I hate to "give it to them", but the targets of TESCREAL are reprehensible BUT fascinating. It's kinda fun to learn about people like the Cosmists or Nick fucking Land. But the targets of this dude are basically unknown academics. The right doesn't need a convoluted acronym to dump on those, they already have "woke".

you say "neo-luddite" as if that's a bad thing

Look, I am shockingly uninformed about the current conflict in the Middle East - mostly b/c I got sucked into Ukraine-watching and then Oct 7 + Trump II basically killed any motivation to learn more depressing things. But then I'm just a nobody, while Yud aspires to change world leaders' minds about AI so it doesn't kill us all[1]. And the Arab/Israel conflict is one of the longest-running in our world, it hinges on important stuff like national self-determination, how to treat civilians in war, how limited natural resources can lead to conflicts - all the kind of stuff you might want your robot god to be "aligned" about, in whatever direction.

It's ok to say you can't be bothered about Gaza, or not having the energy to learn more. But then people might just not be interested in reading about your ideas on how LLMs will destroy the world.

[1] latest outburst here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kgb58RL88YChkkBNf/the-problem

Also "orate" is a fucking verb

Good news everyone! Someone with a SlackSlub has started a series countering the TESCREAL narrative.

He (c'mon, it's a guy) calls it "R9PRESENTATIONALism"

It stands for

• Relational
• 9P
  • Postcritical
  • Personalist
  • Praxeological
  • Psychoanalytic
  • Participatory
  • Performative
  • Particularist
  • Poeticist
  • Positive/Affirmationist
• Reparative
• Existentialist
• Standpoint-theorist
• Embodied
• Narrativistic
• Therapeutic
• Intersectional
• Orate
• Neosubstantivist
• Activist
• Localist

I see no reason why this catchy summary won't take off!

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RCDEFhCLcifogLwEm/exploring-the-anti-tescreal-ideology-and-the-roots-of-anti

JFC

Agency and taking ideas seriously aren’t bad. Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work and only hypochondriacs worried about covid; rationalists were some of the first people to warn about the threat of artificial intelligence.

First off, anyone not entirely into MAGA/Qanon agreed that masks probably helped more than hurt. Saying rats were outliers is ludicrous.

Second, rats don't take real threats of GenAI seriously - infosphere pollution, surveillance, autopropaganda - they just care about the magical future Sky Robot.

It always struck me as hilarious that the EA/LW crowd could ever affect policy in any way. They're cosplaying as activists, have no ideas about how to move the public image needle other than weird movie ideas and hope, and are literally marinated in SV technolibertarianism which sees government regulation as Evil.

There's a mini-freakout over OpenAI deciding to keep GPT-4o active, despite it being more "sycophantic" than GPT-5 (and thus more likely to convince people to do Bad Things) but there's also the queasy realization that if sycophantic LLMs is what brings in the bucks, nothing is gonna stop LLM companies from offering them. And there's no way these people can stop it, because they've made the deal that LLM companies are gonna be the ones realizing that AI is gonna kill everyone and that's never gonna happen.

Using the term "Antichrist" as a shorthand for "global stable totalitarianism" is A Choice.

old timey eugenicists were all about preventing "unsuitable" people from having kids, thereby circumventing natural selection. It's not as if they didn't purposefully misunderstand the phrase "survival of the fittest"

You know stuff is bad if the margins aren't "low" or "razor-thin" but "very negative".

The entire business idea is dumb. Yes we will pay retail for access to models run by companies also offering the same products that we do, but we'll make up for it in volume?

Guess either term hasn't started, or his gig as phil prof is some sort of right-wing sinecure. Dude has a lot of time on his hands.

FWIW I'd say banning a poster for including slop image in a 3rd party article is a bit harsh, but what would Reddit be without arbitrary draconian rules? A normal person would note this, accept the 3 day ban, and maybe avoid the sub in future or avoid including slop. The fact he flew off his handle this much is very very funny though.

I believe the scientific consensus is that it originated in a wet market in Wuhan.

The "lab leak theory", while not impossible, is also shorthand for a morass of conspiracy theories grounded in racist attitudes towards China. It somehow conflates that the pandemic is China's fault, if not an outright attack from China, while simultaneously downplaying any efforts to mitigate such an attack.