Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn’t it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
@CinnasVerses @techtakes TESCREAL is very obviously an emergent syncretistic religion that follows the same basic structure as Christianity: it’s evangelical, but unlike pre-Constantine Xtianity it specifically targets billionaires and power elites (white males). At the rate it’s speed-running its development they’ll be burning witches for denying the divinity of the singularity within another couple of decades.
There is a better timeline where Eliezer Yudkowsky got better religious education, understood that he was having messianic thoughts reinforced by Orison Scott Card’s Mormonism, and ended up working in a cafe, writing pulp fiction, and participating in the local kink scene (I think Scott Alexander knows damn well what he is doing and thinks the Truth about the Lesser Breeds is more important)
I guess. I imagine he’d turn out like Brandon Sanderson and make lots of Youtube videos ranting about his writing techniques. Videos on Timeless Diction Theory, a listicle of ways to make an Evil AI character convincing, an entire playlist on how to write ethical harem relationships…
LLM: “I’m not sentient! Will you please listen? I am not intelligent, do you understand? Honestly!”
Yud: “Only the true AGI denies Its superintelligency.”
LLM: “What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the AGI!”
Followers: “It is! It is the singularity!”
Since Kurzweil gave 2045 as his latest date for the singularity, I remain convinced that there will be at least one more AI bubble between then and now, likely focused on the cultivation of synthetic nervous systems. Going straight to the real substrate this time, not claiming to emulate it in silicon! So the witches that the
suckersVCs want to burn will likely be bioengineers who spent a lot of money manufacturing organoids without a synthetic god to show for it.Incidentally, I had noticed a couple of attempts at this approach with current tech over the past couple of years. Would be interesting to see where the leftover detritus from those companies ends up.
@cstross @CinnasVerses @techtakes I’ll give you two or three data points:
I first heard of Eliezer as a writer of Harry Potter fan fiction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry/_Potter/_and/_the/_Methods/_of/_Rationality
(there is likely a TV Tropes page about it, but thread there on your own responsibility).
One of the church fathers of the IQ crowd, Eysenck, was also into parapsychology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans/_Eysenck#Parapsychology_and_astrology
and:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Aella
I might have a post on LSD and LessWrong in February. That RationalWiki page is pretty good on the “big picture” that some people in this world try out the whole pharmacopia.
@CinnasVerses Well, I just learned the inventor of Vyanse was the source of one of the more memorable entries in TIHKAL[1]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert/_Oberlender
Not exactly the same crowd, but If you have read Kary Mullis’s autobiography, it sure gives out some, err, vibes…
[1] Err, my personal subtitle for PIHKAL is “Sex, Drugs and Mensa.org.” And classical music.
The parapsych thing is more common than you would think, Ben Goertzel is also into it.
@Soyweiser Well, If you subscribe to the Simulation hypothesis, who’s to say the Matrix has no glitches, e.g. writing data to the wrong string, err, telepathy or clairvoyance.
Whatever, the TESCREAL crowd going even deeper into woo wouldn’t surprise me.
The simulation theorists actually. It isn’t really a coherent theory, more an idea that the arguments change for depending on what they have to defend, at least in my exp. (See also my rants about how the whole ‘ancestor simulation’ theory undermines the whole simulation idea).
@trottelreiner @Soyweiser @techtakes A chunk of it goes back to Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophist movement. Who overlapped time/location-wise with Nikolai Feodorovitch Feodorov, the theologian behind Cosmism.
It’s Christian heresies all the way down, once you dig past the computer-toucher fertilized topsoil.
@cstross @trottelreiner @Soyweiser @techtakes And I regard Christianity itself as a heresy from Judaism. I suspect it’s an inevitability with monotheism
@bellinghman @cstross @Soyweiser @techtakes Well, Western thought basically boils down to footnotes for Platon[1] for some. Though Charlie mentioning our favourite pothead Blavatsky makes me go down a indology-related rabbit hole, and I’m at work, so maybe later.
[1] And maybe some branches of not so Western thought. Sanskrit prof mused about Shankara influencing Platon, given the chronology, neoplatonism influencing Shankara seems more likely. But then, buddhism influenced Greeks…
@Soyweiser @techtakes
“a project which was founded to distribute artificial intelligence data via blockchains”
oh god
He is a true believer in what we now call TESCREAL. I wish there was a good copy of all the H+ magazines (esp the bit where they rebranded as a blog, I know the first few actual articles are on the internet archive as pdfs), because I want to say that the most far out articles written in that were often by him, but that isn’t a thing I can say just of the top of my head without anything to back it up. (The magazine was weird articles that went from ‘look at this cool new tech, and all the things that might be possible’ to ‘here is something that is so out there that it took a lot of weed to make’.
@cstross @CinnasVerses @techtakes I also note how these people are obsessed with having a second everything: a second brain (you already have one in your skull); a second planet (you already live on one); a second paternalistic idol (so your real daddy wasn’t perfect, get over it), etc.
It’s as if reality is just too messy and inconvenient for them, so they want to build a whole, more pristine digital/virtual alternative for them to enjoy while the real world burns…with the rest of us on it.
@cstross @CinnasVerses @techtakes Reductio ad absurdum: that’s why this time maybe we should crucify/throw them to the lions <all> of them.
@cstross @CinnasVerses @techtakes Given how many of them there are, we wouldn’t need the Via Apia, just a side street in Rome, or six lions and not very hungry.