read that sentence back in a mirror to me

This isn’t a joke either. Read it back in the mirror. To ME. What do you think you see when you look in the mirror? WRONG.

Ahhh Jaan Tallinn, the Diet Coke of batfuckery. Jaan “Diet Batfuckery” Tallinn.

I still think that this represents a bias towards a military-geopolitical interpretation of history that’s not wholly sustainable, in spite of its appeal. In the Russian Empire case, I’m quite certain that that’s a popular myth, because I know that it is certainly the case that when the first railway infrastructures were being built, the political powers, administrators, and engineers responsible were as much influenced by technological and physical geographical imperatives as they were by geopolitical. The Russian Empire’s decision to use what would become the Russian gauge was multi-factoral - indeed looking it up, it appears that they were persuaded by Brunel’s own preference for a wide gauge, which was famously thwarted in the early development of the British railways.

I’d advise that the SneerClub is actually a negroni with extra-proof (70-90% alcohol) rum replacing the Campari, which is instead drizzled from the bottom of a nearly empty bottle over the top. And it’s taken like a shot, beginning when you log on and continuing at your own pace until either you pass out or the internet does.

Never meditate folks, it’s bad for the brain

Speaking as apparently one of the few people online who still has to look it up in order to find out a reference is to Avatar and not some Vietnamese proverb from the ‘60s…but I repeat myself

I want to add William H. Tucker’s posthumous “The Bell Curve in Perspective”, which came out I think right at the end of last year. It’s a short, thorough, assessment both of the history of The Bell Curve book itself and what has happened since.

Even the first chapter is just mindblowingly terse in brutally unpacking how (a) it was written by racists, (b) for racist ends, (c) Murray lied and lied afterwards in pretending that ‘only a tiny part of the book was about race’ or whatever

It gets better: and all of the “metamodern” post-postmodern solutions on the table revolve around making the bot “friendly”

I’ve been saying this more often lately, but LessWrong gets its readers in, by and large, at the absolute bottom rung of intellectual thought, they don’t know anything else

You have to interpret somebody getting into LessWrong as just graduating from Cracked or Newgrounds in the mid-2000s

It’s a technique he uses to get you, the reader, to understand that you aren’t the person who thinks in terms of elan vital.

In one of his essays on quantum phenomena and personal identity he does it with time. He explains something like if you think time in the universe works in the sense of clock time, then you just don’t have a clue about physical reality, so when he gets to his next point it stands in contrast to the straw layman. But his readers are obviously already the sort of people who do know that, because they’re nominally smart, education-enthusiastic western(ised) nerds, even if they understand next to nothing about how this works out in real physical theory.

So the strawman doesn’t just create a favourable contrast for Yudkowsky’s argument, it constructs them as smart and different from lay people - it isn’t a one-shot effect, it builds as he starts small and piles on increasingly esoteric speculations (even if this is the first “mind = blown” blog post they’ve ever read from this weird guy).

“…trying to head off an argument by bringing their estimates down as low as possible” - you’ve got it. We’re done. You can stop now.

This is great, and also immediately sends me back to 10ish years ago when I would read these things and laugh without the incredible weight of (a) being harassed and stalked by Yudkowsky (et al.) fans (b) the knowledge that at one point I could have used that time fruitfully (c) the fact that we live in Yudkowsky’s Clown Car California Ideology Nightmare now