Very glad to see the sub being run exactly as it was always supposed to be.

Sorry, but the history of technology is one of my things, and I think that there’s a misrepresentation going on here about how technology develops. Not only is it rarely mono-causal, it’s extremely rare that one cause even predominates in the evolution of a technology (such as a railway system). I don’t think it’s the case that 20th century conflicts have remotely a large enough impact on the development of the European railway systems to properly explain why it is that they aren’t more integrated.

That does clarify the point, but I also don’t think that it’s true. It may well be that a major reason proposals for unified European rail never got off the ground before recently was that European countries rejected such proposals on grounds that it would make it easier for them to be invaded. But the rail systems in different European countries nonetheless developed independently, using different technology and standards, mostly (arguably) in the 19th century.

This complex process doesn’t reduce to 20th century FUBAR, even insofar as diplomatic and security considerations were involved in its evolution (and yet of course beginning in the 19th, not the 20th, century).

Honestly? Whatever. I know I’m not in the wrong here. I shouldn’t have come in hard at the beginning.

[what 2024 would look like if Big Yud had been allowed to first strike data centers in the mid-2010s meme - wizzy flying cars, big tubular buildings, and so on]

and that “who talks to who” is basic journalism.

It’s always interesting to note when an apparently natural convention has metastasised and begun to sprout weird, ugly, distensions that no longer make sense. Sure, when the stakes are ideas, it’s important to stick to ideas and not over-focus on personalities! In fact you can take that principle fairly far, as when holding onto your ideals in the teeth of conflict which can abase you and cause you to lose all moral compass. But never talk about personalities? And in a big way we live in the century of metastasised conventions - the internet, but also everything else, both accelerates and robs us of any behavioural compass but strange and constantly shifting conventional guides for getting along (have a terrifying conversation with almost anyone in Gen Z for proof of that). In the same way “in-group/out-group” is hopelessly inadequate to capture this dynamic, but it’s another convention that this lot of have chosen to metastasise (and, paradoxically, it now looms larger in the rules governing their thinking than almost anywhere).

For them, it’s all become a strange conspiracy of the elect in which nobody knows who’s in charge and nobody is actually the elect, hence this constant bizarre resort to the counter-conspiracy whenever their strange values come into conflict with the outside: they no longer have a tool for reality-testing their values, because the rest of the world is either wrong or the enemy

The State Department? That unimpeachable organ of American governance?! Why, I don’t even know whether to trust them not to collude with shadowy corporations or not to be duped!

I have good news for you: the ChatGPT racists got there because the idea isn’t even original to either of them

I don’t have the source article, my full title is all one quote from the latest issue of the London Review of Books. But I’ve seen it before multiple times - it’s out there and findable

There are no known problems that can’t theoritically be solved, in a sort of pedantic “in a closed system information always converges” sort of way

Perhaps. The problem of human flight was “solved” by the development of large, unwieldy machines driven by (relatively speaking, cf. pigeons) highly inefficient propulsion systems which are very good at covering long distances, oceans, and rough terrain quickly - the aim was Daedalus and Icarus, but aerospace companies are fortunate that the flying machine turned out to have advantages in strictly commercial and military use. It’s completely undecided physically whether there is a solution to the problem of building human-like intelligence which does a comparable job to having sex, even with complete information about the workings of humans.

Apparently, pace my own username, you don’t know who the fuck I am.

I don’t think any of that first paragraph is true. LessWrong and EA very blatantly do not teach people how to spot fallacious reasoning. Nor does the culture of either encourage the adherents of their one movement to repress their “irrational” emotions. Fallacious reasoning, emotional reasoning, irrational thinking - all three of these self-evidently ran rampant in the culture, so there has to be something else going on here which would explain both what the culture is like and why you have an impression that seems to line up so squarely with their self-presentation.

Rather, it seems that what happens at LessWrong and EA is roughly that a charismatic self-presentation of “rational thinking” (with attendant ideas along the lines of repressing one’s emotions and so on) hooks in impressionable people, who - like victims of any multi-level marketing scheme - quickly replace their own styles and habits of thought with those propounded and taught by the movement. So those people do do something like “repress” their emotions, but only in the sense that they repress those styles of thought and emotional presentation which had previously come naturally to them. But of course the movement also teaches that it is right and proper or that there is even a sort of duty to make impassioned (whiny) emotional appeals to this or that privileged source of the right kind of emotions to feel (such as feeling indignant about normie reasoning, or feminism, or whatever), which are (some would say fallaciously) considered above rational criticism themselves.

You can see that sort of thing play out in basically any rationalist discussion or article at Vox’s “Future Perfect”!

So what you describe with respect to drugs and so on is true enough but misses the point. It’s rather that throughout the movement there’s a strong current of precisely the things that in its self-presentation the movement is supposed to ward off. The drug scene isn’t an outlet for repressed feelings, it’s just a particular place (of many) towards which the movement’s leaders have directed the energies (which they don’t repress but encourage) of their followers.

The shame and guilt thing is a separate issue, it has nothing to do with the conscious or directed repression of emotions under the auspices of the movement.

The little paranoid devil on Siskind’s shoulder screaming horrible compulsive thoughts in his ear is my favourite character in this whole decades long saga