The targets are informed, via a grammatically invalid sentence.

Sam Kriss (author of the ‘Laurentius Clung’ piece) has posted a critique. I don’t think it’s good, but I do think it’s representative of a view that I ever encounter in the wild but haven’t really seen written up.

FWIW the search term 'Laurentius Clung' gets no hits on LW, so I'm to assume everyone there also is Extremely Online on Xitter and instantly knows the reference.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3GbM9hmyJqn4LNXrG/yams-s-shortform?commentId=MzkAjd8EWqosiePMf

Look: I’ve managed to get through an entire essay on rationalism without mentioning Roko’s basilisk even once, and frankly I think I deserve a bit of credit for it.

The effort this took is outstanding.

This was a good read. I also read the post/story/essay that got the rats upset and it's good too.

https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-law-that-can-be-named-is-not

Yud's sputtering reaction can be read here among the comments here

https://xcancel.com/captgouda24/status/1946398995556819149

Oh man, that was a chuckle and a half. Choice quotation:

We’re supposedly dealing with a group of idiosyncratic weirdos, all of them trying to independently reconstruct the entirety of human knowledge from scratch. Their politics run all the way from the furthest fringes of the far right to the furthest fringes of the liberal centre

Anyone know a good gladiator arena with aperol spritzes? I have a date to plan for the weekend!

Saw this posted to the Reddit Sneerclub, this essay has some excellent zingers and a good overall understanding of rationalists. A few highlights...

Rationalism is the notion that the universe is a collection of true facts, but since the human brain is an instrument for detecting lions in the undergrowth, almost everyone is helplessly confused about the world, and if you want to believe as many true things and disbelieve as many false things as possible—and of course you do—you must use various special techniques to discipline your brain into functioning more like a computer. (In practice, these techniques mostly consist of calling your prejudices ‘Bayesian priors,’ but that’s not important right now.)

We're all very familiar with this phenoma, but this author has a pithy way of summarizing it.

The story is not a case study in how rationality will help you understand the world, it’s a case study in how rationality will give you power over other people. It might have been overtly signposted as fiction, with all the necessary content warnings in place. That doesn’t mean it’s not believed. Despite being genuinely horrible, this story does have one important use: it makes sense out of the rationalist fixation on the danger of a superhuman AI. According to HPMOR, raw intelligence gives you direct power over other people; a recursively self-improving artificial general intelligence is just our name for the theoretical point where infinite intelligence transforms into infinite power.

Yep, the author nails the warped view Rationalists have about intelligence.

We’re supposedly dealing with a group of idiosyncratic weirdos, all of them trying to independently reconstruct the entirety of human knowledge from scratch. Their politics run all the way from the furthest fringes of the far right to the furthest fringes of the liberal centre.

That is a concise summary of their warped Overton Window, yeah.

To be fair, some character development does take place: by the end, Harry has learned how to not be so frightening, and how to use his powers of effortless domination more strategically. There is a general failure of self-awareness here I have not seen outside Sonichu. It makes for genuinely harrowing reading.