there’s a lot i want to pull out from this comment by ngo

first, shorn of context, i don’t know that this sort of power fantasy reflects so poorly on the rationalists. or perhaps it does, and in that case also reflects poorly on me, since it’s my preferred power fantasy. the world sucks and it would be nice to magically make it better. EDIT: ok im noticing that the naruto fanfiction excerpt is just straightforwardly jerking off about doing a fascist coup

second, we must remember that rat stories are implicitly either recipes for social change or warnings that society ought to stay away from particular demons. rationalism is in large part a political movement with what they believe to be practical aims

third, if ngo’s marxist fiction from the 1800s all ended with communist revolutions, the worrying thing for a member of the movement would not be a fantasy of triumph or a sense of certainty of triumph, but rather an inability to connect triumphant outcomes to action under the present conditions. as you highlighted, the fantastical element of these stories is in conflict with the practicality of their aims

fourth, as far as i can tell, that is not ngo’s objection at all. what he seems to be concerned about is the possibility that rationalists will make serious progress on actually taking over the world and make terrible things happen once they do. i don’t take this possibility seriously at all. fundamentally, rationalists are lapdogs, forever licking the negligently outstretched hands of billionaires. they cause real harm as lackeys of the ultrawealthy and vectors for the diseases of racism, eugenics, etc, but to take ngo’s concerns seriously i would have to buy into the same fantasy of magical omnipotence he’s pointing to, because there seems to be no other path from here to rationalist dictatorship.

in all honesty we would love it if doing this were our job but there is no pathway to that that we can see. we just do it b/c it’s really fun

our pay is our satisfaction in having inflicted it on others as well

new odium symposium episode. we examine the foundational TERF text, janice raymond’s “the transsexual empire,” which turns out to be about how trans people are a big pharma conspiracy

https://www.patreon.com/posts/12-invasion-of-w-152915964

www.odiumsymposium.com for links to other platforms

new development in ontology: “the ontology that makes ai models valuable is american”

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mguiup62lt2j

one of the brain geniuses at bluesky

wrt to the first part, nick consistently outmaneuvers people who bring him onto their platforms. he’s honestly brilliant at understanding who the audience is, what frame he’s appearing in, and how to signal given those circumstances. i didn’t understand until i started prepping for this episode that nick is actually lazy and incurious in almost the exact same way alex jones is. dan and jordan notice and call out how he effortlessly establishes dominance over alex, but i think there’s a subtler game going on where nick manages to appear competent and informed compared to alex, and you don’t realize that’s just an artifact of conversational skill until you hear nick on his own show.

wrt to the second part, i could not agree more and i’m very glad to hear that is a takeaway because it is absolutely something i was hoping to communicate. that’s the freudianness of it all, how these existing patterns of relations to another get played out and reenacted through the audience’s relationship to nick, and vice versa

i think this is exactly why they had to come up with - or rather, misappropriate - the concept of coupled vs decoupled thinking. when they (especially the more, ahem, human biodiversity minded of them) fold ridiculous claims about what constitutes virtuous cognition into scientific and sophisticated sounding terminology, it makes those claims seem aligned with the broader sales pitch of rationalism

also that scott quote is excellent. i hadn’t heard that one before

if we had made the podcast series on rationalists, their importance as useful idiots for billionaires was the structure i wanted to hang the whole thing on. so this is a gratifying read. that said i think the ideas here will be familiar to many stubsack readers

The rationalist view of the world assumes, at some level, that the relevant actors are optimizing for well-understood, predictable variables and a clear understanding of what best serves their self-interest. What it cannot account for is bad faith, impulsiveness, ideological motivation untethered from evidence, random instances of force majeure, and personal whims and petty rivalries.

i will go further and say that not accounting for such things is considered virtuous in rationalist ideology

new episode of odium symposium. it’s a tribute to knowledge fight, in which we dissect an episode of nick fuentes’s show. i was nervous about how this would turn out but i think it’s actually my favorite episode yet.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/11-groyper-151852222 (links to other platforms at www.odiumsymposium.com)

just got a job in mathematical publishing. it’s work i think i’ll actually enjoy and expect to be very good at, it pays much better than any other job i’ve had previously (and they maxed out the position’s pay range, which i wasn’t expecting) and it has about a month of paid leave a year. such a relief

friend of a friend who works for meta was just ignoring the mandate to use ai. apparently this was happening enough that they’ve now implemented per character provenance tracing, and you get ranked according to how much AI is in your code

this is a lot like my expectation. ai never goes away, it never becomes revolutionary, it just makes everything worse and supercharges scams and theft and spam and means of social and nonsocial murder forever with maybe some real but kind of marginal usecases idk

unherd is a fash publication. to me this comes across as an AI take-ified rewrite of a 1994 luttwak essay i read recently, an endorsement of a revival of italian style fascism: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n07/edward-luttwak/why-fascism-is-the-wave-of-the-future

maybe “parasitic innovation”?

need a word for the sort of tech ‘innovation’ that consists of inventing and monetizing new types of externalities which regulators aren’t willing to address. like how bird scooters aren’t a scam, but they profit off of littering sidewalk space so that ppl with disabilities can’t get around

EDIT: a similar, perhaps the same concept is innovation which functions by capturing or monopolizing resources that aren’t as yet understood to be resources. in the bird example, we don’t think of sidewalk space as a capturable resource, and yet

new episode of odium symposium. we look at rousseau’s program for using universal education to turn woman into drones

https://www.patreon.com/posts/project-1789-150782184

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excruciating

this is some of the most shameful groveling I’ve ever seen. what a pathetic toad

given how epstein ignores his proposal in favor of slapping him down i would be surprised if any of it came to fruition