18
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
18 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
2621 readers
45 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Daniel Faggella has found the old SneerClub and here too
These doofuses never actually think through their thought experiments. Quoting from a dead thread half a year ago, where he was downvoted but not yet identified:
Okay, but first surely he can recognize that humanity is already multicultural and multispecies? Like, in a non-specious sense, we've incorporated many mammals, birds, plants, fungi, etc. into our daily lives and can't really separate them out at this point. Sure, there's some ineffable and beautiful relationship between humans in general which we want to preserve, but before worrying about whether robots should join in, we should first notice that there's already an expansion of that relationship to include e.g. face mites, and there's no sense in which face mites are a Worthy Successor to whom we should cede all managerial decisions. (I was gonna say "cats", but I know plenty of y'all would rather have a cat in charge than a human, and you're not wrong.)
Oh no every day sneerclub teaches me about a new guy.
So he's basically arguing that the Borg did nothing wrong (note: the Borg do not actually exist, note #2: the Borg are space fascists).
This isn't the first time I've seen this idea in rationalist circles: that is bad / wrong / irrational to be biased in favor of humans and or humans to succeed in particular. Often the idea is taken as obviously true, but I cannot understand it at all.
Like I don't care if you can make a computer "better" than me or less sad than me or less likely to eat an innocent shrimp than me. I am not that computer-- if it's a choice between me and them I'm fighting on team me. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make one's space in the universe or to "selfishly" want self-actualization or to want humans to thrive.
I think this particular pattern is another consequence of long-termism in the water supply. It's easy to disconnect yourself from humanity as a concept when you're in a space that often assumes that you and everyone you could ever have a personal relationship with are already long dead. The fact that this makes it easy to ignore the problems that people today are having in front of your face is purely coincidental.
I’ve been aware of Faggella for a while (entirely against my will) he’s got an interview with Yud on his podcast which contains this all-timer quote:
daniel self-flagella, more like
for frame of reference, this is the kind of stuff he tweets