this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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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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I tried to read this over breakfast, which consisted of very mellow bowl of jungle oats (no extra flavour) and some semi-terrible filter coffee. and I gotta tell ya, both of those fairly mellow things were better than the entire first quarter of this post
the author seems to be trying to whiteknight some general idea of maybe some progress isn't bad and "well obviously there will be some bad associations too", while willfully excluding the direct and overt bad actions of those associated bad actors?
admittedly I only got a quarter of the post in (since my oats ran out - scandalous), but up until that point I hadn't really found anything worthwhile beyond the squirrelly abdication bullshit
@froztbyte maybe my breakfast (untoasted muesli, coconut yoghurt) started me in a different frame of mind. I read it as showing that a lot of these ideas, which, yes, some jerks (but also plenty of non-jerks) are into, have deeper left histories, and deserve serious consideration.
you are aware that you just repeated the exact pattern that I pointed out the author did?
@froztbyte kinda, but with a different emphasis. The author talks about specific ideas and their origins, and asks that try to build a positive left futurism, and not cede the field to a subset of 2020s Silicon Valley interpretations of those ideas. If eg transhumanism was interesting and worth exploring before Peter Thiel turned up, it can still be so afterwards.
but transhumanism wasn’t interesting before Thiel showed up. it started as an Italian proto-fascist movement and to this day it hasn’t shaken its association with fascism and white supremacy
if there’s any deeper leftism in the post you linked, you’d best quote it — cause all I’m seeing from my skim through is dollar store Marx and literally a paragraph of poorly-cited Eco used to somehow justify the idea that opposition to TESCREAL ideas is due to a conspiratorial mindset and membership in a cult. I’m seeing a bunch of shit flung at folks like Timnit who’ve put more apparent thought into TESCREAL than anything I’m seeing in that post
so show me the good part
@self No, transhumanism goes back before Italian proto-fascists like Marinetti–it arrived in the west via translations of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky but he learned it from his teacher, the Russian Orthodox theologian and inventor of Cosmism, Nikolai Fyodorovitch Fyodorov.
It's 19th century Russian Orthodox theological heresy. Transhumanism is just Christianity in god-free, jesus-free, drag.
no, at best it's the more benign and fluffy end of the Californian Ideology, it's still extremely much the same thing