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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How to explain our very good friends to normal humans? (awful.systems)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

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Thinking about how the arsing fuck to explain the rationalists to normal people - especially as they are now a loud public problem along multiple dimensions.

The problem is that it's all deep in the weeds. Every part of it is "it can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong."

With bitcoin, I have, over the years, simplified it to being a story of crooks and con men. The correct answer to "what is a blockchain and how does it work" is "it's a way to move money around out of the sight of regulators" and maybe "so it's for crooks and con men, and a small number of sincere libertarians" and don't even talk about cryptography or technology.

I dunno what the one sentence explanation is of this shit.

"The purpose of LessWrong rationality is for Yudkowsky to live forever as an emulation running on the mind of the AI God" is completely true, is the purpose of the whole thing, and is also WTF.

Maybe that and "so he started what turned into a cult and a series of cults"? At this point I'm piling up the absurdities again.

The Behind The Bastards approach to all these guys has been "wow these guys are all so wacky haha and also they're evil."

How would you first approach explaining this shit past "it can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong"?

[also posted in sneer classic]

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

There's something about how these weird ideologies grow and how people get trapped in them that reminds me of oncogenesis.

When a cancer forms, cell lines experience a typical progression where a lineage accumulates mutations which aren't that bad individually, but combine in the aggregate to cause havoc. The cells close themselves off from outside communication and lose all capacity for repairing genomic damage or heeding signals to slow out-of-control growth. Environmental factors like pollution and ionizing radiation can predictably push otherwise benign cells in that direction; the same cancer can develop in thousands or millions of people independently via convergent shit-evolution.

It rhymes, doesn't it?