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.
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)
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.
Yep. You know a Scott Alexander Siskin article is worth reading if and only if it's about psychiatry.
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
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
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
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.
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.
Also w/ the caveat that something written expressly as a propaganda piece for a certain philosophy should be given a bit more strenuous criticism.
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.
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.
