Dowhammer 40k is real!
In the land of ball-busting, the one-balled is king.
Are you telling me it's improbable that the equivalent of every single American and then some liked that video?
Fucking anti-khaganate propaganda. Real ones know this is the true version of that progress image.
Wow, that's some venomously hateful text.
new york city truly is a first and fourth word city overlayed atop each other
Jesus Christ learn what words mean. Even if you use "Third World" to mean "poor countries", fourth world is not a thing and people living in extreme poverty in developing countries are in fact not better off than non Wall Street New Yorkers.
Those comments are tight, but really the problem with trying to explain any of this to laypeople isn't exposing how wrong it is. The hard part is making any sense of it.
Like if I told you Donald Trump has connections with a cult that believes grandmothers are a species of raspberry, whose goal is turning Denmark into cheese and oh, a splinter group of theirs just murdered a police officer. That will just raise more questions than it answers. How the hell did they come to believe that? Why would anyone want that? And then I have to choose between looking like a loony conspiracy theorist, doing an impromptu lecture or just having to decide you actually probably don't want to know.
I don't think Yud is that hard to explain. He's a science fiction fanboy who never let go of his adolescent delusions of grandeur. He was never successfully disabused from the notion that he's always the smartest person in the room and he didn't pursue high school, let alone college education to give him the expertise to recognize just how difficult his goal is. Blud thinks he's gonna create a superhumanly intelligent machine when he struggles with basic programming tasks.
He's kinda comparable to Elon Musk in a way. Brain uploading and superhuman AI are sort of in the same "cool sci fi tech" category as Mars colonization, brain implants and vactrain gadgetbahns. It's easy to forget that not too many years ago the public's perception of Musk was very different. A lot of people saw him as a cool Tony Stark figure who was finally going to give us our damn flying cars.
Yudkowsky is sometimes good at knowing just a bit more about things than his audience and making it seem like he knows a lot more than he does. The first time I started reading HPMoR I thought the author was an actual theoretical physicist or something and when the story said I could learn everything Harry knows for free on this LessWrong site I though I could learn what it means for something to be "implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian" or what that those "timeless formulations of quantum mechanics" were about. Instead it was just poorly paced essays on bog standard logical fallacies and cognitive biases explained using their weird homegrown terminology.
Also, it's really easy to be convinced of thing when you really want to believe in it. I know personally some very smart and worldly people who have been way too impressed by ChatGPT. Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you're about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.
His fantasies of becoming immortal through having a God AI simulate his mind forever aren't the weird part. Any imaginative 15 year old computer nerd can have those fantasies. The weird parts are that he never grew out of those fantasies and that he managed to make some rich and influential contacts while holding on to his chuunibyō delusions.
Anyone can become a cult leader through the power of buying into your own hype and infinite thielbux.
I know this is going to hurt millions of regular people in and outside the US, many of them through no fault of their own. Despite that I can't help myself.
Hi, I'm an unimtentional moderate centrist! I don't have an ideology, only views! My overton window is a peephole! Kamala is a far leftist! Trump is orange! People should stop treating politics like team sports and join the non team sports tribe like me! Political correctness gone mad! Let me tell you about Chesterton's fence! Everyone's sheeple except my flock! Say it with me: I'm an independent thinker!
Wow, farriers are going crazy with these modern horseshoe designs!
image transcription
Above: a single axis scatter plot. The ends of the axis are labeled "Left" and "Right". Data points are distributed similarly to normal distribution, the center being more concentrated than the extremes. Caption: "What people think the political spectrum is vs What it actually is".
Below: A two-dimensional scatter plot. The ends of the horizontal axis are labeled "Left" and "Right" and the vertical axis is labeled "Independent Thought" at the top and "Groupthink" at the bottom. The data points are evenly distributed inside a bell curve shape, with the peak of the hump at Independent Thought and between Left and Right, and the wide bottom of the bell spanning the whole Left-Right axis at maximum Groupthink.
Data points near the top of the bell (Independent-Center) labeled '"Un-intentional moderates" (from Paul Graham's The Two Kinds of Moderate)'. [Original image uses double quotes around the term Un-intentional moderates and single quotes around the title of Paul Graham's shitpost.]
Data points at the bottom center of the bell (Groupthink-Center) labeled "Intentional moderates".
In the bottom corner a watermark crediting the image to "@shw1nm".
I love the implication that being an independent thinker means agreeing with both the majority and other independent thinkers.
If you give me six thousand tweets written by the hand of the most damned and hypocritical of men, I will find something in them which will cancel him. —@RichelieuArmand, probably