modern Europe’s original sins (colonialism and slavery) scientific racism is always waiting in the wings when the Rokos of the world reach their inevitable conclusions. Put it’s important not to conceive of scientific racism as a form of ignorance: it is, rather, an often highly organised political movement devoted to proving and promoting its claims by any means necessary - it is a knowing lie, with the caveat that insofar as scientific racists frequently show that they implicitly know that they lie (with absurd clandestine promotion strategies and revealing statistical sleights-of-hand), it’s rarely clear that they are wholeheartedly aware of it.

It’s a combination of those things.

Because rationalism the coherent phenomenon was founded with the more or less explicit intention of building a cult, Yudkowsky’s original rule-set incorporated all of the basic cult rules, which every cult leader tends to be able to work out mostly for themselves by looking at what they outwardly want to build (a movement) and what they inwardly want to do with it (retain personal power over that movement)

So, for example, the particular way that Yudkowsky frames “objectivity” coalesces later on around the “object level” vs “meta level” dichotomy, “low” vs “high” “decoupling”, the “grey tribe”, but it’s there from the beginning in his insistence on the highly specific and idiosyncratic framework proposed in The Sequences, his constant explicit insistence on the rarity of his chosen elect, and also just in (a) his consistent lambasting of people who work outside that framework in the text of The Sequences themselves, and (b) his sometimes hilarious neg/love-bombing of the reader

Of (b), my favourite example is that passage where he bizarrely takes an unnecessary moment to call you an idiot if you think that there’s a universal clock measuring time throughout the universe, in the full knowledge that his nerdy readers are aware of relativity

So the whole system, beginning with LessWrong’s very founding, is geared to control the framing in ways like not naming names. Naming names is a failure of objectivity, because it brings in the sorts of particulars that might exercise your ordinary human judgement - ordinary human judgement is bad, we know this from Daniel Kahneman, and that’s another rule of objectivity. So, moreover, the whole system is geared so as to keep “objective” framings which favour HBD “in-group”, and to displace good human judgements (‘Richard Hanania is a ridiculous mendacious racist’) into the “out-group”).

HBD hegemony within the movement (in influence if not in numbers), moreover, could not but have been the eventual outcome of the same rule-set. In spite of his own protestations, Yudkowsky’s pugilistic naturalism was sufficiently both insisted upon and theoretically naive as to ultimately yield hegemony to the HBDers by sheer inertia: once you have eliminated and salted the earth of any thinking which fails to embrace the most childish physical-scientistic reductionism, then when your rules for thinking enter the arena of politics (especially American politics) and human biology, you have already ceded all possible theoretical ground to HBD, and any counter-weight you try to introduce thereto becomes the pathetic mewling of Kahnemanian irrational beliefs. Your rhetoric already implied “it’s just basic biology” from the very beginning.

So, for anyone keeping score, the only way for anyone on LessWrong to win the rhetorical argument is, unfortunately, just to be normal, and violate one or more of the LessWrong standards for thinking.

Scholars of fascism and nazism do it all the time! The target of quotes like that is supposed to be those who deliberately muddy the waters. The “call a nazi a nazi” principle is a blunt instrument, and there are other tools in the anti-nazi kit.

[some hours later…] ah, the quote is from AR Moxon, whom I happen to know is both (a) not remotely averse to going deeper on what makes the nazis, (b) distinctly averse to not going deeper

I’m saying this goes further!

Actually I feel kind of irked that this reply seems to just miss the part at the end of the paragraph that says “it is, literally, indistinguishable from who they are”

It’s true though. They’re not nazis. They’re incapable of being fired by any fundamentally political or spiritual ideals, no matter how ultimately black and nihilistic, at all. Even if these people were full-throated card-carrying members of the American Nazi party marching through Times Square with a swastika flag throwing out copies of Der Sturmer from a Panzer tank they wouldn’t be nazis. The fact is that they’re just the purest distillation of 20th-21st century media culture yet: they’re so utterly saturated in media that the only choice they’ve made, the only choice available to them, was whether to lean into the goodie or the baddie vibe, and they plumped for “baddie” because it suited their contrarian aesthetic and then, without even leaving a ripple on the surface, they slipped into the role and inhabited it so thoroughly that it is, literally, indistinguishable from who they are.

These people are nothing less, and 100% nothing more, than your childish glee at getting to play the villain in an RPG.

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.

It’s from Maps of Meaning, per the caption, so no this is from his original theory of everything.

Nonetheless, to be perfectly honest, I honestly can’t complain that he put something weird like that in the book as such. What, after all, is actually wrong with it, assuming a certain amount of charity about context relevance? That it’s gross to recount weird sexually charged dreams you had about your grandmother?

For a psychologist in the tradition of Jung, and therefore to a great extent Freud, such material might actually be quite useful! Amongst the worst things therapy culture - and perhaps the whole ideology of post-Freud psychology/iatry/therapy - does is to rehabilitate prudishness about what it is and is not acceptable to talk about in our psychic lives, when liberation from those oppressive norms is precisely the best achievement of those aspects of Freud which remain uncontroversial (not to mention those which are only controversial for bad reasons).

You know the whole thing: “we don’t talk about that wanting to have sex with your mother stuff”, well why on Earth not? Amongst the most obvious things in the world is that people are incredibly weird and complex. Why cave in to propriety and ignore it?

Lots of people have experiences like this, and therefore by definition it’s important to discuss them - non-pathologically - if you want to understand (and improve) people’s psychic life.

I’m just cackling at whatever this guy thinks ketamine does when you’re already on speed playing jump rope with the traffic, other than “you will lie face down on the pavement for half an hour and conduct a week long interview with satan between the gap in your eyelids”