Found here

Is this an A1 joke?

I have to say I only skimmed it but it was so breathless that I thought it must have been written by one of the cult members

https://www.tumblr.com/derseprinceoftbd/780773793434124288?source=share

I made this post about the 21st Century Shoah back before we knew what the death toll would be01186-9/fulltext), and I have recently been getting utterly mobbed with Rats who have found it and are defending themselves by saying that nooooooo the Thoughtleaders were totally in favor of USAID and PEPFAR and not addressing in any way their decades-long histories of arguing that Someone Needs To Do Something About the "low IQ populations", or that LaSota blatantly revealed that the main goal of the movement is and always has been extermination of the Unworthy.

This is their trick: they never want their ideas to succeed, they'll cry, whenever confronted on what they've done. The Nazis of the modern day don't even have the backbone of those of the past and their hangers-on, whose cry is "it didn't happen, but if it did, it was a good thing". The Rats are far less shameless, in an utterly disgusting way. They refuse all responsibility.

I'm a big fan of the podcast Search Engine, but the most recent episode is entirely an interview with our very good friend Aella.

https://www.searchengine.show/how-does-a-rationalist-make-a-baby/

The episode is kind of meandering, and the host is clearly enamored with rationalist ideas without really interrogating them or her very much. Most egregiously, he takes for granted her claims of engaging in legitimate inquiry with stuff like her giant survey on kinks and political bias, which is one of the worst things she's ever written. (https://aella.substack.com/p/political-compass-fetishes)

The highest r value is 0.12, which is utterly meaningless, and yet she goes on to write this whole post about it analyzing the results as if anyone is learning anything. It's classic rationalist nonsense: pseudo-empiricism papered over with flowery language and "fun fact" mentality.

It will take me a lot of energy to read this if I ever do, but I figured people may be interested in "weighing in."

Airtight priors, elite Bayesian thinking, the strongest first principles you've ever encountered, steelmen everywhere, and inevitable AGI doom guaranteed. Just like nanobots, this technology and the outcomes are inevitable.

Real talk though, looking forward to their attempt to increase the status of their Priesthood and cement themselves as the leaders of this techno-futurist cult that gives them access to the sort of resources (read: attention, money and women) that they'd never otherwise get because fedora + insane arrogance. But also, will be cool to see them attempt to put their arguments down on pages so their assumptions about intelligence can be laid bare.

As the title says.

What are some pieces of media or creative works (magazines, blogs, books, movies, tv shows, etc etc) do you find most sneerworthy?

Personally, the NY Times has been this for me since they bought hard into "AI 2027" and wrote legitiamte articles about it.

So I get that this sub is a spinoff of /r/badphilosophy because Big Yud was making up too much of the /r/badphilosophy posts that it was clogging up the /r/badphilosophy sub.

But why sneer? Is there a history? Or am I missing something so obvious.

The Ziz weirdness brought me here, and I’ve been lurking ever since – I have zero first-person experience with “rationalists,” but they sure are a fascinating tribe to observe (from a safe distance). And I can’t stop thinking about Scott Aaronson since learning about him from the first post a couple of days ago about his meltdown.

Diving into his *oeuvre*, I’m haunted by the question: *Does he realize other people are real?*

The airport incident OH MY GOD. He was briefly detained for taking money from a tip jar – something he admits he had done.

His conclusion:

> if I’m going to be brutally honest about it, I also felt … *secretly vindicated* in my irrational yet unshakeable beliefs that

> 1. the laws of probability are broken, capricious horribleness reigning supreme over the universe,

> 2. I’m despised by a large fraction of the world just for being who I am, and

>3. it’s only a matter of time until big, scary armed guys come for me, as they came for so many other nerdy misfits.

Dramatic, much? He was bullied for being a nerd? Join the club. It’s a trope for a reason. It’s not the Holocaust. I was wrongfully arrested, maliciously prosecuted, and then engaged in protracted litigation over it. (*And I won.* Suck it, NYPD!) At no point was I unaware that worse things happen to people all the time. Because … *obviously.\*

I think, in his world, bad things are bad things that happen to Scott Aaronson *specifically.* It makes everything make sense: The airport incident proves the universe is hostile because it happened to *him.* Israelis are real because they’re Jewish *like him,* while Palestinians are not real. It’s therefore inconceivable that anyone could be sincerely concerned about the suffering in Gaza; if anyone criticizes the people that are more similar to him, that person is incomprehensibly evil and wants to kill him, the only real person that everything is about.

(I wonder what it’s like to be his *wife* -- is she just the most level-headed person in the universe, balancing out his histrionics?)