this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Random blue check spouts disinformation about "seed oils" on the internet. Same random blue check runs a company selling "safe" alternatives to seed oils. Yud spreads this huckster's disinformation further. In the process he reveals his autodidactically-obtained expertise in biology:

Are you eating animals, especially non-cows? Pigs and chickens inherit linoleic acid from their feed. (Cows reprocess it more.)

Yes, Yud, because that's how it works. People directly "inherit" organic molecules totally unmetabolized from the animals they eat.

I don't know why Yud is fat, but armchair sciencing probably isn't going to fix it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That reminds me. If the world is about to FOOM into a kill-all-humans doomscape, why is he wasting time worrying about seed oils?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (7 children)

A lot of rationalism is just an intense fear of death. Simulation hypothesis? Means that maybe you can live forever if you're lucky. Superintelligence? Means that your robot god might grant you immortality someday. Cryogenics? Means that there's some microscopic chance that even if you pass away you could be revived in the future at some point. Long terminism? Nothing besides maybe someday possibly making me immortal could possibly matter.

I mean don't get me wrong I'd give a lot for immortality, but I try to uhh... stay grounded in reality.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@sailor_sega_saturn @TinyTimmyTokyo @nyrath I like to call LessWrong "modern-day Scientology" and that moniker seems more and more appropriate with each passing month.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

@sailor_sega_saturn @TinyTimmyTokyo @nyrath For someone claiming to be rational (meaning putting reality above superstition), he [Yudkowsky] really did create what is essentially a proto-religion. Hence, Scientology.

I am literally a devout (if reformist) Christian and I'm less superstitious than that clown shoe and his zombies.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

@sailor_sega_saturn @TinyTimmyTokyo Been thinking and saying this for a while. These powerful billionaire types are terrified of death as it’s so egalitarian - nobody escapes it; No matter how much money and power they accumulate, they can’t get control over this one thing and it drives them up the wall.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

@sailor_sega_saturn @TinyTimmyTokyo Kinda hilarious those beliefs are called "rationalism". They're speculation
& pseudoscience at best.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (24 children)

@sailor_sega_saturn

Spelt "TESCREAL", pronounced "existential angst"...

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

@sailor_sega_saturn @TinyTimmyTokyo Eh, no guarantee (or any reason to believe really) a simulation would be even focused in any way on humanity (no anthropocentrism needed).

Similarly for superintelligence, few reasons for it to care.

Cryogenics is a better bet and as you say it's quite unlikely unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@sailor_sega_saturn @cstross I”m not sure that those things are “Rationalism”. Rationalism is about reason above religious belief, not substituting one god with another..

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

don’t worry, folk like Yudkowsky have already taken care of substituting one god with another under rationalism’s name in an attempt to grift atheists who miss the comfort of an afterlife to look forward to

you can thank him by donating a tithe of all your money to effective altruism or whichever “AI alignment” org will save you from the Basilisk these days

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@self I had no idea who that was until I looked him up. He talks about something called “Rationality” (which seems to be anything but). I’m talking about Rationalism, which is a different thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism?wprov=sfti1

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

further reading as you fall down the Yudkowsky rabbit hole I guess (and the complementary RationalWiki article, written by folks who probably deserve the term rationalist to a greater degree than any of LessWrong or Yudkowsky’s output)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

how can you trust rationalwiki it's the sorta organisation that uses a brain as a logo

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

the brain, mostly notable for being the only organ capable of generating lies. how curious that anyone would recommend a website that identifies with the liemaker organ

e: please read this post in the most ben shapiro voice your liemaker can muster

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

i expect it was a brain that did that

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

The whole ‘trad clean’ market on twitter is wild. You’d be amazed at the mark ups of like, tortilla chips.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Carves reality at the seams.

Oops, anyone know how to stitch reality back together again?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@saucerwizard "New diet villain just dropped." New? Come on Yud, the far/weird right has been shouting about this for years. r/StopEatingSeedOils/ is 4 years old for example. (It def is older than that)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yud himself has been on this particular train for years. In one of his dath ilan fanfic blog-stains, he bemoaned the evils of our society killing babies with omega-6 nutrition bags.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

@zogwarg wait what jesus that is not what omega-6 doe... and lol after all these years I can still discover new weird old stuff about them.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"carving reality at the joints" - does this mean anything?

Only finer-grained concepts like "linoleic acid" are useful for carving reality at the joints.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

His metaphors mix worse than seed oil and water.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

This systematic review and meta-analysis doesn't seem to indicate that linoleic acid is unusually bad for all-cause mortality or cardiovascular disease events. And is there another meta-analysis showing the opposite? I kinda just don't trust those anymore, unless somebody I trust vouches for the meta-analysis

"I only trust meta-analyses if the results agree with me"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Poor Yud's Bayes must have broken.