YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

This is great, and also immediately sends me back to 10ish years ago when I would read these things and laugh without the incredible weight of (a) being harassed and stalked by Yudkowsky (et al.) fans (b) the knowledge that at one point I could have used that time fruitfully (c) the fact that we live in Yudkowsky’s Clown Car California Ideology Nightmare now

One of the least studied rationalist tics is “as far as I can tell, most people who believe X is bad think so because Y reason which nobody has ever brought up, but which I find easy to disregard”

Apparently, pace my own username, you don’t know who the fuck I am.

I don’t think any of that first paragraph is true. LessWrong and EA very blatantly do not teach people how to spot fallacious reasoning. Nor does the culture of either encourage the adherents of their one movement to repress their “irrational” emotions. Fallacious reasoning, emotional reasoning, irrational thinking - all three of these self-evidently ran rampant in the culture, so there has to be something else going on here which would explain both what the culture is like and why you have an impression that seems to line up so squarely with their self-presentation.

Rather, it seems that what happens at LessWrong and EA is roughly that a charismatic self-presentation of “rational thinking” (with attendant ideas along the lines of repressing one’s emotions and so on) hooks in impressionable people, who - like victims of any multi-level marketing scheme - quickly replace their own styles and habits of thought with those propounded and taught by the movement. So those people do do something like “repress” their emotions, but only in the sense that they repress those styles of thought and emotional presentation which had previously come naturally to them. But of course the movement also teaches that it is right and proper or that there is even a sort of duty to make impassioned (whiny) emotional appeals to this or that privileged source of the right kind of emotions to feel (such as feeling indignant about normie reasoning, or feminism, or whatever), which are (some would say fallaciously) considered above rational criticism themselves.

You can see that sort of thing play out in basically any rationalist discussion or article at Vox’s “Future Perfect”!

So what you describe with respect to drugs and so on is true enough but misses the point. It’s rather that throughout the movement there’s a strong current of precisely the things that in its self-presentation the movement is supposed to ward off. The drug scene isn’t an outlet for repressed feelings, it’s just a particular place (of many) towards which the movement’s leaders have directed the energies (which they don’t repress but encourage) of their followers.

The shame and guilt thing is a separate issue, it has nothing to do with the conscious or directed repression of emotions under the auspices of the movement.

My impression is that, as a group, on average, rationalists tend to both feel and repress more intense feelings of shame and guilt than the rest of society can be bothered dealing with, and I say that as somebody who has spent nearly two years doing addiction recovery

The little paranoid devil on Siskind’s shoulder screaming horrible compulsive thoughts in his ear is my favourite character in this whole decades long saga

The fossil fuel companies thing is a metaphor run wild. It makes some sense in its own context as a characterisation of the way economic ‘forces’ (or ‘capital’) are able to go on operating and eating everything no matter what human beings collectively try to do about it. It does not make sense when you transfer the metaphor over to a new domain by holding onto one word (for example: “machine”) and behaving as if it continues to mean the same thing in a new context.

It isn’t a parsimonious way of thinking, it’s a rhetorical move he’s making.

Did OP consider the work going on at literally every single tech college’s VC groups in ~~optoelectronic~~ neural networks built on optical components to improve minimisation and how ~~that’s going to impact the decoupling of AI training and operation from Moore’s Law~~ that’s one hope for making processing power gains so that the banner headlines about “Moore’s Law” are pushed back a little further? I’m guessing no.~~___~~

You have the insider clout of a 15 year old with a search engine

This whole situation is making me so glad I stopped taking drugs and never learned to program

Born too young to be made to learn how to program in school

Born too old to lose my code monkey job to a literal mechanical code monkey in a mutually disastrous management fuckup

Born just in time to burn out on drugs and alcohol and watch the machine revolution from home

GHB aside I wouldn’t even call it particularly dangerous, it’s just blissfully wrongheaded. Ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic, and it does what it says on the tin: it takes however your mind is at that moment and just brutally lops off all the connections you normally anticipate it having with your body and other bits of itself, with various interesting consequences for mind and body both. Alcohol is alcohol, it’ll depress your euphoria to some extent but it is also in itself sugar and obviously will make you drunk on top of the (significant) remaining effects of the stimulant - rather than calm down, you are far more likely to get outrageously mad and try to punch a stranger, poorly, because already the whole point of abusing most stimulants, euphoria aside, is to turn you into the world’s sharpest spoon.

I’m just cackling at whatever this guy thinks ketamine does when you’re already on speed playing jump rope with the traffic, other than “you will lie face down on the pavement for half an hour and conduct a week long interview with satan between the gap in your eyelids”

That’s basically what I mean. A fun thing to do in rehab, for example, is to try and figure out who’s still withdrawing and who is just like that

Yeah, it’s true, if you’re not careful extended reliance on acid and mushrooms can make you an even more annoying megalomaniac