God it feels so fucking good not knowing who any of these idiots are, time to ruin that feeling forever
Going through random pages of Zack’s blog, which I don’t recommend unless you really like to look at self-harm, which you shouldn’t, … sometimes you find passages that make you remember the important things and you feel a little less bad about all the mess.
(The really hard part is overcoming the improbability of finding a wife who I could love and who could love me, and who is enthusiastic about starting a family qua eugenics project rather than merely qua family. Any single (cis) women reading this who like my writing: please, don’t hesitate to write me!)
Also this one’s really just kind of cute.
I continue to maintain that fandom conventions are boring. I enjoy consuming fiction. I even enjoy discussing fiction with friends—the work facilitating a connection with someone else present, rather than just between me and the distant author, or me and the universe of stories. But for the most part, these big, bustling conventions just don’t seem to facilitate that kind of intimacy. […]
But that’s okay. Ultimately, I did not come to Fan Expo San Francisco 2022 for the intimacy of analyzing fiction with friends who know me.
I came because of the loophole. As reactionary as it might seem in the current year, I am spiritually a child of the 20th century, and I do not crossdress in public. That would be weird. (Not harmlessly weird as an adjective of unserious self-deprecation, but weird in the proper sense, out-of-distribution weird.)
But to cosplay as a fictional character who happens to be female? That’s fine! Lots of people are dressed up as fictional characters at the convention, including characters who belong to categories that the cosplayer themself does not. That guy dressed up as a vampire isn’t actually a vampire, either.
@Amoeba_Girl @dgerard Sometimes I think there’s a goldmine of comedy to be had laughing at these eugenics types having kids and slowly realizing they aren’t rich like Musk and Grimes and have to care for these humans. Then I remember that isn’t funny at all, it’s extremely upsetting.
well, cute for someone who would transition to a trans neoreactionary
I admit my standards might have been lowered due to consuming too much of the brain sludge.
I don’t know what man-made horrors beyond my comprehension I just stubled upon, but this person really really really needs psychological help and possible to be forced out of their self-hatred jesus christ
jesus christ
LWers will literally
Instead of going to therapy
This is not healthy.
ya dont fucken say
^F David Gerard
Imagine one day David Gerard of /r/SneerClub said, “Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist!” And you replied: “No, I’m not! That’s a lie.” And imagine E.T. Jaynes was still alive…
I‘m impressed at the way you still manage to live rent free in these chud’s heads. The bogeyman is real if you’re a rationalist apparently & his name is D.Gerard.
/r/SneerClub
these people are so terrified of Satan Church that they haven’t read the change of address we stabbed into the front door with a ceremonial dagger like 5 months ago
Imagine one day Dan Gackle of Hacker News fame banned the Linus Tech Tips guy for sockpuppeting but actually you were the sockpuppet. Also suppose Terry A. Davis were still alive so you went to ask him how to sockpuppet like a veteran, but instead you run into Timnit Gebru, who is also a terrorist. She calls you pronouns and slurs like TESCREAL and your pants drop to your ankles and everyone is laughing at you and also Terry calls you the N word because you don’t know how to write a compiler. Then you turn around and see Scott Siskind and Joanne Rowling and they’re also laughing at you and you start to cry.
Anyway you’d be really upset.
Picture a scene: the New York Times is releasing an article on Effective Altruism (EA) with an express goal to dig up every piece of negative information they can find. They contact Émile Torres, David Gerard, and Timnit Gebru, collect evidence about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board blowup, and Pasek’s Doom, start calling Astral Codex Ten (ACX) readers to ask them about rumors they’d heard about affinity between Effective Altruists, neoreactionaries, and something called TESCREAL. They spend hundreds of hours over six months on interviews and evidence collection, paying Émile and Timnit for their time and effort. The phrase “HBD” is muttered, but it’s nobody’s birthday.
From here.
The EA/LW community loves to think from first principles, and that is usually one of its finest traits. I notice and respect the times their first-principles thinking leads them to be correct about things broader society is incorrect about—a regular occurrence.
[citation fucking needed]
the fuck. apparently I secretly do run rationality.
scratching his itch to be productive by traveling the world and doing charity via talking with cool, smart people about meaningful ideas.
i’d want some pretty convincing evidence that the bit after “and” goes with the word “productive”.
@Geoffrey Miller, with his own long history of serious, sincere engagement within the rationalist community,
uh yeah lol ok
I follow drama and blow-ups in a lot of different subcultures. It’s my job.
Wait, you can get paid for this???
A thing that is sort of amazing about that article (by Woodgrains, who is supposed to be part of the leftwing people of themotte) is that their complaints about journalism being unfair to them is said by everybody all the time in every subculture when there is a non 100% puff piece on their subculture.
The problem with journalists is that they tend to shine a light on the parts of your subculture that you pretend isn’t there, but a part that you should really check out and do something about (a bit like that mole, ow god I’m projecting and need to call my doctor). How can you be a grown person and not have seen this happen to several groups over and over again already? How sheltered and only inside LW spheres are these people? (Rhetorical)
And this is without talking about how journalist are pressured for time, underpaid, etc etc. Seeing how six months of work isn’t enough to uncover the truth in their own paid sex slaves (yes, this is the intentionally worst way to describe that situation) and more work keeps piling up on up on just that case with claims, counterclaims, miss attributions etc should
tell them somethingupdate their priors about just how much work and how difficult journalism is, but it will not.(I know Woodgrains is praising the ability of LW to criticize themselves, but crucially he doesn’t really seem to notice that nothing changes, the various racists/sexists etc are still there and talking about happy birthdays (urgh). But hey at least it got Gwern mad)
leftwing people of themotte
lol the empty fucking set
Yeah remember how themotte had a “quality contributions of last month” post every month? The schism (for people not in the know: the less ‘far right culture war, more good faith discussions’ spinoff of themotte (how many layers deep are we now? Damn you Hanson!), what a failed project from the start, the culture war anger is the point and the draw of themotte) has a ‘Quality Contributions for the first half of 2023’ post. Guess there were no quality contributions the 6 months after that.
Three major thoughts here: 1) this is the epitome of toxic individualism, 2) holy hell this person really needs to leave rationalism for their own health and happiness, 3) I love the idea that anyone can insist on quoting Ray “doesn’t believe in bisexuality” Blanchard while calling themselves a person focused on truth
This person is clearly struggling with who they are and has decided they don’t get to be themselves and is working back from there
And I just want to clarify my beef with Blanchard. It’s not just that he’s wrong about me and people I care about in ways that are hurtful, prejudiced, and used to cause harm. It’s also the fact that he’s held up by a certain type of person because they can’t be bothered to understand us or science. Sometimes in science one lone person speaks truth to a field that irrationally digs in their heels and refuses to see reason. I understand that. But sometimes some jackass looks identical to that and just happens to be wrong and using terrible methodology and because people outside the field don’t understand shit they latch on because the field is saying things that go against their preconceived notions and that person sounds kinda right.
Ray Blanchard is the Andrew Wakefield of sexology and a certain type of people insist he’s Galileo in that story that’s usually oversimplified because it makes for a better story than telling it truthfully.
If I were to transition today and didn’t pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading me: making me think my transition was successful, even though it wasn’t.
This is the same fuckin’ diseased mentality that gets cis women harassed in changing rooms for having jawlines that are slightly too heavy.
The math is also weird and unclear in that way which feels like a person reaching for grandiose Theories Of It All without any experience solving more mundane problems first.
Zack’s ability to externalise problems onto all others is stupendous even as a rationalist
Exactly. Yeah some trans women really don’t pass, some cis women don’t either. Nobody benefits from increased scrutiny on people’s gender except people selling fear of trans people or selling the tools to conform to gendered expectations.
But also if you’re unhappy with your meat sack change it because there’s no evidence you get another.
🎶 I see the girls go by dressed in their summer clothes / Priors all updating until my darkness goes 🎶
104 minutes! Not today satan.
A ctrl+f on ‘sneer’ shows me a lot of talking about sneerclub, but guess he didn’t actually check reddit and notice that it is no longer there.
And of course the guy is some weird anti pronouns person. (‘But somebody might look how you not expect them to look!’)
not going to waste my time on a random terf, but i’m happy to see said terf to waste ten times more to write and meticulously cross-reference all that crap.
Not so much a random terf as someone who appears to have been trying to use lesswrong struggle sessions in place of trans conversion therapy for a while now.
Or at least that’s my diagonal impression, and I’m also not going over that entire maelstrom just to make sure if they are a rotten egg or not.
Zack seems to want to transition, has detailed logic as to why not to, and is determined to make it everyone else’s problem
Demanding that EY et al define “woman” for them so that they can know whether or not they can transition is simultaneously hilarious and deeply sad.
Yeah i didn’t read much, but at one point in my life i was attempting to do something like that and I see all the telltale signs. The difference is that as a teenager I grew up and developed the emotional maturity to understand that no amount of wanting to not be trans would make me cis, just trans and miserable.
Also I grew up and learned how absolutely bonkers rationalism is as a philosophy.
They seem so deep in that the idea of “what would make me happy” has left the equation long ago
That kind of stuff does make me feel sad, like all the trans people who start out hating on trans people on 4chan. (Don’t get me wrong they still suck and they should stop, but I can feel multiple emotions and also feel a bit sad about them)
The hilarious part to me is that they imagine Eliezer moderates himself or self-censors particularly in response to sneerclub. Like of all the possible reasons why Eliezer may not want to endorse transphobic rhetoric about pronouns (concern about general PR besides sneerclub, a more complex nuanced understanding of language, or even genuine compassion for trans people), sneerclubs disapproval is the one that sticks out to the author. I guess good job on us? Keep it up!
I’m amazed that the random shitposting of a bunch of nerds who band together purely to dunk on terrible rationalist takes weighs so heavily on their minds. Aren’t they supposed to be above that kind of thing?
They are not really talking about us, they are talking about an imagined group of badguys, for all their talks about intellectual turing tests they fail the most basic ones at their own detractors. This does however worry my paranoid mind, as this does mean that the more deranged parts of Rationalism might try and take action against people from sneerclub. I have no desire to be doxed and then have weird LW/EA kids from local universities visit my home. (or make working in tech harder for me).
When I first started reading Sneerclub I was amazed at how different Sneerclub was vs how the Rationalists described it. Also amazing how much better your mh gets after you stop reading SSC subreddit (this was before they created themotte).
Every sneer is one transphobic act suppressed in fear.
Rationalist Civil War was my least favorite Marvel movie.
Is this stuff deliberately written to be word salad?
all the evidence is that Zack cannot not write like this
As somebody who has read terf shit to self harm in the past I want to thank this poor soul for writing something too impenetrable to even be readable let alone effective
Someone asked in the comments that Zack clarify wtf the claim is, and Zack posted this abstract:
Does this help? (159 words and one hyperlink to a 16-page paper)
Empirical Claim: late-onset gender dysphoria in males is not an intersex condition.
Summary of Evidence for the Empirical Claim: see “Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies” by Anne Lawrence, published in European Psychologist. (Not by me!)
Philosophical Claim: categories are useful insofar as they compress information by “carving reality at the joints”; in particular, whether a categorization makes someone happy or sad is not relevant.
Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community’s collective sanity.
Caveat to the Sociological Claim: the Sociological Claim about a prominence-weighted sample of an amorphous collective doesn’t reflect poorly on individual readers of lesswrong.com who weren’t involved in the discussions in question and don’t even live in America, let alone Berkeley.
so this is a two-hour post about Zack’s arguments with unnamed Bay Area rationalists. Today, in posts that should have been a Discord chat.
(the paper he names is a Blancharding ramble)
And the arguments seem to boil down to them saying “if you wanna transition, just do it”, and Zack is all like “nooooooo you must convince me not to via Rationality!!!”
(sorry if I’m being flippant, this person seems to be in a lot of mental distress, but they’re also kinda big deal in the community? Like fucking gwern weighed in a bit sarcastically?)
Who knows? They seem to know all these people personally, so I guess they attend rationalist cuddle puddles in SV or something.
I ran into them online a year ago when a Twitter follow shared their last essay with some acerbic comments about the lengths (both in the mental & absurd word count senses) they were going to do deny their desire to transition & they appeared in the comments after I made a snarky remark along the lines of “methinks the lady doth protest too much”. Still quite proud of that one.
yeah i noticed yesterday there’s a link to (one of) Zack’s blog(s) in SSC’s sidebar.
so what precisely is Zack supposed to be good at in Rationality other than Blancharding?
Word count.
One day, when Zack is a little older, I hope he learns it’s okay to sometimes talk -to someone- instead of airing one’s identity confusion like an arxiv prepublish paper.
Like, it’s okay to be confused in a weird world, or even have controversial opinions. Make some friends you can actually trust, aren’t demanding bayesian defenses of feelings, and chat this shit out buddy.
Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community’s collective sanity.
Zack my guy you are so fucking close. Also just fucking leave.
Suppose there are five true heresies, but anyone who’s on the record as believing more than one gets burned as a witch.
Two heresies leave Chicago traveling at 90 km/h and 100 km/h
Jessica asked if Yudkowsky denouncing neoreaction and the alt-right would still seem harmful, if he were to also to acknowledge, e.g., racial IQ differences?
uh
I agreed that that would be better, but realistically, I didn’t see why Yudkowsky should want to poke that hornet’s nest.
uhhhhhhhhh
a perfectly spherical heresy in a vacuum at absolute zero, and also it’s racist
My dayjob performance had been suffering for months. The psychology of the workplace is … subtle. There’s a phenomenon where some people are vastly more productive than others and everyone knows it, but no one is cruel enough to make it common knowledge. This is awkward for people who simultaneously benefit from the culture of common-knowledge-prevention allowing them to collect the status and money rents of being a $150K/year software engineer without actually performing at that level, who also read enough Ayn Rand as a teenager to be ideologically opposed to subsisting on unjustly-acquired rents rather than value creation. I didn’t think the company would fire me, but I was worried that they should.
My goodness is there anything about this person’s outlook that isn’t profoundly sad.
They’re up to their armpits in a pit of self-loathing of their own making & unable to take any of the proffered help because their self-imposed ethical system doesn’t permit it.
Profoundly sad is exactly what it is.
Crucially, a misanthropic and underbaked ethical system based on principles that are either completely removed from reality or demonstrably wrong. And which in the end really amounts to a great deal of … rationalisation :o
